The Church Prior to the Reformation: “The Purgatory Industry”

Salvation according to Rome: “Ye must!”

Of course, “corporal works of mercy” are a thing that Roman Catholics MAY do. Feeding the hungry, or giving alms – these are the kinds of good works that the Scriptures require. But notice how far down they are on the Roman Catholic “list of things to do”. When we are talking about being “created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do”, these particular good works (those prescribed by Christ) are far down in the Roman Catholic system.

Rome does not require these things – merely points to them as good things. What it REQUIRES is that you do “the Precepts of the Church”.

As a Roman Catholic, you won’t find yourself in hell for failing to feed the hungry, or clothing the naked, etc. However, you will go to hell (at least, you would have, when I was a kid) for failing to keep the “indispensable minimums”, the “Precepts of the Church”, unless they’ve found some way to “reformulate positively” these things, the way that they’ve reformulated positively the statement “no salvation outside of the church”.

But it seems as if they may be trying. The online version of Paragraph 2041 says:

2041 The precepts of the Church are set in the context of a moral life bound to and nourished by liturgical life. The obligatory character of these positive laws decreed by the pastoral authorities is meant to guarantee to the faithful the very necessary minimum in the spirit of prayer and moral effort, in the growth in love of God and neighbor …

However, my version, a printed 1995 edition of the book, clearly does not say “very necessary” but “indispensable”. Now, if you were going to relax those precepts, from “indispensable” to something, well, less than “indispensable”, you might head in the direction of “very necessary”. Maybe a future edition of this will be “we kinda-sorta think you oughta do it, but hey, who are we to judge?”

In any event, when I grew up, missing Mass on a Sunday or a “Holy Day of Obligation” was a mortal sin. Failing to get to confession in a year was a mortal sin, and definitely something to worry about.

In the middle ages, too, people cared about the state of their souls.

Continuing with yesterday’s account from Diarmaid MacCulloch, “The Reformation, A History”, MacCulloch begins to outline ways in which “the Mass was at the centre” of a “burgeoning system of intercession”:

The Church told them that there was a great deal of merit available, if only it was drawn on with reverence and using the means provided by the Church (the “precepts” etc.). Human beings could construct their own humble imitations of the mercy of God in good works. Some of these were works of mercy, such as giving to beggars or contributing to the upkeep of the hospitals which looked after the chronically sick or elderly. If someone did the community good with an act of public-spiritedness, that too was a work of mercy: building or repairing a bridge, for instance (bridges tending by their nature to be built on boundaries, ending up as no one’s official responsibility). Some people even left money in their wills to pay their village’s tax bill to the king, a work of mercy that perhaps deserves revival.

Works such as these could then form part of a spiritual trade within the community of the living for another form of good work – prayer. So the beggar was expected to pray for the future welfare of the soul of the good wife who gave him a coin, the inmates of the hospitals must lie in their beds praying for their benefactors, those who trudged over the bridge must pay for the donor – suitably reminded by an inscription on the bridge soliciting these prayers for the donor by name. Every soul-prayer could bear on one’s time in Purgatory. Better still, to pray for the souls of the dead was also mutually beneficial, because the dead in Purgatory, with a good deal of time on their hands, could be expected to reciprocate with their own prayers …. It was a marvelous way of uniting the dead and the living in mutual aid, to make the barrier seem no wider than that between a congregation and the carved figures in the roodloft, as well as giving the community of the living a sense of mutual responsibility and concern. It gave people a sense that they had some control over death, before which humanity has always stood baffled and powerless.

No wonder Purgatory was one of the most successful and long-lasting theological ideas in the Western Church, or bred an intricate industry of prayer. There is no doubt that this was much encouraged by the trauma of the Black Death in 1348-9, that exceptional pandemic of plague in which perhaps a third of western Europe’s population died.

These forms of popular (and popularly-conceived) piety cropped up in many different places, and received more or less official sanction from “the Church”.

Follow the money

… the development of an obsession with Purgatory was not uniform within Europe. Increasingly historians are finding that it was the north rather than the Mediterranean area, and perhaps most intensively the Atlantic fringe from Galicia on the Spanish Atlantic seaboard round as far as Denmark and north Germany, which was most intensively concerned with prayer as a ticket out of Purgatory.

The reasons for this are obscure; … Whatever explanations make sense, there is hard evidence for the contrast. Dante Alighieri’s detailed descriptions of Purgatory in his fourteenth-century masterwork the Divina Commedia might suggest that southerners were indeed concerned with Purgatory, but his Italian readers do not seem to have transformed their delight in his great poem into practical action or hard cash. This action can be monitored through the contents of late medieval wills – one of the rare ways in which we can meet thousands of individuals facing death across the centuries and hear echoes of what they made of the experience.

In the north, the will-makers put a great deal of investment into such components of the Purgatory industry as Masses for the dead. In Germany there was a phenomenal surge in the endowment of Masses from around 1450, with no signs of any slackening until the whole system imploded under the impact of Luther’s message in the 1520’s. Samplings from Spain and Italy do not reveal the same level of concern; indeed there are several local studies which suggest that such activity was imported by reforming ‘Counter-Reformation’ Catholic clergy in the late sixteenth century, only then creating a piety reminiscent of that which the Protestants were destroying in much of northern Europe.

It is interesting to me to watch the wave of this “piety” move from the north, where Lutheranism and the Reformed faith eventually took hold and eliminated it, to the southern Mediterranean. Different areas responded differently at different times. As MacCulloch noted, whatever reasons you attribute for this sort of thing, “there is hard evidence for the contrary”.

Continuing:

Another important symptom of a north-south difference has been noted in research into the many books published to provide clergy with models for sermons about penitence. These books sold well throughout Europe in the fifteenth century, because the faithful particularly demanded sermons during the penitential season of Lent, and they expected their clergy to use them properly at that time. However, different books sold well in northern and southern Europe, and they contrast in emphasis in what they say about penance. In the north, the preacher throws the spotlight on the penitents themselves, on the continual need for penance in their everyday lives and on the importance of true contrition and satisfaction when they come to confession; the priest in confession is cast in the role of judge, assessing the sincerity of all this busy work. In the south, the sermons pay more attention to the role of the priest, who is seen as doctor or mediator of grace in absolution of sin; the preacher is not so concerned to urge the layperson on to activity.

The significance of this contrast is that the Purgatory-centered faith of the north encouraged an attitude to salvation in which the sinner piled up reparations for sin; action was added to action in order to merit years off Purgatory. It was possible to do something about one’s salvation – this was precisely the doctrine which Martin Luther was to make his particular target after 1517. So the difference between attitudes to salvation in northern and southern Europe may explain why Luther’s first attack on some of the more outrageous outcrops of the soul-prayer industry had so much more effect in the north than in the south. (pgs 13-15).

What accounted for this north-south difference? It was there, to be sure; what caused it was something less-sure.

Even within northern Europe, devotional life was far from uniform; different areas revealed different intensities of emotional and devotional investment in the system. Ralph Houlbrooke has examined hundreds of late medieval English wills and found that a majority of will-makers in Norfolk left money to the gilds or confraternities which sustained prayers and Masses for the dead; by contrast, far fewere did so in Buckinghamshire or Berkshire (where concentrations of Lollard sympathizers may quietly have induced a mood of local skepticism about the whole Purgatory industry). It is also possible that some people may have felt a real weariness about the old system in northern Europe and its labour-intensive devotion, and were ready to hear a message which involved reform of the system. Various English local studies in areas as widely separated as York, Salisbury and East Anglia (Norfolk and Suffolk) have found signs of a decline in the numbers of gilds in the 1510s and 1520s, and in East Anglia, possibly the most intense area of traditional practice in England, most major church-building projects seem to have been over by the 1500s.

We should not underestimate the European laypeople. They were perfectly capable of thinking for themselves, particularly about death, a religious theme in which everyone had an investment and about which everyone was likely to have an opinion. There is no need to invoke the idea of systematic pagan survival to account for this: Europe’s mass Christianization had been a steady if piecemeal process from the sixth century through to the fourteenth. Outside of the extreme of Europe and Lithuania, where officially supported non-Christian religion had come to an end only in 1386, the most judicious recent survey of folk belief and devotional customs suggests that its pre-Christian content is very fragmentary: the most widespread and persistent practices in northern Europe, like the lighting of fires with rowan branches on May Day, had no perceptible connection with beliefs about the afterlife. Ordinary people simply drew their own conclusions about the world of the dead … religion as practiced even by the self-consciously orthodox was not necessarily the same religion that was officially recommended (Diarmaid MacCulloch, “The Reformation: A History”, New York, NY: Penguin Books, ©2004, pgs 13-16).

It was this lay-and-clergy interaction which, however, led to some codifications (we might say “development”) of “precise doctrine”, a topic that I’ll turn to next time, Lord willing.