Fallible Authors - Alastair Minnis The Middle Ages Series

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a sinner’s debt of punishment (poena) for sins already forgiven through the sacrament of penance, wherein moral guilt (culpa) was removed. An indulgence, then, was concerned solely with the satisfaction due for the requisite penitential punishment.166 The debt was paid out of the Church’s vast spiritual treasury, as filled superabundantly with the merits of Christ and His Saints.167 This may be seen as a development from the Church’s belief in the Communion of Saints and the unity of Christians within Christ’s mystical body. The principle of vicarious satisfaction goes back to the early Church;168 the practice of saying masses to help the souls of sinners pass the more quickly through purgatorial fires was also of long standing. From the eleventh century onward, however, we have clear evidence of indulgences being granted as remissions in whole or in part of the penance which a priest would normally have imposed—or which he already had imposed—following a person’s confession of his or her sins.169 Thus, indulgences were believed to alleviate the “temporal” punishments which the sinner would have to undergo whether in this life or in the next—that is, in purgatory (where time existed also).170 Their power certainly did not extend to the eternal punishments of hell. The “birth” of purgatory171 was utterly essential for the growth of the theology of indulgences.

      A sinner could give alms for some charitable work, such as the building and/or upkeep of a hospital, school, or church; in return he or she would receive an indulgence. Indulgences were also granted to those who went on certain approved pilgrimages, visited important churches—or, indeed, served in Palestine in one of the campaigns to recover the Holy Land for Christianity. At the Council of Clermont (1095) it was proclaimed that anyone who had “set forth for the liberation of the Church of God in Jerusalem” who was motivated by “devotion alone, and not for the purpose of gaining honours and wealth” was to have that journey “reckoned in place of all penance.”172 Urban II exhorted bishops to preach this project to their congregations with eloquence and enthusiasm, thereby ensuring a good supply of “battlers for God’s people”—but he emphasized the importance of confession and true repentance for gaining “speedy pardon from Christ.”173 The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 extended this indulgence, granting full pardon of sins—i.e., a plenary indulgence, meaning a release from all poena174— not only to those who personally went on crusade but also to those who sent “suitable men” at “their own expense and in accordance with their means”; furthermore, some degree of pardon was promised to those who had made a “suitable contribution from their property.” Once again, the “spirit of devotion” which the participants had to possess was insisted upon—but it is difficult to avoid the impression of a sliding scale of pardon which functioned in relation to the amount of material contribution, whether militaristic or monetary, which one was able or willing to offer.

      Henry Charles Lea found “grandeur and consolation in this noble theory of the solidarity of mankind for good and not for evil as long as it had not assumed the shape of a fund out of which the Church could arbitrarily for money compound the sins of an individual.”175 But that is what it seems to have become. True, the traffic in indulgences helped to ensure that churches were constructed or repaired, that schools and hospitals received adequate funding, and the roads and bridges which enabled access to them were well maintained—the practical benefits could be considerable and should be given their due.176 But the system could all too easily be abused by both high and low, from the supreme pontiff to the lowliest pardoner or priest who had been ordered to advertise the issue of some new indulgence.

      “Little can be said about indulgences with certainty,” said Durandus of St. Pourçain O.P. (c. 1275–1334) with masterly understatement, “because nothing is said expressly about them in Scripture.” Besides, the saints, such as Ambrose, Hilary, Augustine, and Jerome, have little to say on the subject.177 This lack of guidance was exacerbated by many sources of confusion, one of which concerned the distinction between poena and culpa: the very different powers of the two keys (of ordo and of jurisdiction) could easily be muddled. Boniface VIII’s genuine bull promised “the most total forgiveness of all sins” to those who filled the conditions for the indulgence associated with the first Roman Jubilee (1300).178 Yet contemporary chroniclers went further. The Nuova Cronica of Giovanni Villani (c. 1276–1348) spoke of a “full and entire pardon of all sins . . . both of guilt and punishment (di culpa e di pena),” while the Chronicon Astense of Guglielmo Ventura di Asti (1250–1310?) supposed that all the recipients of the indulgence would be “as free, as from the day of their baptism, of every sin, both from guilt and from punishment (tam a culpa, quam a poena).”179 Even the doctor resolutus, John Baconthorpe (c. 1290–1346), who rose to become head of the English Carmelites, could make the unwary remark that in a jubilee year the pope may absolve a culpa et a pena, in the course of affirming that simple priests possess the power of penitential absolution but not of full absolution, that being the pope’s prerogative.180 Catherine of Siena (1347–80) could suppose that the indulgence she had received from “the holy father” himself (in this case Gregory XI) afforded remission from both “sin and punishment” (di colpa e di pane).181 Francis of Meyronnes O.F.M. (c. 1285–after 1328) went so far as to remark that it is commonly taught (“communiter docetur”) that indulgences a pena et a culpa may be granted. In fact, he explains, this cannot be, because culpa is a matter repugnant to indulgences, and can be remitted only through contrition and confession.182 Similar treatments of the topic are afforded by Bonifatius de Amanatis and William of Montlaudun,183 both of whom seek to blame the confusion on a failure of comprehension by the uneducated. According to Bonifatius, the belief that indulgences can deliver absolution a pena et a culpa is a vulgar misunderstanding rather than a legal fact (est non a iure, sed a vulgo), and William speaks of how such remission of sin as was granted by jubilee year indulgences offered absolution merely from pena, though “vulgarly” they were supposed to afford release from both guilt and punishment (vulgo a pena et a culpa dicitur).

      Such confusion was, to be sure, often castigated. Clement V included in his list of abuses committed by quaestores their claim to absolve people from all kinds of horrendous sin, including perjury and murder, and to absolve from both punishment and punishment (“a pena et a culpa absolvunt”), those being the very terms they used.184 But all the blame may not be placed at the feet of the pardoners, any more than it may be put down to “vulgar” misunderstanding. Some popes themselves went beyond the limits of strict theological propriety—as when, for example, Celestine V, on the occasion of his consecration (in 1294) in the church of St. Maria of Collemadio, said that anyone who visited this church on that day should receive an indulgence a poena et a culpa for all sins committed since infancy.185 True, he did say that the recipients had to be truly repentant and confessed, but the phrasing was certainly misleading. Then again, one of the charges brought against Pope John XXIII on 25 May 1415 (in the course of the Council of Constance) was that he had acted scandalously in authorizing the sale of indulgences a culpa et poena.186

      In other cases the confusion probably arose from the failure of papal bulls to spell out the necessity of contrition on the recipients’ part, with phrases such as “vere poenitentibus et confessis” or “corde contritis et ore confessis”;187 thus a plenary indulgence (from poena alone) could easily be mistaken as a release a poena et a culpa. The phrase a poena et a culpa seems to have come into common (though of course misguided) use with reference to plenary indulgences in particular,188 and the fact that Boniface IX (1389–1404) finally bowed to pressure and revoked all indulgences which contained it is clear evidence that many such misleading documents were in circulation.189 He did not cease dispensing pardons for the greater glory of St. Peter’s, however, and the traffic in indulgences was so widespread and well established that effective regulation was impossible.

      John Wyclif and his followers found indulgences an easy target for condemnation. Such “marchaundise of shriftes and graunting of indulgencis” is evidence that the pope is setting himself up over and above God, declares a typical account. The truth of the matter is that “no man mai for Скачать книгу