Indulgence

The indulgence began as an act of mercy inside a system of ferocious discipline. Early medieval penance was tariffed, so many years of fasting for such a sin, and the tariffs could stack into impossible lifetimes; commutation followed, harsh terms exchanged for gentler ones, a pilgrimage, an endowment, a work of charity. The decisive step came in 1095, when Urban II promised the crusaders at Clermont that the journey itself would stand for all penance, the first plenary indulgence.

The theology was systematized afterward: Christ and the saints had earned merit beyond all need, a treasury the Church could dispense; an indulgence drew on it to remit not guilt, which only absolution touches, but the temporal punishment still owed after forgiveness. The machinery then did what machinery does. Indulgences were extended to the dead in purgatory in the fifteenth century; preaching campaigns were licensed to fund cathedrals, hospitals and wars; and the required almsgiving shaded, in practice and in the public mind, into purchase. The distinction between the doctrine and its traffic was real, and reformers inside the Church said so for two centuries before Luther. But by 1517 the practical experience of the ordinary Christian was of grace with a price list, and it was against that experience, not against forgiveness itself, that the Reformation's first document was aimed.

The indulgence that broke Christendom was a building fund. To finance the new St. Peter's, and, less publicly, to retire the debts the young Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz had incurred buying his sees, a plenary indulgence was preached across Germany, and the Dominican Johann Tetzel worked the territories near electoral Saxony in 1517 with the full apparatus: processions, the papal bull on velvet, and preaching whose remembered jingle, as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs, may be caricature but caught the tenor.

Luther, then an Augustinian professor at Wittenberg, heard his parishioners' reports, and on 31 October 1517 issued ninety-five theses for academic disputation on the power of indulgences. The theses are more conservative than their legend, they assume purgatory and papal authority, but their edge is unmistakable: the pope can remit only what he or the canons imposed; the truly penitent already have full remission; and the treasury of the Church is the gospel, not a fund. The controversy escalated past indulgences within months, to authority itself.

The Council of Trent's eventual settlement, in its very last decree in 1563, held the line it needed: indulgences are wholesome and remain, but all traffic in them is condemned, the office of the pardoner abolished. Paul VI reorganized the whole practice in 1967, grounding it in the communion of saints; the indulgence survives, chastened, its history the standing case study in what happens when grace acquires a market.