Selling the Afterlife

Words to Know

Purgatory — in Catholic teaching, a place of cleansing after death before heaven.

Indulgence — an official grant cancelling the punishment still owed for sins already forgiven. Often obtained by a payment.

Treasury of merit — the idea that the church holds a store of surplus goodness, built up by me and the saints, which the pope can draw on.

Schism — a formal split, with two sides each saying the other is not the real church.

First, consider a very human idea.

By the twelfth century most Christians in the west believed in a waiting place after death called purgatory. It was not hell. It was a place where you were cleaned up before you were let in.

I want to be gentle here, because the idea came from love. People could not bear to think their ordinary mother, who was not a saint and was not a monster, had nowhere to go. Purgatory gave her somewhere.

But your skeptic is already asking where it comes from, so let me answer fairly.

It is not stated in the New Testament. Nobody serious claims it is. The case for it rested on 2 Maccabees 12:44–45, where money is sent for a sin offering on behalf of soldiers already dead, and that book is not in your Bible if you are a Protestant. It rested on one clause of Paul, saved, but only as through fire (1 Corinthians 3:15). And it rested on an honest instinct: most people are not saints and not monsters, and a system with only two destinations has nowhere to put almost everybody.

The noun purgatory, a place rather than a process, comes into use only in the later twelfth century. It was formally defined at Lyon in 1274 and again at Florence in 1439. ¹

Go deeperAugustine, Gregory, and a circular argument

The Reformers themselves removed the strongest text for it. 2 Maccabees is in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles, not Protestant ones, because the Reformers moved it out of the canon. The very people who rejected purgatory had already taken the strongest evidence for it out of their own Bible, which tells you how tightly those two decisions were bound together.

The other passage, 1 Corinthians 3:15, comes from a discussion about builders and building materials. It is one clause doing a great deal of theological work on its own.

Long before anyone called it purgatory, early writers felt around the edges of the idea. Augustine wondered, carefully, whether some cleansing fire might exist, and said plainly that he was not sure. Gregory the Great, around the year 600, told stories about it.

This lesson is not about the doctrine. Watch what gets built on top of it.

A waiting place can have its waiting shortened.

And once it can be shortened, somebody has to decide by how much — and that somebody is standing in a building you can walk into, with a list of what it costs.

Here is how the machine was built.

• 1300: Pope Boniface VIII declares a jubilee, a year of full pardon for pilgrims to Rome. A chronicler who was there saw two clergymen at an altar gathering in the money with rakes. ²
• 1343: Pope Clement VI gives official shape to the treasury of merit, and in the same document cuts the wait between jubilees from a hundred years to fifty. ^{3 4}
• 1454–55: Among the earliest things printed on the new printing press are indulgences.
• 1476: Pope Sixtus IV, who built the Sistine Chapel, declares that these grants can be applied to souls already in purgatory. ⁵

“Treasury” is their word, not mine.

Go deeperWhat a jubilee required, and what came after

The jubilee itself had requirements: come to Rome, visit the tombs of the apostles on the required number of days, and receive the fullest pardon on offer. Boniface announced it would happen once every hundred years.

Clement VI's document had a name, Unigenitus Dei Filius, and its shortened interval was not the end of the shortening. The next jubilee was set for 1350, within the lifetime of people then living rather than something only their great-grandchildren would see, and later popes cut the gap again, and again.

Sixtus IV's extension to the dead had a name too, Salvator Noster, and in that first instance it was granted for contributions toward a church building project in France.

Now stop and see what has just been created.

Your mother is dead. You believe she is suffering. And there is now a payment you can make that shortens it.

That is not a religious doctrine. That is the most effective fundraising instrument ever devised, because there is no ceiling on what a person will pay to stop their mother from burning.

And since the lesson is called “Selling the Afterlife,” here is the sale.

A campaign needed a papal grant. It needed the local ruler’s permission, and he took a share. It had a preacher who came into town with bells and a procession and preached in the marketplace about the dead. It had a published price, scaled by rank, from a prince down to one coin from a labourer. It had a locked chest in the church. And you walked away with a printed letter with your name written into a blank, dated and sealed. It was a receipt. The money was split by written agreement before the first sermon: a share to Rome, a share to the local authority, and sometimes a share straight to a bank. ⁶

In Lesson 27 you will see one of these campaigns in full, with all the names attached.

Go deeperThe commissary, and the tiers below a prince

The papal grant itself named the territory, the purpose, the duration and the split of the money before anyone preached a word. A local ruler who refused simply barred the preachers at his border instead of taking a cut; in Lesson 27 you will watch a German prince do exactly that.

Selling it took a structure. A commissary was appointed, with sub-preachers working under him, and the whole party travelled with a retinue, entering a town with the papal bull itself carried on a cushion ahead of them.

The price list had more rungs than prince and labourer: something less from a knight, less again from a merchant, and for the truly destitute, prayer and fasting stood in for money.

Thousands of the printed receipts still survive in archives today. And this particular kind of campaign is the one that, a few decades on, broke the church in half.

Now here is what I did about this, once, in public.

I went into the Temple, the holiest building my people had, to the tables where men were changing money and selling animals. And I want to be fair: those men were providing a legitimate service. Pilgrims needed the right coin for the Temple tax and could not bring a lamb two hundred miles.

I turned the tables over anyway (Mark 11:15–17). I did not say they were charging too much. I said this house was meant to be a house of prayer for all the nations, and they had made it a den of robbers.

The objection was not the exchange rate. The objection was that access to God had acquired a counter, a queue, and a fee — and that the people furthest from the center were the ones who paid it.

That is the whole of my position on indulgences, and it is eight hundred years older than they are.

Meanwhile, look at who was running it.

In 1302 Boniface VIII wrote in Unam Sanctam that every human being must be subject to the pope to be saved. The next year the men of Philip IV of France broke into his residence at Anagni and seized him, and he died about a month later. Two years after that a Frenchman was elected pope, and from 1309 to 1377 the popes lived in France, at Avignon. There they built the largest Gothic building in Europe and the most efficient revenue-collecting organization on the continent, charging for appointments, confirmations, dispensations and documents. The poet Petrarch, who lived there, called it the Babylon of the west. ⁷

Then, from 1378 to 1417, there were two popes at once, each excommunicating the other, and after 1409 briefly three. ⁸ Each kingdom picked the pope its foreign policy required. France took the Avignon pope. England took the Roman one.

Not one of those decisions was made on a theological question. They were made on maps.

Now ask why the church needed indulgence money so badly in exactly these years. A court built on the scale of a kingdom had to be run two and three times over, by rival claimants with no other way to raise money than to sell what only a pope could sell. The doctrine and the deficit are the same story.

I said: call no man on earth your father, because you have one Father (Matthew 23:8–10). I did not build a chain of command that could split into three.

Go deeperHow the schism actually started

The fight with Philip IV was over whether a king could tax the clergy at all; Unam Sanctam was Boniface's answer, and it is the highest claim any pope ever put in writing. In September 1303 the king's agent and a Roman noble family rode into Anagni with armed men and seized him; he was freed a few days later and died about a month after that.

Rome itself was part of why the next pope never went there. It was a dangerous, faction-ridden city where papal authority was fought over in the streets, while France was safe and French cardinals now made up the majority of the electors. The palace the popes built at Avignon went up from the 1330s, and paying for it and its enormous staff meant taking the first year's income of every senior church post that was filled, a new system nobody had run so thoroughly before.

The way back to Rome, and the way the schism actually began, both have names attached. In 1377 the pope finally returned, pushed in part by a Dominican woman from Siena named Catherine, who travelled to Avignon and told him to his face to go home. He went, and died the following spring. A Roman crowd then surrounded the cardinals' conclave demanding an Italian, and they elected one, Urban VI, who proved so violent and abusive in office that the same cardinals who had chosen him withdrew from Rome months later, declared their own election invalid because it had been made under fear, and elected a second pope, who went to Avignon.

The third pope had a cause too. In 1409 a council at Pisa tried to end the split by deposing both men and electing a replacement. Neither of the first two accepted being deposed, and the church simply had three claimants instead of two.

France was not alone in choosing sides by politics. Scotland, at war with England, backed the Avignon pope for that reason alone. The empire sided with Rome, and Portugal switched depending on which way Castile was leaning.

Here are the men who said so.

John Wycliffe, an Oxford scholar, argued that the church should hold no property at all and that ordinary people should read the Bible in their own language. He was not burned, because John of Gaunt, the richest man in England, protected him. A great lord enjoyed a scholar proving that the church should own nothing. Wycliffe was silenced and died in his bed in 1384.

His followers, the Lollards, had no duke. From 1401 English law provided for burning them alive, and it was used. And in 1428, on the pope’s order, church officials dug up Wycliffe’s bones and burned them and threw the ashes in a river. ^{9 10} That denied him consecrated ground and denied his followers a shrine. It was not fury. It was administration.

Go deeperThe 1409 ban on English Bibles

Wycliffe's actual objections ran wider than the two the lesson names. He also argued that a person's authority over others depends on living rightly rather than on holding office, and that the pope's own claims could not be supported from scripture.

His protector, John of Gaunt, held the title Duke of Lancaster and was the effective ruler of England for a period, which is worth knowing: if the church should hold no property, somebody else may hold it instead.

Wycliffe was eventually moved out of Oxford as well as silenced, and he died of a stroke in his own parish at Lutterworth.

In 1409, years before anyone touched his bones, the Archbishop of Canterbury banned translating the Bible into English or even reading such a translation without a bishop's licence. Owning the wrong book in English had become evidence against you.

And before the burning there was a trial of sorts: a church council condemned him thirty-one years after his death, and only thirteen years after that was he exhumed.

There was a third reason for it besides denying him ground and denying his followers a shrine. He had escaped the court by dying, and digging him up said: you did not escape. There was no line beyond which the jurisdiction stopped.

Jan Hus preached in Czech in Prague and said much the same things. He was invited to a church council at Constance to explain himself, under a written promise of safe travel from the emperor Sigismund himself. They arrested him on arrival and burned him on 6 July 1415. ¹¹ The council ruled that a promise made to a heretic did not bind. Sigismund let it happen, because he needed those churchmen to end the three-pope schism.

I said: let your yes be yes and your no be no (Matthew 5:37).

And that council did end the schism. In the same sessions, it condemned a dead Englishman and burned a live Czech, both of whom had complained about the corruption it met to fix. The reform council reformed by killing the reformers.

Go deeperWhat Hus actually preached, and who else burned

Hus preached at a chapel where the sermons were given in Czech rather than Latin, specifically so ordinary people could follow them. What he actually preached went well beyond a general likeness to Wycliffe: that a priest living in open sin had no business exercising his office, that buying and selling church posts was a crime, that the church is the body of those God has chosen rather than a list of officeholders, that no pope is its head, and, the belief his followers went to war over, that ordinary lay people should receive the cup at communion, not just the bread.

He was held for months in a cell before he was tried and burned. His ashes went into the Rhine, for the same reason Wycliffe's had gone into a river. The next year the council burned his friend Jerome of Prague as well.

The council itself sat at Constance from 1414 to 1418, called to end the schism, and it did: it removed all three claimants and elected one man in their place.

And then Bohemia did something nobody else in this unit manages. Hus’s countrymen rose, and between 1420 and 1431 the pope and the emperor sent five crusades against them. Under a blind commander named Jan Žižka, they won all five, and in 1436 a church council gave them the thing they had gone to war for. ¹² They won because they were concentrated, their nobility joined them, and they were better at war. Those are not spiritual reasons. But the record is the record.

Go deeperŽižka's wagons, and the crusade that fled

Their commander, Jan Žižka, was one-eyed and then fully blind by the time he led them, and he won with an invention: farm wagons chained together into fortified squares, guns mounted on them, peasants behind the guns beating armoured knights who had never faced anything like it.

By the fifth crusade, in 1431, the invading army is reported to have broken and fled before the fighting even started.

This is the one place in this whole unit where the people who read my words right were not simply crushed. It is worth knowing that it was possible.

And then came the thing nobody planned.

Around 1450, in the German town of Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg worked out how to print with movable metal type. A scribe spent most of a year on one Bible. Gutenberg’s shop produced something like a hundred and eighty at once, and by 1500 there were presses in more than two hundred European towns. ^{13 14}

But the Bible was not the first thing off that press. In 1454 and 1455, before his Bible was finished, Gutenberg printed indulgences, with a blank left for the buyer’s name.

The machine that would eventually put the text into everybody’s hands was paying its way, at the start, by mass-producing the receipts.

And Gutenberg did not keep it. In 1455 the man who had lent him the money, Johann Fust, sued him and took the workshop and the type.

Even the press had a lender standing behind it.

Hold all of that. It comes back when the church splits.

Go deeperWhat Gutenberg's invention actually was

Movable type by itself was not new; people had already printed from carved wooden blocks. Gutenberg's invention was a whole system with four parts working together: a hand mould that could cast thousands of identical metal letters quickly, reusably and to an exact height; a metal alloy that melted low enough to cast but stayed hard enough to strike; an oily ink that would stick to metal instead of beading off it; and a press adapted from the kind used to squeeze grapes and paper. The mould was the heart of it: one punch cut one matrix, and one matrix could cast letters all day long.

The indulgence sheets he printed in 1454 and 1455 were for a specific fundraising campaign, not a general trial run.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Mark 11:15–17 — the one time I am recorded using physical force.

Then look up: Matthew 10:8 — freely you have received, freely give. Then consider a priced grant of forgiveness with a published rate for each rank of society.

For the history:

• 2 Maccabees 12:44–45. If you have a Protestant Bible, find a Catholic one or look it up online.
• Unigenitus Dei Filius, Clement VI, 1343 — the treasury of merit and the shorter jubilee, in one document.
• Unam Sanctam, Boniface VIII, 1302. One page. Read the last sentence.
• The decrees of the Council of Constance, 1414–18. Note what it achieved and what it burned.
• A Gutenberg indulgence, 1454–55. Several libraries have digitized one.

The Short Version

• Purgatory rests on 2 Maccabees, one clause of Paul, and an honest instinct.
• Clement VI defined the treasury of merit in 1343; Sixtus IV extended pardons to the dead in 1476.
• The sale had a papal grant, a ruler’s cut, a price list by rank and a printed receipt.
• From Avignon to three rival popes, the church needed money, and the selling sped up.
• Wycliffe died in bed and Hus was burned; only Bohemia fought back and won.

Think About It

1. Why is a payment for a dead relative harder to refuse than a payment for yourself?
2. Wycliffe had a duke and died in bed. Hus had a promise and was burned. What does the difference actually measure?