sorrow of the heart, and must include the purpose henceforth to avoid sin; "satisfaction" must be made by works prescribed by the priest who heard confession. In the administration of the Sacrament, however, the absolution preceded "satisfaction" instead of following it, as it had done in the discipline of the early Church.[1] To justify this apparent inconsistency, the Doctors further distinguished between the "guilt" and the "penalty" of sin.[2] Sins were classified as "mortal" and "venial."[3] Mortal sins for which the offender had not received absolution were punished eternally, while venial sins were those which merited only some smaller penalty; but when a mortal sin was confessed and absolution granted, the guilt of the sin was done away, and with it the eternal penalty. And yet the absolution did not open the gate of heaven, though it closed the door of hell; the eternal penalty was not to be exacted, but there was a temporal penalty to be paid. The "satisfaction" was the temporal penalty, and if satisfaction was in arrears at death, the arrearage must be paid in purgatory, a place of punishment for mortal sins confessed and repented, but "unsatisfied," and for venial sins, which were not serious enough to bring eternal condemnation. The penalties of purgatory were "temporal," viz., they stopped somewhere this side of eternity, and their duration could be measured in days and years, though the number of the years might mount high into the thousands and tens of thousands.
It was at this point that the practice of indulgences united with the theory of the Sacrament of Penance. The indulgences had to do with the "satisfaction."[4] They might be "partial," remitting only a portion of the penalties, measured by days or years of purgatory; or they might be "plenary," remitting all penalties due in this world or the next. In theory, however, no indulgence could remit the guilt or the eternal penalty of sin,[5] and the purchaser of an indulgence was not only expected to confess and be absolved, but he was also supposed to be corde contritus, i. e., "truly penitent."[6] A rigid insistence on the fulfilment of these conditions
- ↑ See Thesis 12.
- ↑ See Theses 4–6, Note 2.
- ↑ For Luther's opinion of this distinction, see the Discourse Concerning Confession elsewhere in the present volume.
- ↑ "Not even the poorest part of penance which is called 'satisfaction,' but the remission of that poorest part of penance." Letter to Staupitz, below.
- ↑ There is ample proof that in practice the indulgences were preached as sufficient to secure to the purchaser the entire remission of sin, and the form a culpa et poena was officially employed in many cases (Cf. Brieger, Das Wesen des Ablasses am Ausgang des MA. and PRE3 IX. 83 ff., and Lea, History of Confession, etc., III, 54 ff.). "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," Lindsay, History of the Reformation, I, 226.
- ↑ It is on the basis of this theory that Roman Catholic writers on indulgences declare them to be "extra-sacramental," i. e., outside the Sacrament of Penance. So, e. g., Kent, in The Catholic Encyclopedia, Art. Indulgence.
