Indulgences
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The Reformation is an odd chapter in
European history. The history of the Catholic church
throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance is a history
filled with spiritual, artistic, and intellectual triumphs
as well as a history of tremendous abuses and doctrinal
stupidities. From the very formation of the Christian
church, there has been no such thing as a unified church.
All through the Middle Ages, there are strong, passionate,
and often powerful reactions to Catholic doctrine and church
practices. It's not unfair to say that the history of the
medieval church is, by and large, one long history of
heresies.
But the granddaddy of all heresies, the
one that permanently changed the face of Christianity and
European culture, was perpetrated by an Augustinian monk
sheltered in the recesses of the Holy Roman Empire. Martin
Luther's call for reformation of corrupt church practices
would eventually erupt into the greatest spiritual and
political challenge medieval Catholicism ever faced. The
doctrines and churches of Christianity would fragment into a
million separate pieces; thousands of gallons of blood would
be spilled by Christians killing other Christians in
European wars over religion; the European state itself would
be rocked to its foundations by the political implications
of Luther's newly reformed church.
We do not have world enough and time to
catalog the abuses of the medieval and Renaissance church;
however, Luther's initial call for reform centered around a
single practice: the sale of indulgences. We will start,
then, with indulgences.
The logic of indulgences is hard for
moderns to understand and the practice is easy to condemn in
hindsight, but in reality they make a great deal of sense.
The whole concept of an indulgence is based on the medieval
Catholic doctrine that sinners must not only repent of sins
that they've committed, they must also confess these sins
and pay some sort of retribution. You see, the problem with
repentance and confession is that the only evidence you have
of repentance is the sinner's claim to be repentant.
Repentance is, after all, an internal state rather than an
external action; foundational Christianity is, after all,
heavily oriented towards the interior life of individuals
rather than their exterior life. However, just because a
sinner claims to be repentant doesn't mean that he or she
actually is repentant.
Therefore, in a grossly oversimplified way
of putting it, the history of medieval Catholic doctrine is
in many ways an attempt to find ways to give exterior signs
for the interior state of the individual believer.
Repentance was no exception to this. So in order for an
individual to demonstrate that he or she is truly repentant
and not just saying it, the concept of "temporal punishment"
was invented. In other words, the sinner needed to undergo
some punishment or task; the sin would not be expiated until
this was accomplished. Part of this temporal punishment
involved doing "good works," that is, deeds that are
charitable, such as feeding the poor or caring for the sick.
A truly repentant person would show that repentance by
behaving in the most charitable ways towards fellow human
beings.
Sins that have not been properly expiated
with temporal punishment land the sinner in purgatory. In
fact, the entire concept of purgatory, which was invented in
the late twelfth century, is as a place of temporal
punishment. The concept of performing expiatory acts in this
life to demonstrate one's internal state was pushed into the
afterlife. At the conclusion of this punishment, the
individual soul is allowed into heaven.
Indulgences in an Economic Context
Now, here we'll take a short diversion
from church history to economic history. In the latter
centuries of the Middle Ages, the Europeans discovered
mercantilism. Mercantilism is an economic activity in which
goods are purchased in one place and then moved to another
place, where those goods are scarce, and sold at a much
higher price. In the late eleventh and twelfth centuries,
Europeans learned how to do this from Muslims and they took
to it like a duck to water. From the twelfth century
onwards, Europeans busied themselves moving all sorts of
goods&emdash;salt, wool, sheep skins, and various new
inventions--all over Europe and the European economy began
to boom.
This booming mercantile economy quickly
changed the way people traded goods. For the most part,
trade in medieval Europe involved barter: individual goods
were traded for other individual goods. I will give you one
toilet for three chemistry textbooks. Mercantilism, however,
put money into circulation and everybody started
using it. Rather than trading goods directly, people began
to trade goods through the medium of money. By the late
thirteenth century, most economic transactions were taking
place with money, and Europe shifted from a largely barter
economy to a money economy.
Now, since we live with money all the
time, we really don't think about how strange it is.
Medieval Europeans, however, did understand the strangeness
of money and began to adjust their thinking and world view
around this new phenomenon. (Money had always been around,
it just hadn't been in wide circulation). You see, in order
for money to really work, it can't have a use value,
or then it would just be barter. If money had a use value,
then its value would fluctuate wildly. Let's say that we
used toilets for money. If you could buy three chemistry
textbooks for one toilet, this would perhaps seem reasonable
to you if you have had nothing to eat or drink in a day or
two. If, on the other hand, you had just finished drinking a
case of soda pop this morning, you'd probably be less
willing to trade your toilet away at such a low price. So,
in order for the trade value of money to be
relatively fixed, not only must money be made of a material
that is relatively rare, money can't have any real
value, that is, it can't have use value.
This is an odd way of doing business. You
can walk into a car dealership and hand someone several
thousand pieces of paper with George Washington's face on
them, pieces of paper that have no use whatsoever, and that
fool will hand you the keys to a brand new car. And the only
reason he'll do it is because he can take those thousands of
pieces of useless paper and hand them to someone else who
will then give him something back that is useful and
valuable.
Money works, then, by substituting
for real things. When you look at a sweater and see a price
tag on it that says "$50," that means that you can
substitute fifty dollars for that sweater. If you own a CD
player that says "$50," that means that you can substitute
fifty dollars for that CD player. Rather than trade your CD
player for the sweater, you can sell the CD player and take
fifty dollars instead as a substitute and then use that
money to purchase the sweater. In a money economy, then,
money can be substituted for any object whatsoever.
This has been a long digression to explain
indulgences, but there is in fact a clear relationship.
Indulgences were originally created by the church for one
reason: to collect money, that stuff that began circulating
all over Europe in the late Middle Ages. The medieval
Catholic church was the source of almost all social welfare
and charity, and all this charity needed to be paid for.
Beginning in the twelfth century, various hospitals and
other organizations affiliated with the church began to send
people out begging for money. However, there wasn't that
much money around, and it was hard to persuade people to
give it up for nothing at all.
In the late thirteenth century, the church
came up with the idea of indulgences. In the spiritual life
of sinners, indulgences function exactly the same way money
functions in their economic life. Here's the logic: since
the expiation of sin involves temporal punishment and this
temporal punishment involves the doing of good works, why
not substitute someone else's good works for the
good works you're required to do? Why not pay
someone else to do the good works demanded of you as
temporal punishment? Church officials argued that clergy
were doing more good works than they needed to; they had,
you might say, a budget surplus of good works in the
spiritual accounts. Why not sell them? So that's what the
church did. With the approval of the pope, individual
bishops could sell indulgences which more or less
paid off any temporal punishment or good works that the
individual believer had accumulated in the previous year. It
substituted the good works of the Catholic clergy for the
good works required of the individual believer. Proof of
this substitution was in the indulgence itself, which was a
piece of paper, like a piece of money or a check, that
certified that the good works of the clergy had paid off the
"good works debt" of the individual believer.
Inspired by the need to raise money,
indulgences reproduced the very logic of money. In place of
the real thing (good works), indulgences substituted a
completely valueless piece of paper. The only reason this
worked is because everybody accepted this as a valid
substitution, just like money.
Indulgences, like money, had their critics
from the very beginning. With the invention of the printing
press, however, indulgences became big business for the
church and the critics grew. Nowhere was criticism of the
church more revolutionary than in northern Europe.
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