Why Would Forgiveness Require Doing Something? The Debt Was Not the Guilt

The theology behind the practice separates two things that ordinary language runs together. The guilt of a sin, meaning the state of being at fault and cut off, was held to be removed by repentance and absolution. A further consequence, described as temporal punishment, was held to remain, on an analogy with damage that persists after an apology is accepted, since saying sorry for breaking something does not mend it. Works assigned after confession were understood as discharging that remainder. Whether the remainder exists at all became one of the sharpest points of division at the Reformation.

The works imposed changed enormously over time:

• •Public penance in the early church, lasting years and performed openly
• •Exclusion from communion until the period was completed
• •Private confession and assigned works, spreading from Irish practice
• •Fixed tariffs listed in handbooks, with a penalty for each named sin
• •Fasting, prayer, almsgiving and pilgrimage as the standard forms
• •Later, short prayers assigned in the confessional and performed at once

Irish and Anglo-Saxon manuals from the sixth century onwards list sins with a prescribed period of fasting for each, and they are extraordinary historical documents quite apart from their religious purpose. They record what people actually did, in detail that no other source of the period approaches, covering theft, violence, sexual behaviour, magic, drunkenness and a great deal of ordinary rural life. They also introduce the idea of commutation, allowing a long period to be exchanged for something more intense and shorter, or for a payment, or for somebody else to perform it, and that substitution is the door through which the later abuses entered.

The doctrine only makes sense alongside a belief about what happens to a debt left unpaid at death, and the two developed together. The answer given was that the remainder is discharged after death in an intermediate state, which was elaborated considerably from the twelfth century onwards and which gave the living a powerful reason to act on behalf of the dead. Endowments paying for prayers and masses, chantry chapels, and gifts to religious houses all follow from it, and they represent an enormous transfer of wealth across several centuries. Protestant rejection of the intermediate state removed the basis for all of that at a stroke.

The remission of this remaining debt, granted by the church and described as an indulgence, became attached to specific acts including donations to building projects, and by the early sixteenth century was being marketed aggressively, with preachers offering remission for the dead in exchange for payment. Martin Luther's objections in 1517 were directed at exactly that practice and at the theology behind it, and the resulting dispute produced the Reformation. Protestant churches rejected the underlying distinction, holding that forgiveness leaves nothing to be worked off. The Catholic church abolished the sale in 1567 while retaining the practice in reformed shape, and the language changed substantially again in the twentieth century.

Separating the guilt of a sin, removed by absolution, from a remaining debt to be discharged is what made assigned works necessary, and the forms ran from years of public exclusion to a short prayer said at once. Handbooks listing a fixed period for each named sin are unmatched evidence of ordinary life. Allowing that period to be exchanged for a payment is what led to 1517.