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Images, jurisdiction, and the treasury of merit
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Journal ~] Medieval Histo,3'~ Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 237 247. 1996
S0304-4181(96)00013-9
Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in The Netherlands. All rights reserved 0304-4181/96 $15.00 + 0.00
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Images, jurisdiction, and the treasury of merit Robert W. Shaffern Department of History and Political Science, University of Scranton, Scranton, PA 18510, U.S.A.
Abstract Indulgences, which were remissions of temporal penalty for sin, were one of the most popular religious practices of the later Middle Ages. Famous as the occasion for the Protestant Reformation, the abuses connected with the popularity of indulgences are well-documented, but to focus on abuse, as so many histories have done, is to miss the insight into the religious culture that the study of indulgences affords. The proliferation of indulgences can instead be attributed to the imagery and sensibilities in medieval Catholicism, which the pastoral methods of the mendicant friars systematised, popularised, and employed to serve the ecclesiology of papal monarchy. Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.
The popularity of indulgences in the later medieval Church has long been associated with abuse and ambition,~ but the religious imagery and sensibilities which emerged in the twelfth century and flourished until the end of the of the Middle Ages better explain the proliferation of indulgences.2 Venal prelates, unscrupulous pardoners, and greedy friars undeniably perverted and profited from questionable indulgences. At the same time, however, saintly bishops and zealous reformers granted ever increasing numbers of indulgences in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The spiritually sophisticated were just as likely to make pilgrimage as were the morally lax. Corruption fails to explain the popularity of indulgences. The popularity and growth of indulgences demand a new historical interpretation which explains the behaviour of both saint and sinner. ROBERT W. SHAFFERN is professor of history at the Universityof Scranton, Pennsylvania.He is working on the relation between religious ideas and practice in the Middle Ages through study of theological and canonistic writings on indulgences. He has published two previous articles on indulgences, in Church History and The Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law. 'For instance, see E. Delaruelleet al., L "dglise au temps du grand schisme et de la crise conciliare (Tournai, 1964), 810-20; E. Grller, Der Ausbruch der Reformation und die spiitmittelalterliche Ablaflpraxis (Herder, 1917); R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (New York, 1970), 136-43; J. Sumption, Pilgrimage (Totowa, N.J., 1975), 141. More recent general studies, like J. Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400-1700 (New York, 1985), F. Oakley, The Western Church in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, 1979), and S. Ozment, The Age of Reform, 1250-1550 (New Haven, Conn., 1980), have more correctly tried to locate the popularity of indulgenceswithin the context of medieval religious culture. These works offer new approaches, but little detailed study. 2On the formation of the religious sensibilitiesot the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, see Renaissance and renewal in the twelfth century, ed. R. Benson and G. Constable(Cambridge, Mass., 1982), H. Grundmann, Religirse Bewegungen im Mittelalter, 2nd edn (Hildesheim, 1961), and J. B. Russell,Dissent and RefOrm in Early Medieval Europe (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965).
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By the turn of the fourteenth century, Latin Christians had granted and received indulgences for several centuries. According to the teaching of the twelfth-century sacramental theologians, the commission of each sin brought guilt (culpa) and penalty (pena) upon the sinner. In the sacrament of penance, guilt was forgiven, and damnation (if a mortal sin had been committed) was commuted into temporal penalty, that is, a penalty that could be expiated through suffering or good work. Indulgences were (and are still) remissions or pardons of temporal penalty for sin granted through the episcopal authority of the Catholic Church. All historians agree that indulgences were a vital part of religion in Catholic Europe from the fourteenth century until the Reformation, and that their prominence grew during these centuries. Most medieval historians likewise note that theoretical expositions of indulgences first appeared in the second half of the twelfth century, some 150 years after bishops had begun granting them. By the middle of the thirteenth century, the doctrine of the treasury of merit had become the accepted theological explanation of indulgences' origin and efficacy. Theologians and canonists alike taught that indulgences-were grants--some even used the term payments--from the infinite treasury of merit that Christ and the martyrs had gained for the Church through their example, suffering, and good works. Thus Bonaventure said: 'remissions or indulgences are granted from the superabundant merits which belong to the Church, which indeed are unto its spiritual treasury'.3 Thomas Aquinas used more Aristotelian language, but the same metaphor: 'Indeed, the cause of remission of penalty in indulgence is nothing other than the abundance of merits of the Church '4 The distribution of these merits by a bishop or his duly-appointed agents could make vicarious satisfaction possible. What accounted for such a monetary image of atonement? Because indulgences have been little studied in the past five decades, two old explanations persist. According to Catholic historian Nikolaus Paulus and Catholic theologian Bernhard Poschmann, the doctrine of the treasury of merit evolved from tenth-century penitential practices like the absolution (absolutio), during which bishops called upon the intercession of the saints for the pardon of sin.5 Eleventh-century bishops transformed the absolution, which was an intercessory prayer, into the indulgence, which was an act of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Paulus and Poschmann countered the opinion of Henry C. Lea, the American critic of the medieval Church, who maintained that the treasury of merit was a medieval innovation designed to increase the power of the papacy.6 The problem with the two classical explanations is, of course, that they fail to place the development of the
3...relaxationes sive indulgentiae fiunt de meritis supererogationis, quae sunt in ecclesia, quae quidem sunt sicut thesaurus spiritualis eius. Bonaventure, Commentaria in IV libros sententiarum, IV, 20, 1, 3; Opera omnia, 10 vols (Quarrachi, 1886), vol. 4, 534. 4Causa autem remissionis poenae in indulgentia non est nisi abundantia meritorum ecclesiae. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Supplementum, 25, 2; Opera omnia, 48 vols (Rome, 1889), vol. 12, 48. 5N. Paulus, Geschichte des Ablasses im Mittelalte, 3 vols (Paderborn, 1922), vol. 1,259. Paulus published his first thoughts on the development of the treasury in 'Die Einfiihrung des Kirchenschatzes in die AblaBtheorie', Theologie und Glaube, 6 (1914), 284-98. See also B. Poschmann's update of Paulus's thesis in Der Ablafl im Licht der Buflgeschichte (Bonn, 1948), 83, and by the same author, Penance and the Anointing of the Sick, trans. F. Courtney (New York, 1964), 222. °H. C. Lea, A Htstory of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church, 3 vols (New York, 1968), vol. 3, 21-3.
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doctrine within thirteenth-century religious culture. The doctrine of the treasury of merit was instead one response of thirteenth-century intellectuals to the new religious culture which emerged in the twelfth century. Through the treasury, theologians reaffirmed papal authority and jurisdiction over popular religious sensibilities. Seventy-five years before the mature formulation of the treasury, theologians and canonists debated how vehicles of church authority, like indulgences, could be used to govern the new movements in religion. In twelfth- and early thirteenth-century texts, theologians thought of indulgences and popular religious movements simultaneously. Refutations of the Waldensians, whose version of evangelical poverty was beyond the frontier of orthodoxy, accompanied early discussions of indulgences. Imitation of the poor Christ was one of the central themes of popular piety in the second half of the twelfth century. As M. D. Ch6nu has remarked, 'The economy of salvation is not defined exclusively in the reflective and cautiously reasoned understanding of a few licensed thinkers, but also in the concrete decisions, in the state of life embraced, in the ideals of sanctity, in the evangelical work which the church, in its head and members, approves, sets up, promotes--in sort, defines'.7 Alain of Lille (d. 1202) included his exposition of indulgences in The Four Books Against the Heretics, where in Chapter 11 he attempted to prove the validity of indulgences against the Waldensians, who 'say that absolution [by which Alain means indulgence], which is granted by bishops for the consecration of churches, or for other occasions, ought not to have any value'.8 He explained that if sinners undertake indulgences with charity of heart, that is regret for past sins, the episcopal remission is fully valid. A generation later, William of Auvergne argued that 'enemies of the truth' (hostes veritatis), by whom he must have meant the Waldensians, mistakenly believed that indulgences were purchases of pardon, and that they encouraged lax living, since through indulgences easy satisfactions could be procured.9 Later commentators on indulgences, like Bonaventure, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas, listed these objections in their own teachings on indulgences. Orthodox intellectuals at once denied the charges of church critics and affirmed the competence of church authority to help the faithful atone for sin through indulgences. The theologians' arguments show that the Church tried to reestablish its authority over popular religious movements by encompassing and embracing them, just as when Innocent 1II sanctioned the Franciscan and Dominican orders, and when he recognised the spirituality of the Humiliati. j° In the case of indulgences, theologians argued that the Church provided the aids to salvation that the faithful wanted and needed. As Janet Nelson has remarked, the new spirituality emphasised the gravity of sin and the need for repentance. ~ Against the heretics, whom the Church first tried to convert back into the orthodox fold, the theologians taught that the Church competently mediated salvation to everyone equally.
7M. D. Ch6nu, Nature, man, and society in the twelfth centu~, trans. J. Taylor and L. K. Little (Chicago, 1968), 202-3. 8...absolutio quae fit ab episcopis in consecratione ecclesiarum vel in aliis officiis non sit habenda rata. Alain of Lille, Contra hereticos libri quattuor, Patrologia Latina, 210: 387-8. 9William of Auvergne, Opera omnia, 2 vols (Paris, 1674), vol. 1, 550. ]~B. Bolton, 'Innocent III's treatment of the Humiliati', in: Popular Belief and Practice, ed. G. J. Cummins and D. Baker (Cambridge, 1972), 73. ~As cited in Heresy and authority in medieval Europe, ed. E. Peters (Philadelphia, 1980), 60.
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Theologians corralled religious temperament with images of indulgences drawn from daily life. They visualised indulgences in arithmetic and legal images which already existed among the faithful and which captured the truth of the Catholic faith. In the late twelfth century, arithmetic imagery affected the thinking about indulgences among ordinary men and women. Before 1205, Peter of Poitiers warned against believing that remission could be purchased through an indulgence; what counted most was not how much money was given, but from what motivation: Moreover, when a priest, either a bishop or not, is able to reduce some part of penalty, it ought to be known that if a bishop or other prelate indicates or announces that he will remit a third or a fourth fraction of penance for the dedication of some church, or forty days, or some other such thing, to all those who contribute their alms to the maintenance of some church, still it does not follow that whoever will offer his alms there will have bought remission. For does anyone believe that if some rich fellow gives as many coins or oboli as an old, poor man he will receive an equal remission? Nonsense! For God does not ask of men what they are incapable of, he does not consider how much one gives [to an indulgence], but from how much sincerity, that is, from what intention, j2 This arithmetic mentality evolved during the twelfth century. Whereas eleventhcentury indulgences remitted some fraction of penalty, by the second half of the twelfth century most indulgences pardoned a number of days of penalty, usually forty, the length of Lent. Peter the Chanter (d. 1197) argued for an administration of penance and confession more sophisticated and humane than that of the Carolingian penitentials, in short, a study which would more faithfully exemplify the gentility and humanity of Christ himself. ~3 In his theological lexicon, Peter believed that indulgences were better stipulated in a specific number of days, rather than a vague fraction of total penalty owed for sin. j4 The influences of middle-class professions, many of which required the keeping of accounts, prompted the arithmetical and contractual language and imagery in the spirituality of all classes of later twelfth- and thirteenth-century society. According to the thirteenth-century Dominican Giordano da Pisa, the merchant 'did nothing day or night but calculate' and 'thought arithmetically in and out of his countinghouse; and when he had children, whether they followed him into trade, or became friars or mathematicians,
~21tem, cum sacerdos, sive sit episcopus sive non, possit aliquid de poena subtrahere, sciendum est quod si episcopus vel alius prelatus indicat et publicet se in dedicatione alicuius, ecclesiae dimissurum tertiam vel quartam partem poenitentiae, vel quadraginta dies, vel aliquid tale omnibus illis qui ad fabricam illius ecclesiae contulerint eleemosynas suas, non ideo quicunque suam ibi attulerit eleemosynam, promissam consecutus est veniam. Si enim dives aliquis det tantum nummum vel obolum, sicut vetual pauperrima, credit tantum dimissum esse ? Absit ! Deus enim non quaerit ab homine quod non potest, non considerat quantum detur, sed ex quanto, id est ex qua voluntate. Peter of Poitiers, Sententiarum libri quinque, Patrologia Latina, 211: 1076. t3L. E. Boyle, 'Summae confessorum', in: Les genres littdraires dans les sources th~ologiques et philosophiques mddidvales. Definitions, critiques, et exploitation (Louvain, 1982), 229-37. ~4F. Gillman, 'Zur Ablal31ehre der Friihscholastik', Der Katholik, 93 (1913), 366, n. 2.
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he would pass on to them a deep familiarity with number'.J5 Other estates of medieval society employed arithmetic to earn a living as well. Some peasant professions, like bailiff, beadle, and reeve, required the keeping of accounts. ~6 Among many aristocrats, the paid soldier had replaced the feudal levy, so William of Auvergne compared indulgences to the wages of soldiers: Moreover, if a king or a prince wages war, he gives to his dukes the power of summoning and recruiting soldiers, and also the power of paying them with stipends. Now because the King of kings and Lord of lords Jesus Christ has waged war from the time during which, I believe, the Church began to fight the not only spiritual, but also literal, or physical, or material war against the heretics and other enemies of the Christian religion, namely the pagans, and from the time of Mahomet, the Saracens, by necessity he gave to his dukes, that is to the prelates, the power of summoning worldly soldiers, and of recruiting them, and of paying them with appropriate wages. What else is it to proclaim indulgences? ~7 Just as kings free their soldiers from other obligations, the Church frees crusaders from fasting, alms giving, and other penitential works. Unlike royal soldiers, 'the stipends of these soldiers will be an eternal remuneration, for the greatest and noblest deeds on their part'. ~8 Thus, theologians took their description of indulgences from aristocratic warriors, shrewdly calculating businessmen, and humble peasants. The image of payment was so vivid that church critics levelled the charge of simony at indulgences, for what else could an exchange of money for a spiritual good be called? Mercantile imagery was a useful pastoral tool, but also led to erroneous beliefs about what indulgences were or how they worked, as the testimony of Peter of Poitiers and William of Auvergne makes clear. Every twelfth- and thirteenth-century medieval theologian who presented an explanation of indulgences explained why indulgences were free from simony. According to William of Auvergne, indulgences carried no taint of simony because they ordered a temporal good to spiritual ends. Moreover, there are benefactors who contribute an obolus or several oboli, or even large sums, for which a third part of enjoined penance, as Ithe heretics] say, is remitted .... This is to make the Holy Spirit, namely grace, venal .... But a prelate who
~SA. Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1978), 194. ~M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record. England 1066-1307 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 187. See also D. L. D'Avray, The Preaching of the Friars. Sermons Diffused from Paris before 1300 (Oxford, 1985), 42. 17Si rex, re! princeps bellum habeat, dat potestatem ducibus suis perquirendi et conducendi bellatores dignisque stipendiis remunerandi. Quia ergo rex regum et dominus dominantium Christus bellum habuit a tempore, quo caepit ecclesia bellum, inquam, non solum spirituale, sed etiam literale, seu corporale, sire materiale contra haereticos, et alios Christianae religionis inimicos, videlicet paganos, e t a tempore Machometi, sarracenos, necessario dedit potestatem ducibus suis, id est, praelatis, perquirendi bellatores materiales, et conducendi eos, et congruis stipendiis remunerandi. Quid autem est praedicare indulgentias.... William of Auvergne, Opera omnia, vol. 1,551. ~...stipendia hujusmodi bellatorum pro maxima ac nobilissima sui parte remuneratio aeterna erit. William of Auvergne, Opera omnia, vol. 1, 551.
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grants such an indulgence, does not do so for money, but he intends to promote the honour of God, and the care of souls; he does not intend to heap up money, but to enhance the honouring and worship of God. For such purposes a church is built, and therein the honour and worship of God encouraged, so that in the church the holy rites are celebrated with veneration, and also for other similar purposes, so that the divine office, service, remissions, graces, and whatever other blessings of God may penetrate the soul. Therefore, it is not for money, but through money, that a church is built. 19 The Church needed money to enhance the true worship of God and the salvation of the souls entrusted to her care. Not the form, but the purpose of the wealth determined whether or not a contribution for an indulgence was simoniacal. Of course, commerce demanded familiarity not only with arithmetic but also with contract. Just as the late twelfth century cast indulgences in arithmetic images and analogies, so also were the contractual elements of indulgences highlighted. Was the Church empowered to dispense pardons of penalty, on its part, and what was required of the receivers, on their part? According to the theologians, the Church fulfilled its side of the contract--the Church guaranteed that penitents would receive the full remission promised by the preacher of the indulgence. Huguccio, for instance, argued that the Church had received the power to remit penalty from Christ, as the gospel text of Matthew 16:19 makes clear.2° William of Auxerre likewise affirmed that the Church was as good as its word. Indulgences are real pardons of sin, not some ruse to induce penitents to good work. Indulgences must be worth as much as they are preached, otherwise they would be a pious fraud, and compromise the dignity of the Church. 21 Finally, Innocent IV added matter-of-factly, that God's justice ensured that he would consider good work and piety when souls came to him for judgement. 22 The receivers of indulgences had to fulfil several conditions, of which Peter the Chanter offered two lists. In the Summa de sacramentis et animae consiliis he argued that sinners must perform the good work which the indulgence enjoins with religious zeal.23 Peter's theological lexicon was more explicit--penitents must not only complete the good work, but also receive their confessors' permission before obtaining indulgtgBenefactores autem sunt qui nummos singulos, vel obolos, vel etiam ova tribuunt, pro quo tertia pars poenitentiarum injunctarum, ut dicunt remittitur .... Hoc est facere spiritum sanctum, scilicet gratiam, venalem .... Praelatus enim, qui huiusmodi indulgentiam dat non pecuniam, sed dei honorem intendit, et animarum utilitatem; non enim intendit coacervare pecuniam, sed ampliare dei honorificentiam, et cultum. Ad hoc enim aedificatur ecclesia, et dei cultus, et honorificentia amplietur, ut in ea sancti digna veneratione celebrentur, et ad hoc insuper, ut divinum officium, servitium, remissiones, et gratiae, caeteraque dei beneficia animabus impetrentur. Sicut ergo non propter pecuniam, licet per pecuniam, aedificatur ecclesia. William of Auvergne, Opera omnia, vol. 1, 550. z°Ubi ergo sunt illi qui dicunt quod remissiones facte ab ecclesia et que fiunt cotidie in ecclesia, non valent nisi ad relevandas negligentias et functiones penitentiarum ? lpse enim Christus dixit in evangelio: Si cui peccata remiseritis, remittentur ei, ut I. q. I. Ut evidenter (c. 82), et quecunque solvitis super terrain, erunt soluta. Huguccio, Summa decretorum, De penitentia, D. 1, c. 88, cited in F. Gillman, 'Zur AblaBlehre der Friihscholastik', 368. 2LErgo generalis ecclesia dicit falsum et scienter; ergo mentitur; ergo generalis ecclesia peccat; quod absurdum est dicere. William of Auxerre, Summa aurea, IV, 14, 2, 2; 6 vols (Paris, 1980-85), vol. 4, 349. ZZlnnocent IV, Commentaria super libros quinque decretalium V, 38, 4 (Frankfurt, 1570), 543. 23peter the Chanter, Summa de sacramentis et animae consiliis, 5 vols (Louvain, 1957), vol. 1, 195.
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ence, and live in charity and contrition. 24 In the work of Dominican writers, contractual imagery led to greater formality. They insisted that confession, which was the outward sign of contrition, must be made prior to undertaking an indulgence. The formalisation and contractualisation of indulgences reached its zenith in the teaching of Thomas Aquinas. Thomas argued that the will of the grantor determined the amount of remission gained by any one indulgence. Whereas all previous commentators on indulgences believed that the fervour of the penitent must appropriately increase or decrease the amount of remission of any given indulgence, Thomas gave no weight to the spiritual disposition of the receiver. In Q u o d l i b e t , II, 8, 2, Thomas considered the validity of crusade indulgences. Does a crusader who dies on the way to the Holy Land receive plenary indulgence? Thomas answered that the proclamation of the crusading indulgence, which was drawn up at the pleasure of the dispensing prelate, determined the amount of the indulgence's remission. If the document required only the intention to go on crusade, then the indulgence is received, because all the conditions of the indulgence had been met: Therefore, it must be said in answer to the proposed question, that if, according to the form of the papal letter, indulgence is granted to those who take up the cross for the liberation of the Holy Land, the crusader immediately receives the indulgence, even if he should die before arriving in the Holy Land, because the cause of the indulgence is not the crusader, but the vow of the crusader. But if in the form of the letter it shall be stated that indulgence is given to those who travel to the Holy Land--he who dies before he departs receives no indulgence, because the cause of the indulgence is not present f5 Thus contractual requirements and jurisdictional propriety determined whether and how much remission was received. Thomas's formalism seems to represent the ideas of many persons in medieval society, although this particular opinion carried little authority among later writers, who reaffirmed the worthiness of deeply felt contrition. Mendicant friars, as Humbert of Romans wrote, were supposed to preach to the faithful 'usefully, about thingsrelevant to them '26 Mendicant theologians formalised in the treasury of merit the hundred year old tradition of conceptualising religious ideas in arithmetic and contractual images. The authorship of the treasury is doubtful. In his commentary on the decretals, Hostiensis attributed the doctrine to the Dominican Cardinal of Saint Sabina, Hugh of St Cher: And besides, the martyrs shed their blood for the faith and the Church, and they were
24F. Gillman, 'Zur AblaSlehre der Friihscholastik', 366, n. 2. 2~Est ergo dicendum in questione proposita, quod si secundum formam papalis litterae indulgentia concedatur accipientibus crucem in subsidium terrae sanctae, crucesignatus statim habet indulgentiam, etiamsi decedat antequem interarripiat; quia sic causa indulgentiae erit non iter, sed votum itineris. Sed autem in forma litterae contineatur quod indulgentia detur his qui transierunt ultra mare; ille qui decedit antequam transeat, non habet indulgentiam, quia non habet indulgentiam causam. ThomasAquinas, Quodlibet II, 8, 2; Opera omnia (Parma, 1852-1873), vol. 9, 484. 26A. Murray, 'Religion among the poor in thirteenth-century France', Traditio, 30 (1974), 287, n. 9.
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punished beyond that for which they had sinned. It so occurs that in the said effusion of blood, all sin is punished, and this effusion of blood is the stored treasury in the cask of the Church, of which the Church possesses the keys. Hence, when the Church wishes, she is able to open the cask, and will be able to grant to anyone her treasury, through granting indulgences and remissions to the faithful. And thus sin goes not unpunished, because it was punished in the son of God, and by his holy martyrs, according to the lord cardinal Hugh.27 No other sources corroborate Hostiensis' creditation of Hugh, who left no treatise explaining his views on the treasury. Nonetheless, Hugh dispensed many indulgences as papal legate, displayed the generosity expected of a medieval prince, and acted as though he believed in the treasury himself. Paulus credited Alexander of Hales with the invention of the treasury, but his argument was based on the Cologne 1623 edition of book four of Alexander's Summa theologica which, according to the Quaracchi editors of the standard critical edition of this text, Alexander did not write.28 Of course, the really important issue is not the authorship, but the formulation of the treasury by the mendicant theologians of the middle of the thirteenth century and its acceptance by all succeeding mendicant and secular commentators. The fullest explanations of the treasury may be found in the learned commentaries--theological and canonistic--of the 1250s. Mendicant theologians were even more aware of the pastoral needs of Latin Christendom than their predecessors, and yet more concerned with preserving, extending, and centralising the authority of the Church and pope. The treasury served both needs well. The theological form and sanction that the treasury gave to contemporary religious ideas and attitudes made indulgences a kind of benefice over which pope and bishops could exercise jurisdiction and use to serve the policies of papacy and episcopacy. The mendicants used the treasury to promote the ecclesiology of papal monarchy. Indulgences became a special manifestation of the pope's sovereignty over the Church. Mendicant theologians compared the superabundant merits of the Church to the treasuries of kings. Just as a king's treasury exists for the commonweal of his subjects, the treasury of merit exists for the benefit of the Church. A king has the power to use the treasury for the good of the kingdom; the princes of the Church--the pope and bishops--have the right to dispense satisfaction from the treasury of merit for the good of the Church.29 However, the right to grant indulgences originates from the papal plenitude of power: 2VEt preterea martyres pro fide et ecclesia sanguinem suum fuderunt et ultra quam peccassent puniti fuerunt. Restat quod in dicta effusione omne peccatum punitum est, et hec sanguinis effusio est thesaurus in scrinio ecclesie repositus cuius claves habet ecclesia. Unde quando vult potest scrinium aperire, et thesaurum suum cui voluerit communicare, remissiones et indulgentias fidelibus faciendo. Et sic peccatum non remanet impunitum quia punitum fuit in filio dei et martyribus sanctis suis secundum dominum Hugonem cardinalem. Hostiensis, Summa aurea, V, 67 (Lyons, 1537), 288. 28Alexander of Hales, Summa theologica, 3 vols (Quarrachi, 1948), vol. 3, lix-lx. 29Ratio autem, quare thesaurus ecclesiae solis episcopis committitur dispensandus, est quia ecclesia thesaurum istum habet ex desponsatione sui cum Christo, qui est vir et eius sponsus, et cui generat filios et filias, id est perfectos et imperfectos, ad quorum educationem Christus vult servari haec bona. Bonaventure, Commentaria in IV libros sententiarum, IV, 20, 1, 3; vol. 4, 534.
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It must be said that the pope has the plenitude of pontifical power, just as a king in his kingdom. But bishops are endowed with a part of his power, just like the ruling magistrates in individual towns. Because of this, bishops alone the pope calls 'brothers' in his letters; all others he calls 'children'. And therefore the power of granting indulgences resides fully in the pope, because he is able to grant indulgences as he wishes, of course, with an existing, legitimate reason. But for bishops, the 30 power to grant indulgences is distributed by the ordination of the pope. Thomas constructed this argument either in the midst or wake of the antimendicant controversy at the University of Paris (1252-1257). Thomas here argued against episcopal ecclesiologists like William of St Amour that the treasury meant that bishops receive the ability to grant indulgences from the pope. Whereas bishops could grant indulgences only within their dioceses, the pope distributed indulgences throughout Christendom. He could also regulate episcopal dispensations of indulgences. In short, the pope had absolute stewardship over the treasury and indulgences, just as he had absolute sovereignty over the Church. Thus, the history of indulgences paralleled other developments in the centralisation of church authority. Like their twelfth-century predecessors, the mendicants also answered the charge of simony, but used the image of the treasury to explain not only that indulgences were free from simony, but that they also advanced the common good. While the king's treasure exists for the honour of the monarch and the commonwealth, the treasury of the Church exists for the honour of God and the welfare of the Church: It must be said that, just as we observe in the polities and communities of human beings, the treasury of the commonwealth is customarily distributed and spent for two reasons--thus is it understood for the spiritual treasury. In the first instance, the treasury is spent in order to advance the glory of the prince, just as royal courts display, as did Asther in the first chapter of the Book of Esther. In the second instance, the treasury is spent because of the need or usefulness within the community, so that when the community is attacked, stipends or rewards are given to soldiers, so that they may go to war. Thus, the treasury of the Church ought to be distributed by those to whom it is entrusted for two reasons, namely, for the glory and praise of the prince. And the praise and honour of God is in his saints, and the saints are honoured by the construction of basilicas, by the visitation of basilicas, by the commemoration of the saintly virtues--all these are also recommended in preaching and sermons, therefore, indulgences are rightly granted to all persons for these services. However, in the case of the Church the common need is the defence of the Holy Land, the defence of the faith, the encouragement of studies and related 3°Dicendum quod papa habet plenitudinem pontificalis potestatis, quasi rex in regno. Sed episcopi assumuntur in partem sollicitudinis, quasi iudices singulis civitatibus praepositi; propter quod eos solos in suis litteris papa fratres vocat, reliquos autem omnes vocat filios. Et ideo potestas faciendi indulgentias plene residet in papa; quia potest facere prout vult, causa tamen existente legitima. Sed in episcopis est taxata seeundum ordinationem papae. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Supplementum 26, 3; Opera omnia (Rome), vol. 12, 48. Cf. Bonaventure, Commentaria in IV libros sententiarum, IV, 20, 1, 3; Opera omnia, vol. 4, 534; Albert, Comrnentarii in IV libri sententiarum, IV, 20, 21, 38 vols (Paris, 1894), vol. 29, 857-8.
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endeavours, and therefore indulgences ought also to be granted for these enterprises. And since these services to the Church consist in exterior acts, indulgences ought especially to be granted for them.3~ The Dominican theologians Thomas Aquinas and Peter of Tarentaise offered more abstract arguments. Thomas and Peter asserted that whenever temporal goods were used to serve spiritual goals, no simony could take place: It must be said that temporal things are ordained for spiritual goals--that we ought to use temporal things because of spiritual goals. And therefore indulgence is not able to be granted simply for temporal things, but for temporal things ordained for spiritual goals, like the repression of the enemies of the Church, who disturb the peace of the Church, or for the construction of churches and bridges, and for the collection of alms. And it is clear that simony is not committed through these acts, because a spiritual thing is not given in exchange for a temporal thing, but for a spiritual thing.32 Their ideas passed into the common moral theology of the Dominicans through John of Freiburg.33 The doctrine of the treasury, therefore, also appealed to the basic cultural and political values of medieval Europe. Indulgences served the common good, the most frequently cited goal of government in medieval documents.34 No matter how vaguely the concept of common good itself might be explained or understood, the acts for which indulgences were granted unmistakably served the Christian commonwealth. They encouraged prayer, preaching, the veneration of saints, and study. Churches, monasteries, and basilicas were built and maintained with the funds indulgences generated. Popes and bishops used indulgences to exercise their authority and to defend Christen-
3~Dicendum, quod sicut videmus in politicis et communitatibus humanis, quod thesaurus reipublicae propter duo maxime consuevit proferri et communicari exterius; sic in spiritualibus intelligendum. Profertur namque thesaurus extra ad dispergendam propter gloriam prinicipis, sicut faciunt reges curiales, sicut fecit Assuerus Esther primo; alio modo propter utilitatis communitatis sive necessitatem, ut quando laeditur communitas, proferuntur stipendia et donativa militibus, ut eant ad pugnam. Sic thesaurus ecclesiae ab his qui habent dispensare, duplici ex cause debet distribui, scilicet propter gloriam principis et laudem; et laus et honor dei est in sanctis suis, et sancti honorantur in constructione basilicarum, visitatione basilicarum, commemoratione virtutum suarum, et idem fit in praedicationibus et sermonibus: ideo pro his omnibus indulgentiae recte fiunt. Communis autem utilitas est defensio terrae sanctae, defensio fidei, promotio studii et consimilia; et ideo adhuc pro talibus debent fieri. Et quoniam haec consistunt in actibus exterioribus, ideo maxime pro actibus exterioribus debent fieri indulgentiae. Bonaventure, Commentaria in lV libros sententiarum, IV, 20, 1, 4; Opera omnia, vol. 4, 537. 32Dicendum quod temporalia ad spiritualia ordinantur: quia propter spiritualia temporalibus uti debemus; et ideo pro temporalibus simpliciter non potest fieri indulgentia, sed pro temporalibus ordinatis ad spiritualia, sicut repressio inimicorum ecclesiae, qui pacem ecclesiae perturbant; vel sicut constructio ecclesiarum et pontium, et aliarum eleemosynarum collatio. Et per hoc patet quod non fit ibi simonia, quia non datur spirituale pro temporali, sed pro spirituali. Thomas Aquinas, Commentum in IV libri sententiarum, IV, 20, 1, 3, 3; Opera omnia (Parma), vol. 7, 843. ST Suppl., 25, 3; Opera omnia (Rome), vol. 12, 50. Cf. Peter of Tarentaise, In IV libros sententiarum commentaria, 4 vols (Toulouse, 1672), IV, 20, 3, 2, 5; vol. 4, 232. 33Dicendum quod temporalia et ad spiritualia finaliter ordinantur et non econverso, quia finis est melior his que sunt ad finem. Et ideo pro temporalibus nunquam sunt danda spiritualia. Unde pro aliqua utilitate spiritualibus sequente dantur indulgentie, et non pro subsidio temporali principaliter. John of Freiburg, Summa confessorum (Augsburg, 1476), book 3, q. 185. 34A. Black, Political Thought in Europe, 1250-1450 (Cambridge, 1992), 25.
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dom from its enemies. Indulgences were also granted for a host of other purposes not immediately religious, like the building of bridges, roads, dams, fortifications, and embankments, but which made travel safer, encouraged commerce, and maintained peace and security.35 The fourteenth century inherited and elaborated on the imagery, ecclesiology, and social values of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. War, famine, plague, and spiritual temperament made twelfth-century concerns with repentance and penitence more acute. Papal apologists made more exalted claims for papal authority, even though the balance of power had shifted in favour of secular potentates. Common good remained the criteria for judging polities. The number of indulgences increased. Pope Clement VI declared the treasury of merit an official doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church in the decree Unigenitus (1343)36 which was the same decree that proclaimed the year 1350 a jubilee year, even though Boniface VIII, who proclaimed the year 1300 the first jubilee, had declared that jubilees should be held only once a century. Clement countered his predecessor's prescription by saying that more frequent jubilees had biblical sanction, since Mosaic law declared one year in forty a penitential year. Countless other prelates mimicked Clement's indulgence for reasons known to their predecessors. Pious lay folk petitioned bishops for indulgences. Prelates raised revenues that built and maintained churches and convents, exercised lordship, and made friends with every grant of indulgence. Popes demonstrated their influence throughout the whole Latin Christian world by granting indulgences in England, France, Germany, Scandinavia, Poland, Italy, and Spain. Indulgences proliferated in the fourteenth century along with the religious culture that produced them. Not the pardoner, but the franklin, knight, yeoman, merchant, miller, parson, and good wife of Bath explain the popularity of indulgences in the Middle Ages.
35N. Paulus, Indulgences as a Social Factor in the Middle Ages, trans. J. E. Ross (New York, 1922), 104-9. 3~Extrav., 5. 9. 2.
Journal ~] Medieval Histo,3'~ Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 237 247. 1996
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Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in The Netherlands. All rights reserved 0304-4181/96 $15.00 + 0.00
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Images, jurisdiction, and the treasury of merit Robert W. Shaffern Department of History and Political Science, University of Scranton, Scranton, PA 18510, U.S.A.
Abstract Indulgences, which were remissions of temporal penalty for sin, were one of the most popular religious practices of the later Middle Ages. Famous as the occasion for the Protestant Reformation, the abuses connected with the popularity of indulgences are well-documented, but to focus on abuse, as so many histories have done, is to miss the insight into the religious culture that the study of indulgences affords. The proliferation of indulgences can instead be attributed to the imagery and sensibilities in medieval Catholicism, which the pastoral methods of the mendicant friars systematised, popularised, and employed to serve the ecclesiology of papal monarchy. Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.
The popularity of indulgences in the later medieval Church has long been associated with abuse and ambition,~ but the religious imagery and sensibilities which emerged in the twelfth century and flourished until the end of the of the Middle Ages better explain the proliferation of indulgences.2 Venal prelates, unscrupulous pardoners, and greedy friars undeniably perverted and profited from questionable indulgences. At the same time, however, saintly bishops and zealous reformers granted ever increasing numbers of indulgences in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The spiritually sophisticated were just as likely to make pilgrimage as were the morally lax. Corruption fails to explain the popularity of indulgences. The popularity and growth of indulgences demand a new historical interpretation which explains the behaviour of both saint and sinner. ROBERT W. SHAFFERN is professor of history at the Universityof Scranton, Pennsylvania.He is working on the relation between religious ideas and practice in the Middle Ages through study of theological and canonistic writings on indulgences. He has published two previous articles on indulgences, in Church History and The Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law. 'For instance, see E. Delaruelleet al., L "dglise au temps du grand schisme et de la crise conciliare (Tournai, 1964), 810-20; E. Grller, Der Ausbruch der Reformation und die spiitmittelalterliche Ablaflpraxis (Herder, 1917); R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (New York, 1970), 136-43; J. Sumption, Pilgrimage (Totowa, N.J., 1975), 141. More recent general studies, like J. Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400-1700 (New York, 1985), F. Oakley, The Western Church in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, 1979), and S. Ozment, The Age of Reform, 1250-1550 (New Haven, Conn., 1980), have more correctly tried to locate the popularity of indulgenceswithin the context of medieval religious culture. These works offer new approaches, but little detailed study. 2On the formation of the religious sensibilitiesot the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, see Renaissance and renewal in the twelfth century, ed. R. Benson and G. Constable(Cambridge, Mass., 1982), H. Grundmann, Religirse Bewegungen im Mittelalter, 2nd edn (Hildesheim, 1961), and J. B. Russell,Dissent and RefOrm in Early Medieval Europe (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965).
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By the turn of the fourteenth century, Latin Christians had granted and received indulgences for several centuries. According to the teaching of the twelfth-century sacramental theologians, the commission of each sin brought guilt (culpa) and penalty (pena) upon the sinner. In the sacrament of penance, guilt was forgiven, and damnation (if a mortal sin had been committed) was commuted into temporal penalty, that is, a penalty that could be expiated through suffering or good work. Indulgences were (and are still) remissions or pardons of temporal penalty for sin granted through the episcopal authority of the Catholic Church. All historians agree that indulgences were a vital part of religion in Catholic Europe from the fourteenth century until the Reformation, and that their prominence grew during these centuries. Most medieval historians likewise note that theoretical expositions of indulgences first appeared in the second half of the twelfth century, some 150 years after bishops had begun granting them. By the middle of the thirteenth century, the doctrine of the treasury of merit had become the accepted theological explanation of indulgences' origin and efficacy. Theologians and canonists alike taught that indulgences-were grants--some even used the term payments--from the infinite treasury of merit that Christ and the martyrs had gained for the Church through their example, suffering, and good works. Thus Bonaventure said: 'remissions or indulgences are granted from the superabundant merits which belong to the Church, which indeed are unto its spiritual treasury'.3 Thomas Aquinas used more Aristotelian language, but the same metaphor: 'Indeed, the cause of remission of penalty in indulgence is nothing other than the abundance of merits of the Church '4 The distribution of these merits by a bishop or his duly-appointed agents could make vicarious satisfaction possible. What accounted for such a monetary image of atonement? Because indulgences have been little studied in the past five decades, two old explanations persist. According to Catholic historian Nikolaus Paulus and Catholic theologian Bernhard Poschmann, the doctrine of the treasury of merit evolved from tenth-century penitential practices like the absolution (absolutio), during which bishops called upon the intercession of the saints for the pardon of sin.5 Eleventh-century bishops transformed the absolution, which was an intercessory prayer, into the indulgence, which was an act of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Paulus and Poschmann countered the opinion of Henry C. Lea, the American critic of the medieval Church, who maintained that the treasury of merit was a medieval innovation designed to increase the power of the papacy.6 The problem with the two classical explanations is, of course, that they fail to place the development of the
3...relaxationes sive indulgentiae fiunt de meritis supererogationis, quae sunt in ecclesia, quae quidem sunt sicut thesaurus spiritualis eius. Bonaventure, Commentaria in IV libros sententiarum, IV, 20, 1, 3; Opera omnia, 10 vols (Quarrachi, 1886), vol. 4, 534. 4Causa autem remissionis poenae in indulgentia non est nisi abundantia meritorum ecclesiae. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Supplementum, 25, 2; Opera omnia, 48 vols (Rome, 1889), vol. 12, 48. 5N. Paulus, Geschichte des Ablasses im Mittelalte, 3 vols (Paderborn, 1922), vol. 1,259. Paulus published his first thoughts on the development of the treasury in 'Die Einfiihrung des Kirchenschatzes in die AblaBtheorie', Theologie und Glaube, 6 (1914), 284-98. See also B. Poschmann's update of Paulus's thesis in Der Ablafl im Licht der Buflgeschichte (Bonn, 1948), 83, and by the same author, Penance and the Anointing of the Sick, trans. F. Courtney (New York, 1964), 222. °H. C. Lea, A Htstory of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church, 3 vols (New York, 1968), vol. 3, 21-3.
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doctrine within thirteenth-century religious culture. The doctrine of the treasury of merit was instead one response of thirteenth-century intellectuals to the new religious culture which emerged in the twelfth century. Through the treasury, theologians reaffirmed papal authority and jurisdiction over popular religious sensibilities. Seventy-five years before the mature formulation of the treasury, theologians and canonists debated how vehicles of church authority, like indulgences, could be used to govern the new movements in religion. In twelfth- and early thirteenth-century texts, theologians thought of indulgences and popular religious movements simultaneously. Refutations of the Waldensians, whose version of evangelical poverty was beyond the frontier of orthodoxy, accompanied early discussions of indulgences. Imitation of the poor Christ was one of the central themes of popular piety in the second half of the twelfth century. As M. D. Ch6nu has remarked, 'The economy of salvation is not defined exclusively in the reflective and cautiously reasoned understanding of a few licensed thinkers, but also in the concrete decisions, in the state of life embraced, in the ideals of sanctity, in the evangelical work which the church, in its head and members, approves, sets up, promotes--in sort, defines'.7 Alain of Lille (d. 1202) included his exposition of indulgences in The Four Books Against the Heretics, where in Chapter 11 he attempted to prove the validity of indulgences against the Waldensians, who 'say that absolution [by which Alain means indulgence], which is granted by bishops for the consecration of churches, or for other occasions, ought not to have any value'.8 He explained that if sinners undertake indulgences with charity of heart, that is regret for past sins, the episcopal remission is fully valid. A generation later, William of Auvergne argued that 'enemies of the truth' (hostes veritatis), by whom he must have meant the Waldensians, mistakenly believed that indulgences were purchases of pardon, and that they encouraged lax living, since through indulgences easy satisfactions could be procured.9 Later commentators on indulgences, like Bonaventure, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas, listed these objections in their own teachings on indulgences. Orthodox intellectuals at once denied the charges of church critics and affirmed the competence of church authority to help the faithful atone for sin through indulgences. The theologians' arguments show that the Church tried to reestablish its authority over popular religious movements by encompassing and embracing them, just as when Innocent 1II sanctioned the Franciscan and Dominican orders, and when he recognised the spirituality of the Humiliati. j° In the case of indulgences, theologians argued that the Church provided the aids to salvation that the faithful wanted and needed. As Janet Nelson has remarked, the new spirituality emphasised the gravity of sin and the need for repentance. ~ Against the heretics, whom the Church first tried to convert back into the orthodox fold, the theologians taught that the Church competently mediated salvation to everyone equally.
7M. D. Ch6nu, Nature, man, and society in the twelfth centu~, trans. J. Taylor and L. K. Little (Chicago, 1968), 202-3. 8...absolutio quae fit ab episcopis in consecratione ecclesiarum vel in aliis officiis non sit habenda rata. Alain of Lille, Contra hereticos libri quattuor, Patrologia Latina, 210: 387-8. 9William of Auvergne, Opera omnia, 2 vols (Paris, 1674), vol. 1, 550. ]~B. Bolton, 'Innocent III's treatment of the Humiliati', in: Popular Belief and Practice, ed. G. J. Cummins and D. Baker (Cambridge, 1972), 73. ~As cited in Heresy and authority in medieval Europe, ed. E. Peters (Philadelphia, 1980), 60.
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Theologians corralled religious temperament with images of indulgences drawn from daily life. They visualised indulgences in arithmetic and legal images which already existed among the faithful and which captured the truth of the Catholic faith. In the late twelfth century, arithmetic imagery affected the thinking about indulgences among ordinary men and women. Before 1205, Peter of Poitiers warned against believing that remission could be purchased through an indulgence; what counted most was not how much money was given, but from what motivation: Moreover, when a priest, either a bishop or not, is able to reduce some part of penalty, it ought to be known that if a bishop or other prelate indicates or announces that he will remit a third or a fourth fraction of penance for the dedication of some church, or forty days, or some other such thing, to all those who contribute their alms to the maintenance of some church, still it does not follow that whoever will offer his alms there will have bought remission. For does anyone believe that if some rich fellow gives as many coins or oboli as an old, poor man he will receive an equal remission? Nonsense! For God does not ask of men what they are incapable of, he does not consider how much one gives [to an indulgence], but from how much sincerity, that is, from what intention, j2 This arithmetic mentality evolved during the twelfth century. Whereas eleventhcentury indulgences remitted some fraction of penalty, by the second half of the twelfth century most indulgences pardoned a number of days of penalty, usually forty, the length of Lent. Peter the Chanter (d. 1197) argued for an administration of penance and confession more sophisticated and humane than that of the Carolingian penitentials, in short, a study which would more faithfully exemplify the gentility and humanity of Christ himself. ~3 In his theological lexicon, Peter believed that indulgences were better stipulated in a specific number of days, rather than a vague fraction of total penalty owed for sin. j4 The influences of middle-class professions, many of which required the keeping of accounts, prompted the arithmetical and contractual language and imagery in the spirituality of all classes of later twelfth- and thirteenth-century society. According to the thirteenth-century Dominican Giordano da Pisa, the merchant 'did nothing day or night but calculate' and 'thought arithmetically in and out of his countinghouse; and when he had children, whether they followed him into trade, or became friars or mathematicians,
~21tem, cum sacerdos, sive sit episcopus sive non, possit aliquid de poena subtrahere, sciendum est quod si episcopus vel alius prelatus indicat et publicet se in dedicatione alicuius, ecclesiae dimissurum tertiam vel quartam partem poenitentiae, vel quadraginta dies, vel aliquid tale omnibus illis qui ad fabricam illius ecclesiae contulerint eleemosynas suas, non ideo quicunque suam ibi attulerit eleemosynam, promissam consecutus est veniam. Si enim dives aliquis det tantum nummum vel obolum, sicut vetual pauperrima, credit tantum dimissum esse ? Absit ! Deus enim non quaerit ab homine quod non potest, non considerat quantum detur, sed ex quanto, id est ex qua voluntate. Peter of Poitiers, Sententiarum libri quinque, Patrologia Latina, 211: 1076. t3L. E. Boyle, 'Summae confessorum', in: Les genres littdraires dans les sources th~ologiques et philosophiques mddidvales. Definitions, critiques, et exploitation (Louvain, 1982), 229-37. ~4F. Gillman, 'Zur Ablal31ehre der Friihscholastik', Der Katholik, 93 (1913), 366, n. 2.
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he would pass on to them a deep familiarity with number'.J5 Other estates of medieval society employed arithmetic to earn a living as well. Some peasant professions, like bailiff, beadle, and reeve, required the keeping of accounts. ~6 Among many aristocrats, the paid soldier had replaced the feudal levy, so William of Auvergne compared indulgences to the wages of soldiers: Moreover, if a king or a prince wages war, he gives to his dukes the power of summoning and recruiting soldiers, and also the power of paying them with stipends. Now because the King of kings and Lord of lords Jesus Christ has waged war from the time during which, I believe, the Church began to fight the not only spiritual, but also literal, or physical, or material war against the heretics and other enemies of the Christian religion, namely the pagans, and from the time of Mahomet, the Saracens, by necessity he gave to his dukes, that is to the prelates, the power of summoning worldly soldiers, and of recruiting them, and of paying them with appropriate wages. What else is it to proclaim indulgences? ~7 Just as kings free their soldiers from other obligations, the Church frees crusaders from fasting, alms giving, and other penitential works. Unlike royal soldiers, 'the stipends of these soldiers will be an eternal remuneration, for the greatest and noblest deeds on their part'. ~8 Thus, theologians took their description of indulgences from aristocratic warriors, shrewdly calculating businessmen, and humble peasants. The image of payment was so vivid that church critics levelled the charge of simony at indulgences, for what else could an exchange of money for a spiritual good be called? Mercantile imagery was a useful pastoral tool, but also led to erroneous beliefs about what indulgences were or how they worked, as the testimony of Peter of Poitiers and William of Auvergne makes clear. Every twelfth- and thirteenth-century medieval theologian who presented an explanation of indulgences explained why indulgences were free from simony. According to William of Auvergne, indulgences carried no taint of simony because they ordered a temporal good to spiritual ends. Moreover, there are benefactors who contribute an obolus or several oboli, or even large sums, for which a third part of enjoined penance, as Ithe heretics] say, is remitted .... This is to make the Holy Spirit, namely grace, venal .... But a prelate who
~SA. Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1978), 194. ~M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record. England 1066-1307 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 187. See also D. L. D'Avray, The Preaching of the Friars. Sermons Diffused from Paris before 1300 (Oxford, 1985), 42. 17Si rex, re! princeps bellum habeat, dat potestatem ducibus suis perquirendi et conducendi bellatores dignisque stipendiis remunerandi. Quia ergo rex regum et dominus dominantium Christus bellum habuit a tempore, quo caepit ecclesia bellum, inquam, non solum spirituale, sed etiam literale, seu corporale, sire materiale contra haereticos, et alios Christianae religionis inimicos, videlicet paganos, e t a tempore Machometi, sarracenos, necessario dedit potestatem ducibus suis, id est, praelatis, perquirendi bellatores materiales, et conducendi eos, et congruis stipendiis remunerandi. Quid autem est praedicare indulgentias.... William of Auvergne, Opera omnia, vol. 1,551. ~...stipendia hujusmodi bellatorum pro maxima ac nobilissima sui parte remuneratio aeterna erit. William of Auvergne, Opera omnia, vol. 1, 551.
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grants such an indulgence, does not do so for money, but he intends to promote the honour of God, and the care of souls; he does not intend to heap up money, but to enhance the honouring and worship of God. For such purposes a church is built, and therein the honour and worship of God encouraged, so that in the church the holy rites are celebrated with veneration, and also for other similar purposes, so that the divine office, service, remissions, graces, and whatever other blessings of God may penetrate the soul. Therefore, it is not for money, but through money, that a church is built. 19 The Church needed money to enhance the true worship of God and the salvation of the souls entrusted to her care. Not the form, but the purpose of the wealth determined whether or not a contribution for an indulgence was simoniacal. Of course, commerce demanded familiarity not only with arithmetic but also with contract. Just as the late twelfth century cast indulgences in arithmetic images and analogies, so also were the contractual elements of indulgences highlighted. Was the Church empowered to dispense pardons of penalty, on its part, and what was required of the receivers, on their part? According to the theologians, the Church fulfilled its side of the contract--the Church guaranteed that penitents would receive the full remission promised by the preacher of the indulgence. Huguccio, for instance, argued that the Church had received the power to remit penalty from Christ, as the gospel text of Matthew 16:19 makes clear.2° William of Auxerre likewise affirmed that the Church was as good as its word. Indulgences are real pardons of sin, not some ruse to induce penitents to good work. Indulgences must be worth as much as they are preached, otherwise they would be a pious fraud, and compromise the dignity of the Church. 21 Finally, Innocent IV added matter-of-factly, that God's justice ensured that he would consider good work and piety when souls came to him for judgement. 22 The receivers of indulgences had to fulfil several conditions, of which Peter the Chanter offered two lists. In the Summa de sacramentis et animae consiliis he argued that sinners must perform the good work which the indulgence enjoins with religious zeal.23 Peter's theological lexicon was more explicit--penitents must not only complete the good work, but also receive their confessors' permission before obtaining indulgtgBenefactores autem sunt qui nummos singulos, vel obolos, vel etiam ova tribuunt, pro quo tertia pars poenitentiarum injunctarum, ut dicunt remittitur .... Hoc est facere spiritum sanctum, scilicet gratiam, venalem .... Praelatus enim, qui huiusmodi indulgentiam dat non pecuniam, sed dei honorem intendit, et animarum utilitatem; non enim intendit coacervare pecuniam, sed ampliare dei honorificentiam, et cultum. Ad hoc enim aedificatur ecclesia, et dei cultus, et honorificentia amplietur, ut in ea sancti digna veneratione celebrentur, et ad hoc insuper, ut divinum officium, servitium, remissiones, et gratiae, caeteraque dei beneficia animabus impetrentur. Sicut ergo non propter pecuniam, licet per pecuniam, aedificatur ecclesia. William of Auvergne, Opera omnia, vol. 1, 550. z°Ubi ergo sunt illi qui dicunt quod remissiones facte ab ecclesia et que fiunt cotidie in ecclesia, non valent nisi ad relevandas negligentias et functiones penitentiarum ? lpse enim Christus dixit in evangelio: Si cui peccata remiseritis, remittentur ei, ut I. q. I. Ut evidenter (c. 82), et quecunque solvitis super terrain, erunt soluta. Huguccio, Summa decretorum, De penitentia, D. 1, c. 88, cited in F. Gillman, 'Zur AblaBlehre der Friihscholastik', 368. 2LErgo generalis ecclesia dicit falsum et scienter; ergo mentitur; ergo generalis ecclesia peccat; quod absurdum est dicere. William of Auxerre, Summa aurea, IV, 14, 2, 2; 6 vols (Paris, 1980-85), vol. 4, 349. ZZlnnocent IV, Commentaria super libros quinque decretalium V, 38, 4 (Frankfurt, 1570), 543. 23peter the Chanter, Summa de sacramentis et animae consiliis, 5 vols (Louvain, 1957), vol. 1, 195.
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ence, and live in charity and contrition. 24 In the work of Dominican writers, contractual imagery led to greater formality. They insisted that confession, which was the outward sign of contrition, must be made prior to undertaking an indulgence. The formalisation and contractualisation of indulgences reached its zenith in the teaching of Thomas Aquinas. Thomas argued that the will of the grantor determined the amount of remission gained by any one indulgence. Whereas all previous commentators on indulgences believed that the fervour of the penitent must appropriately increase or decrease the amount of remission of any given indulgence, Thomas gave no weight to the spiritual disposition of the receiver. In Q u o d l i b e t , II, 8, 2, Thomas considered the validity of crusade indulgences. Does a crusader who dies on the way to the Holy Land receive plenary indulgence? Thomas answered that the proclamation of the crusading indulgence, which was drawn up at the pleasure of the dispensing prelate, determined the amount of the indulgence's remission. If the document required only the intention to go on crusade, then the indulgence is received, because all the conditions of the indulgence had been met: Therefore, it must be said in answer to the proposed question, that if, according to the form of the papal letter, indulgence is granted to those who take up the cross for the liberation of the Holy Land, the crusader immediately receives the indulgence, even if he should die before arriving in the Holy Land, because the cause of the indulgence is not the crusader, but the vow of the crusader. But if in the form of the letter it shall be stated that indulgence is given to those who travel to the Holy Land--he who dies before he departs receives no indulgence, because the cause of the indulgence is not present f5 Thus contractual requirements and jurisdictional propriety determined whether and how much remission was received. Thomas's formalism seems to represent the ideas of many persons in medieval society, although this particular opinion carried little authority among later writers, who reaffirmed the worthiness of deeply felt contrition. Mendicant friars, as Humbert of Romans wrote, were supposed to preach to the faithful 'usefully, about thingsrelevant to them '26 Mendicant theologians formalised in the treasury of merit the hundred year old tradition of conceptualising religious ideas in arithmetic and contractual images. The authorship of the treasury is doubtful. In his commentary on the decretals, Hostiensis attributed the doctrine to the Dominican Cardinal of Saint Sabina, Hugh of St Cher: And besides, the martyrs shed their blood for the faith and the Church, and they were
24F. Gillman, 'Zur AblaSlehre der Friihscholastik', 366, n. 2. 2~Est ergo dicendum in questione proposita, quod si secundum formam papalis litterae indulgentia concedatur accipientibus crucem in subsidium terrae sanctae, crucesignatus statim habet indulgentiam, etiamsi decedat antequem interarripiat; quia sic causa indulgentiae erit non iter, sed votum itineris. Sed autem in forma litterae contineatur quod indulgentia detur his qui transierunt ultra mare; ille qui decedit antequam transeat, non habet indulgentiam, quia non habet indulgentiam causam. ThomasAquinas, Quodlibet II, 8, 2; Opera omnia (Parma, 1852-1873), vol. 9, 484. 26A. Murray, 'Religion among the poor in thirteenth-century France', Traditio, 30 (1974), 287, n. 9.
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punished beyond that for which they had sinned. It so occurs that in the said effusion of blood, all sin is punished, and this effusion of blood is the stored treasury in the cask of the Church, of which the Church possesses the keys. Hence, when the Church wishes, she is able to open the cask, and will be able to grant to anyone her treasury, through granting indulgences and remissions to the faithful. And thus sin goes not unpunished, because it was punished in the son of God, and by his holy martyrs, according to the lord cardinal Hugh.27 No other sources corroborate Hostiensis' creditation of Hugh, who left no treatise explaining his views on the treasury. Nonetheless, Hugh dispensed many indulgences as papal legate, displayed the generosity expected of a medieval prince, and acted as though he believed in the treasury himself. Paulus credited Alexander of Hales with the invention of the treasury, but his argument was based on the Cologne 1623 edition of book four of Alexander's Summa theologica which, according to the Quaracchi editors of the standard critical edition of this text, Alexander did not write.28 Of course, the really important issue is not the authorship, but the formulation of the treasury by the mendicant theologians of the middle of the thirteenth century and its acceptance by all succeeding mendicant and secular commentators. The fullest explanations of the treasury may be found in the learned commentaries--theological and canonistic--of the 1250s. Mendicant theologians were even more aware of the pastoral needs of Latin Christendom than their predecessors, and yet more concerned with preserving, extending, and centralising the authority of the Church and pope. The treasury served both needs well. The theological form and sanction that the treasury gave to contemporary religious ideas and attitudes made indulgences a kind of benefice over which pope and bishops could exercise jurisdiction and use to serve the policies of papacy and episcopacy. The mendicants used the treasury to promote the ecclesiology of papal monarchy. Indulgences became a special manifestation of the pope's sovereignty over the Church. Mendicant theologians compared the superabundant merits of the Church to the treasuries of kings. Just as a king's treasury exists for the commonweal of his subjects, the treasury of merit exists for the benefit of the Church. A king has the power to use the treasury for the good of the kingdom; the princes of the Church--the pope and bishops--have the right to dispense satisfaction from the treasury of merit for the good of the Church.29 However, the right to grant indulgences originates from the papal plenitude of power: 2VEt preterea martyres pro fide et ecclesia sanguinem suum fuderunt et ultra quam peccassent puniti fuerunt. Restat quod in dicta effusione omne peccatum punitum est, et hec sanguinis effusio est thesaurus in scrinio ecclesie repositus cuius claves habet ecclesia. Unde quando vult potest scrinium aperire, et thesaurum suum cui voluerit communicare, remissiones et indulgentias fidelibus faciendo. Et sic peccatum non remanet impunitum quia punitum fuit in filio dei et martyribus sanctis suis secundum dominum Hugonem cardinalem. Hostiensis, Summa aurea, V, 67 (Lyons, 1537), 288. 28Alexander of Hales, Summa theologica, 3 vols (Quarrachi, 1948), vol. 3, lix-lx. 29Ratio autem, quare thesaurus ecclesiae solis episcopis committitur dispensandus, est quia ecclesia thesaurum istum habet ex desponsatione sui cum Christo, qui est vir et eius sponsus, et cui generat filios et filias, id est perfectos et imperfectos, ad quorum educationem Christus vult servari haec bona. Bonaventure, Commentaria in IV libros sententiarum, IV, 20, 1, 3; vol. 4, 534.
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It must be said that the pope has the plenitude of pontifical power, just as a king in his kingdom. But bishops are endowed with a part of his power, just like the ruling magistrates in individual towns. Because of this, bishops alone the pope calls 'brothers' in his letters; all others he calls 'children'. And therefore the power of granting indulgences resides fully in the pope, because he is able to grant indulgences as he wishes, of course, with an existing, legitimate reason. But for bishops, the 30 power to grant indulgences is distributed by the ordination of the pope. Thomas constructed this argument either in the midst or wake of the antimendicant controversy at the University of Paris (1252-1257). Thomas here argued against episcopal ecclesiologists like William of St Amour that the treasury meant that bishops receive the ability to grant indulgences from the pope. Whereas bishops could grant indulgences only within their dioceses, the pope distributed indulgences throughout Christendom. He could also regulate episcopal dispensations of indulgences. In short, the pope had absolute stewardship over the treasury and indulgences, just as he had absolute sovereignty over the Church. Thus, the history of indulgences paralleled other developments in the centralisation of church authority. Like their twelfth-century predecessors, the mendicants also answered the charge of simony, but used the image of the treasury to explain not only that indulgences were free from simony, but that they also advanced the common good. While the king's treasure exists for the honour of the monarch and the commonwealth, the treasury of the Church exists for the honour of God and the welfare of the Church: It must be said that, just as we observe in the polities and communities of human beings, the treasury of the commonwealth is customarily distributed and spent for two reasons--thus is it understood for the spiritual treasury. In the first instance, the treasury is spent in order to advance the glory of the prince, just as royal courts display, as did Asther in the first chapter of the Book of Esther. In the second instance, the treasury is spent because of the need or usefulness within the community, so that when the community is attacked, stipends or rewards are given to soldiers, so that they may go to war. Thus, the treasury of the Church ought to be distributed by those to whom it is entrusted for two reasons, namely, for the glory and praise of the prince. And the praise and honour of God is in his saints, and the saints are honoured by the construction of basilicas, by the visitation of basilicas, by the commemoration of the saintly virtues--all these are also recommended in preaching and sermons, therefore, indulgences are rightly granted to all persons for these services. However, in the case of the Church the common need is the defence of the Holy Land, the defence of the faith, the encouragement of studies and related 3°Dicendum quod papa habet plenitudinem pontificalis potestatis, quasi rex in regno. Sed episcopi assumuntur in partem sollicitudinis, quasi iudices singulis civitatibus praepositi; propter quod eos solos in suis litteris papa fratres vocat, reliquos autem omnes vocat filios. Et ideo potestas faciendi indulgentias plene residet in papa; quia potest facere prout vult, causa tamen existente legitima. Sed in episcopis est taxata seeundum ordinationem papae. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Supplementum 26, 3; Opera omnia (Rome), vol. 12, 48. Cf. Bonaventure, Commentaria in IV libros sententiarum, IV, 20, 1, 3; Opera omnia, vol. 4, 534; Albert, Comrnentarii in IV libri sententiarum, IV, 20, 21, 38 vols (Paris, 1894), vol. 29, 857-8.
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endeavours, and therefore indulgences ought also to be granted for these enterprises. And since these services to the Church consist in exterior acts, indulgences ought especially to be granted for them.3~ The Dominican theologians Thomas Aquinas and Peter of Tarentaise offered more abstract arguments. Thomas and Peter asserted that whenever temporal goods were used to serve spiritual goals, no simony could take place: It must be said that temporal things are ordained for spiritual goals--that we ought to use temporal things because of spiritual goals. And therefore indulgence is not able to be granted simply for temporal things, but for temporal things ordained for spiritual goals, like the repression of the enemies of the Church, who disturb the peace of the Church, or for the construction of churches and bridges, and for the collection of alms. And it is clear that simony is not committed through these acts, because a spiritual thing is not given in exchange for a temporal thing, but for a spiritual thing.32 Their ideas passed into the common moral theology of the Dominicans through John of Freiburg.33 The doctrine of the treasury, therefore, also appealed to the basic cultural and political values of medieval Europe. Indulgences served the common good, the most frequently cited goal of government in medieval documents.34 No matter how vaguely the concept of common good itself might be explained or understood, the acts for which indulgences were granted unmistakably served the Christian commonwealth. They encouraged prayer, preaching, the veneration of saints, and study. Churches, monasteries, and basilicas were built and maintained with the funds indulgences generated. Popes and bishops used indulgences to exercise their authority and to defend Christen-
3~Dicendum, quod sicut videmus in politicis et communitatibus humanis, quod thesaurus reipublicae propter duo maxime consuevit proferri et communicari exterius; sic in spiritualibus intelligendum. Profertur namque thesaurus extra ad dispergendam propter gloriam prinicipis, sicut faciunt reges curiales, sicut fecit Assuerus Esther primo; alio modo propter utilitatis communitatis sive necessitatem, ut quando laeditur communitas, proferuntur stipendia et donativa militibus, ut eant ad pugnam. Sic thesaurus ecclesiae ab his qui habent dispensare, duplici ex cause debet distribui, scilicet propter gloriam principis et laudem; et laus et honor dei est in sanctis suis, et sancti honorantur in constructione basilicarum, visitatione basilicarum, commemoratione virtutum suarum, et idem fit in praedicationibus et sermonibus: ideo pro his omnibus indulgentiae recte fiunt. Communis autem utilitas est defensio terrae sanctae, defensio fidei, promotio studii et consimilia; et ideo adhuc pro talibus debent fieri. Et quoniam haec consistunt in actibus exterioribus, ideo maxime pro actibus exterioribus debent fieri indulgentiae. Bonaventure, Commentaria in lV libros sententiarum, IV, 20, 1, 4; Opera omnia, vol. 4, 537. 32Dicendum quod temporalia ad spiritualia ordinantur: quia propter spiritualia temporalibus uti debemus; et ideo pro temporalibus simpliciter non potest fieri indulgentia, sed pro temporalibus ordinatis ad spiritualia, sicut repressio inimicorum ecclesiae, qui pacem ecclesiae perturbant; vel sicut constructio ecclesiarum et pontium, et aliarum eleemosynarum collatio. Et per hoc patet quod non fit ibi simonia, quia non datur spirituale pro temporali, sed pro spirituali. Thomas Aquinas, Commentum in IV libri sententiarum, IV, 20, 1, 3, 3; Opera omnia (Parma), vol. 7, 843. ST Suppl., 25, 3; Opera omnia (Rome), vol. 12, 50. Cf. Peter of Tarentaise, In IV libros sententiarum commentaria, 4 vols (Toulouse, 1672), IV, 20, 3, 2, 5; vol. 4, 232. 33Dicendum quod temporalia et ad spiritualia finaliter ordinantur et non econverso, quia finis est melior his que sunt ad finem. Et ideo pro temporalibus nunquam sunt danda spiritualia. Unde pro aliqua utilitate spiritualibus sequente dantur indulgentie, et non pro subsidio temporali principaliter. John of Freiburg, Summa confessorum (Augsburg, 1476), book 3, q. 185. 34A. Black, Political Thought in Europe, 1250-1450 (Cambridge, 1992), 25.
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dom from its enemies. Indulgences were also granted for a host of other purposes not immediately religious, like the building of bridges, roads, dams, fortifications, and embankments, but which made travel safer, encouraged commerce, and maintained peace and security.35 The fourteenth century inherited and elaborated on the imagery, ecclesiology, and social values of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. War, famine, plague, and spiritual temperament made twelfth-century concerns with repentance and penitence more acute. Papal apologists made more exalted claims for papal authority, even though the balance of power had shifted in favour of secular potentates. Common good remained the criteria for judging polities. The number of indulgences increased. Pope Clement VI declared the treasury of merit an official doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church in the decree Unigenitus (1343)36 which was the same decree that proclaimed the year 1350 a jubilee year, even though Boniface VIII, who proclaimed the year 1300 the first jubilee, had declared that jubilees should be held only once a century. Clement countered his predecessor's prescription by saying that more frequent jubilees had biblical sanction, since Mosaic law declared one year in forty a penitential year. Countless other prelates mimicked Clement's indulgence for reasons known to their predecessors. Pious lay folk petitioned bishops for indulgences. Prelates raised revenues that built and maintained churches and convents, exercised lordship, and made friends with every grant of indulgence. Popes demonstrated their influence throughout the whole Latin Christian world by granting indulgences in England, France, Germany, Scandinavia, Poland, Italy, and Spain. Indulgences proliferated in the fourteenth century along with the religious culture that produced them. Not the pardoner, but the franklin, knight, yeoman, merchant, miller, parson, and good wife of Bath explain the popularity of indulgences in the Middle Ages.
35N. Paulus, Indulgences as a Social Factor in the Middle Ages, trans. J. E. Ross (New York, 1922), 104-9. 3~Extrav., 5. 9. 2.