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The practice of Indulgences pervaded the whole penitential system of the later mediæval Church, and had done so from the beginning of the thirteenth century. Its beginnings go back a thousand years before Luther's time.

In the ancient Church, lapse into serious sin involved separation from the Christian fellowship, and readmission to communion was only to be had by public confession made in presence of the whole congregation, and by the manifestation of a true repentance in performing certain satisfactions,153 such as the manumission of slaves, prolonged fasting, extensive almsgiving, etc. These satisfactions were the open signs of heartfelt sorrow, and were regarded as at once well-pleasing to God and evidence to the Christian community that the penitent had true repentance, and might be received back again into their midst. The confession was made to the whole congregation; the amount of satisfaction deemed necessary was estimated by the congregation, and readmission was also dependent on the will of the whole congregation. It often happened that these satisfactions were mitigated or exchanged for others. The penitent might fall sick, and the fasting which had been prescribed could not be insisted upon without danger of death; in such a case the external sign of sorrow which had been demanded might be exchanged for another. Or it might happen that the community became convinced of the sincerity of the repentance without insisting that the whole of the prescribed satisfaction need be performed.154 These exchanges and mitigations of satisfactions were the small beginnings of the later system of Indulgences.

In course of time the public confession of sins made to the whole congregation was exchanged for a private confession made to the priest, and instead of the public satisfaction imposed by the whole congregation, it was left to the priest to enjoin a satisfaction or external sign of sorrow which he believed was appropriate to the sin committed and confessed. The substitution of a private confession to the priest for a public confession made to the whole congregation, enlarged the circle of sins confessed. The secret sins of the heart whose presence could be elicited by the questions of the confessor were added to the open sins seen of men. The circle of satisfactions was also widened in a corresponding fashion.

When the imposition of satisfactions was left in the hands of the priest, it was felt necessary to provide some check against the arbitrariness which could not fail to result. So books were published containing lists of sins with the corresponding appropriate satisfactions which ought to be demanded from the penitents. If it be remembered that some of the sins mentioned were very heinous (murders, incests, outrages of all kinds), it is not surprising that the appropriate satisfactions or penances, as they came to be called, were very severe in some cases, and extended over a course of years. From the seventh century there arose a practice of commuting satisfactions or penances. A penance of several years' practice of fasting might be commuted into saying so many prayers or psalms, into giving a definite amount of alms, or even into a money fine—and in this last case the analogy of the Wehrgeld of the Germanic tribal codes was frequently followed.155 These customary commutations were frequently inserted in the Penitentiaries or books of discipline. This new custom commonly took the form that the penitent, who visited a certain church on a prescribed day and gave a contribution to its funds, had the penance, which had been imposed upon him by the priest in the ordinary course of discipline, shortened by one-seventh, one-third, one-half, as the case might be. This was in every case the commutation or relaxation of the penance or outward sign of sorrow which had been imposed according to the regulations of the Church, laid down in the Penitentiaries (relaxatio de injuncta pœnitentia). This was the real origin of Indulgences, and these earliest examples were invariably a relaxation of ecclesiastical penalties which had been imposed according to the regular custom in cases of discipline. It will be seen that Luther expressly excluded this kind of Indulgence from his attack. He declared that what the Church had a right to impose, it had a right to relax. It was at first believed that this right to relax or commute imposed penances was in the hands of the priests who had charge of the discipline of the members of the Church; but the abuses of the system by the priests ended by placing the power to grant Indulgences in the hands of the bishops, and they used the money procured in building many of the great mediæval cathedrals. Episcopal abuse of Indulgences led to their being reserved for the Popes.

Three conceptions, all of which belong to the beginning of the thirteenth century, combined to effect a great change on this old and simple idea of Indulgences. These were—(1) the formulation of the thought of a treasury of merits (thesaurus meritorum); (2) the change of the institution into the Sacrament of Penance; and (3) the distinction between attrition and contrition in the thought of the kind of sorrow God demands from a real penitent.

The conception of a storehouse of merits (thesaurus meritorum or indulgentiarum) was first formulated by Alexander of Hales156 in the thirteenth century, and his ideas were accepted, enlarged, and made more precise by succeeding theologians.157 Starting with the existing practice in the Church that some penances (such as pilgrimages) might be vicariously performed, and bringing together the several thoughts that the faithful are members of one body, that the good deeds of each of the members are the common property of all, and therefore that the more sinful can benefit by the good deeds of their more saintly brethren, and that the sacrifice of Christ was sufficient to wipe out the sins of all, theologians gradually formulated the doctrine that there was a common storehouse which contained the good deeds of living men and women, of the saints in heaven and the inexhaustible merits of Christ, and that all these merits accumulated there had been placed under the charge of the Pope, and could be dispensed by him to the faithful. The doctrine was not very precisely defined by the beginning of the sixteenth century, but it was generally believed in, taught, and accepted. It went to increase the vague sense of supernatural, spiritual powers attached to the person of the Bishop of Rome. It had one important consequence on the doctrine of Indulgences. They might be the payment out of this treasury of an absolute equivalent for the satisfaction due by the penitent for his sins; they were no longer merely the substitution of one form of penance for another, or the relaxation of a penance enjoined.

The institution of Penance contained within it the four practices of Sorrow for the sins committed (contritio); the Confession of these sins to the priest; Satisfaction, or the due manifestation of sorrow in the ways prescribed by the Church through the command of the confessor; and the Pardon (absolutio) pronounced by the priest in God's name. The pardon followed the satisfaction. But when the institution became the Sacrament of Penance, the order was changed: absolution followed confession and came before satisfaction, which it had formerly followed. Satisfaction lost its old meaning. It was no longer the outward sign of sorrow and the necessary precedent of pardon or absolution. According to the new theory, the absolution which immediately followed confession had the effect of removing the whole guilt of the sins confessed, and with the guilt the whole of the eternal punishment due. This cancelling of guilt and of eternal punishment did not, however, forthwith open the gates of heaven to the pardoned sinner. It was felt that the justice of God could not permit the baptized sinner to escape from all punishment whatever. Hence it was said that although eternal punishment had disappeared with the absolution, there remained temporal punishment due for the sins, and that heaven could not be entered until this temporal punishment had been endured.158 Temporal punishments might be of two kinds—those endured in this life, or those suffered in a place of punishment after death. The penance imposed by the priest, the satisfaction, now became the temporal punishment due for sins committed. If the priest had imposed the due amount, and if the penitent was able to perform all that had been imposed, the sins were expiated. But if the priest had imposed less than the justice of God actually demanded, then these temporal pains had to be completed in Purgatory. This gave rise to great uncertainty; for who could feel assured that the priest had calculated rightly, and had imposed satisfactions or temporal penalties which were of the precise amount demanded by the justice of God? Hence the pains of Purgatory threatened every man. It was here that the new idea of Indulgences came in to aid the faithful by securing him against the pains of Purgatory, which were not included in the absolution obtained in the Sacrament of Penance. Indulgences in the sense of relaxations of imposed penances went into the background, and the really valuable Indulgence was one which, because of the merits transferred from the storehouse of merits, was an equivalent in God's sight for the temporal punishments due for sins. Thus, in the opinion of Alexander of Hales, of Bonaventura,159 and, above all, of Thomas Aquinas, the real value of Indulgences was that they procured the remission of penalties due after absolution, whether these penalties were penances imposed by the priest or not; and when the uncertainty of the imposed penalties is remembered, the most valuable of all Indulgences were those which had regard to the unimposed penalties; the priest might make a mistake, but God did not blunder.

While Indulgences were always connected with satisfactions, and changed with the changes in the meaning of the latter term, they were not the less influenced by a distinction which came to be drawn between attrition and contrition, and by the application of the distinction to the theory of the Sacrament of Penance. During the earlier Middle Ages and down to the thirteenth century, it was always held that contrition (sorrow prompted by love) was the one thing taken into account by God in pardoning the sinner. The theologians of the thirteenth century, however, began to draw a distinction between this godly sorrow and a certain amount of sorrow which might arise from a variety of causes of a less worthy nature, and especially from servile fear. This was called attrition; and it was held that this attrition, though of itself too imperfect to win the pardon of God, might become perfected through the confession heard by the priest, and in the sacramental absolution pronounced by him. Very naturally, though perhaps illogically, it was believed that an imperfect sorrow, though sufficient to procure absolution, and, therefore, the blotting out of eternal punishment, merited more temporal punishment than if it had been sorrow of a godly sort. But it was these temporal penalties (including the pains of Purgatory) that Indulgences provided for. Hence, Indulgences appealed more strongly to the indifferent Christian, who knew that he had sinned, and at the same time felt that his sorrow was not the effect of his love to God. He knew that his sins deserved some punishment. His conscience, however weak, told him that he could not sin with perfect impunity, and that something more was needed than his perfunctory confession to a priest. He felt that he must do something—fast, or go on a pilgrimage, or purchase an Indulgence. It was at this point that the Church intervened to show him how his poor performance could be transformed by the power of the Church and its treasury of merits into something so great that the penalties of Purgatory could be actually evaded. His cheap sorrow, his careless confession, need not trouble him. Hence, for the ordinary indifferent Christian, Attrition, Confession, and Indulgence became the three heads of the scheme of the Church for his salvation. The one thing that satisfied his conscience was the burdensome thing he had to do, and that was to procure an Indulgence—a matter made increasingly easy for him as time went on.

It must not be supposed that this doctrine of Attrition, and its evident effect in deadening the conscience and in lowering the standard of morality, had the undivided support of the theologians of the later Middle Ages, but it was the doctrine taught by most of the Scotist theologians, who took the lead in theological thinking during these times. It was set forth in its most extravagant form by such a representative man as John of Paltz in Erfurt; it was preached by the pardon-sellers; it was eagerly welcomed by indifferent Christians, who desired to escape the penalties of sin without abandoning its enjoyments; it exalted the power of the priesthood; and it was specially valuable in securing good sales of Indulgences, and therefore in increasing the papal revenues. It lay at the basis of the whole theory and practice of Indulgences, which confronted Luther when he issued his Theses.

History shows us that gross abuses had always gathered round the practice of Indulgences, even in their earlier and simpler forms. The priests had abused the system, and the power of issuing Indulgences had been taken from them and confined to the bishops. The bishops, in turn, had abused the privilege, and the Popes had gradually assumed that the power to grant an Indulgence belonged to the Bishop of Rome exclusively, or to those to whom he might delegate it; and this assumption seemed both reasonable and salutary. The power was at first sparingly used. It is true that Pope Urban ii., in 1095, promised to the Crusaders an Indulgence such as had never before been heard of—a complete remission of all imposed canonical penances; but it was not until the thirteenth and fourteen centuries that Indulgences, now doubly dangerous to the moral life from the new theories which had arisen, were lavished even more unsparingly than in the days when any bishop had power to grant them. From the beginning of the fourteenth century they were given to raise recruits for papal wars. They were lavished on the religious Orders, either for the benefit of the members or for the purpose of attracting strangers and their gifts to their churches. They were bestowed on cathedrals and other churches, or on individual altars in churches, and had the effect of endowments. They were joined to special collections of relics, to be earned by the faithful who visited the shrines. They were given to hospitals, and for the upkeep of bridges and of roads. Wherever they are met with in the later Middle Ages, and it would be difficult to say where they are not to be found, they are seen to be associated with sordid money-getting, and, as Luther remarked in an early sermon on the subject, they were a very grievous instrument placed in the hand of avarice.

The practice of granting Indulgences was universally prevalent and was universally accepted; but it was not easy to give an explanation of the system, in the sense of showing that it was an essential element in Christian discipline. No mediæval theologian attempted to do any such thing. Bonaventura and Thomas Aquinas, the two great Schoolmen who did more than any others to provide a theological basis for the system, tell us quite frankly that it is their business to accept the fact that Indulgences do exist as part of the penitentiary discipline of the Church, and, accepting it, they thought themselves bound to construct a reasonable theory.160 The practice altered, and new theories were needed to explain the variations. It is needless to say that these explanations did not always agree; and that there were very great differences of opinion about what an Indulgence really effected for the man who bought it.

Of all these disputed questions the most important was: Did an Indulgence give remission for the guilt of sin, or only for certain penalties which followed the sinful deed? This is a question about which modern Romanists are extremely sensitive.

The universal answer given by all defenders of Indulgences who have written on the subject since the Council of Trent, is that guilt (culpa) and eternal punishment (pœnæ eternæ) are dealt with in the Sacrament of Penance, and that Indulgences relate only to temporal punishments, including under that designation the pains of Purgatory. This modern opinion is confirmed by the most eminent authorities of the mediæval Church. It has been accepted in the description of the theory of Indulgences given above, since it has been said that the principal use of Indulgences was to secure against Purgatory. But these statements do not exhaust the question. Mediæval theology did not create Indulgences, it only followed and tried to justify the practices of the Pope and of the Roman Curia—a rather difficult task. The question still remains whether some of the Papal Bulls promulgating Indulgences did not promise the removal of guilt as well as security against temporal punishments. If these be examined, spurious Bulls being set aside, it will be found that many of them make no mention of the need of previous confession and of priestly absolution; that one or two expressly make mention of a remission of guilt as well as of penalty; and that many (especially those which proclaim a Jubilee Indulgence) use language which inevitably led intelligent laymen like Dante to believe that the Popes did proclaim the remission of guilt as well as of penalty. Of course, it may be said that in those days the distinction between guilt (culpa) and penalty (pœna) had not been very exactly defined, and that the phrase remission of sins was used to denote both remission of guilt and remission of penalty; still it is difficult to withstand the conclusion that, even in theory, Indulgences had been declared to be efficacious for the removal of the guilt of sin in the presence of God.

These questions of the theological meaning of an Indulgence, though necessary to understand the whole situation, had after all little to do with Luther's action. He approached the whole matter from the side of the practical effect of the proclamation of an Indulgence on the minds of common men who knew nothing of refined theological distinctions; and the evidence that the common people did generally believe that an Indulgence did remove the guilt of sin is overwhelming. Contemporary chroniclers are to be found who declare that Indulgences given to Crusaders remit the guilt as well as the punishment; contemporary preachers assert that plenary Indulgences remit guilt, and justify their opinion by declaring that such Indulgences were supposed to contain within them the Sacrament of Penance. The popular guide-books written for pilgrims to Rome and Compostella spread the popular idea that Indulgences acquired by such pilgrimages do remit guilt as well as penalty. The popular belief was so thoroughly acknowledged, that even Councils had to throw the blame for it on the pardon-sellers, or, like the Council of Constance, impeached the Pope and compelled him to confess that he had granted Indulgences for the remission of guilt as well as of penalty. This widespread popular belief of itself justified Luther in calling attention to this side of the matter.

Moreover, it is well to see what the theory of the most respected theologians actually meant when looked at practically. Since the formulation of the Sacrament of Penance, the theory had been that all guilt of sin and all eternal punishment were remitted in the priestly absolution which followed the confession of the penitent. The Sacrament of Penance had abolished guilt and Hell. But there remained the actual sins to be punished, because the justice of God demanded it, and this was done in the temporal pains of Purgatory. The “common man,” if he thought at all about it, may be excused if he considered that guilt and Hell, taken away by the one hand, were restored by the other. There remained for him the sense that God's justice demanded some punishment for the sins he had committed; and if this was not guilt according to theological definition, it was probably all that he could attain to. He was taught and believed that punishment awaited him for these actual sins of his; and a punishment which might last thousands of years in Purgatory was not very different from an eternal punishment in his eyes. The Indulgence came to him filled as he was with these vague thoughts, and offered him a sure way of easing his conscience and avoiding the punishment he knew he deserved. He had only to pay the price of a Papal Ticket, perform the canonical good deed required, whatever it might be, and he was assured that his punishment was remitted, and God's justice satisfied. This may not involve the thought of the remission of guilt in the theological sense of the word, but it certainly misled the moral instincts of the “common man” about as much as if it did. It is not surprising that the common people made the theological mistake, if mistake it was, and saw in every plenary Indulgence the promise of the remission of guilt as well as of penalty,161 for with them remission of guilt and quieting of conscience were one and the same thing. It was this practical moral effect of Indulgences, and not the theological explanation of the theory, which stirred Luther to make his protest.