Fallible Authors. Alastair Minnis

which are preached to the people and which they are exhorted to do. Bonaventure and Aquinas also address the exemplum of the mother’s white lie, and are equally dismissive. This is a very dangerous assertion to make, says Aquinas, for, as Augustine says, “if any error were discovered in Holy Writ, the authority of Holy Writ would perish”; by the same token, “if any error were to be found in the Church’s preaching, her doctrine would have no authority in settling questions of faith.”²²² For Bonaventure the suggestion that the Church engages in a sort of lying, and in activity which is inane, childish, and facetious, is highly demeaning of its activities.²²³

      That comment of Bonaventure’s forms part of his quaestio on the issue of whether indulgences really have the value with which they are credited in preaching.²²⁴ The pope (who has commanded such preaching) is certainly not given to lying, he assures us. Moreover, if a certain bishop is able to give indulgences of twenty or forty days, and the pope has more power than any bishop (in that he has the plenitude of power over and above all others), therefore it would seem that for him, so to speak, the sky is the limit. Bonaventure also engages in arithmetical reductio ad absurdum of a kind reminiscent of Albert’s. Given that in certain indulgences a third of the due repentance is involved, then if first one denarius is given and secondly another and thirdly a third, it would appear that a person who had committed a thousand sins would be completely freed for three halfpennies or denarii—which would not only be false but would be judged as ludicrous by all those of right mind. Furthermore, if a sinner who owes nine years has three years remitted, on the same reckoning those who owe thirty should have ten remitted: it would seem that sinfulness is treated as a commodity. Then again, is it fair that a person who lives near a church should get the same benefit as the person who lives a long way away, and expends considerable effort to visit it? And that a rich man, in paying his halfpenny, should get the same benefit as a poor woman, for whom that money means a lot more?

      Bonaventure responds with what “is said generally according to the doctors,” that in order for indulgences or relaxationes to be effective, there must be a twofold condition on the part of the giver and a twofold condition on the part of the receiver. The giver must have the appropriate power and a cause which is honest and reasonable. The receiver must have confessed with true contrition and have faith with true devotion, so that he is truly repentant and confident that the pastor’s indulgence will be valid for him. “Others say,” continues Bonaventure, that in absolute terms indulgences are worth what they are said to be, because their conferral is not adjudged a purchase but rather an exercise of the Church’s liberality, and this is equally allotted to all those who dispose themselves to receive it. A rich man, going to a tavern, receives the same wine as does a poor old woman (vetula paupercula), the price being the same for both. The argument is that indulgences should be understood in the same way. But this seems to be making “too great a market of indulgences” (magnum forum facere de indulgentiis), and results in their vilification rather than their praise. Bonaventure suggests that the person who actually gives the indulgence to the recipient must consider the cause for which the indulgence was issued; to the extent, more or less, that the recipient approaches near that cause, he can participate more or less in the indulgence. For example, in the case of the stations of Rome there are set indulgences instituted by the holy fathers, who were mindful of pilgrims who came from remote places. They did not estimate a person living near the church to be worthy of such grace; hence the locals are to receive a lesser indulgence. Bonaventure may not have been wholly comfortable with the idea that a given indulgence is not worth the same to everyone but must be calibrated with reference to what the recipient has done or has to do. For he declares that it is “not becoming” to teach this doctrine openly,²²⁵ because all the faithful should believe in their hearts that the gifts of the holy Spirit are given with equal value to all.

      Thomas Aquinas took issue with Bonaventure’s discussion. The argument that a man may “obtain remission in whole or in part” according as he approached near to “the cause for which the indulgence was granted” simply does not explain “the custom of the Church,” he declares, which assigns “now a greater, now a lesser indulgence, for the same cause.”²²⁶ For the pope may grant “now a year’s indulgence, now one of only forty days” to people visiting one and the same church on different occasions. The effective cause of the remission of poena, Aquinas continues, “is not the devotion, or toil, or gift of the recipient,” or indeed “the cause for which the indulgence was granted.” We cannot, therefore, estimate the quantity of remission by any of these but “solely by the merits of the Church—and these are superabundant.” In other words, the scope and scale of an indulgence depends not on man but on God, whose liberality is dispensed by His authorized representatives on earth. Hence “we do not have too great a market of the divine mercy”— a clear allusion to Bonaventure’s statement as quoted above. Aquinas sides rather with the views of certain “others”—among whom may be numbered William of Auvergne and Peter of Tarantasia²²⁷—who believed that “indulgences have precisely the efficacy claimed for them,” providing that he who grants them has the necessary authority, the recipient has charity, and there is a pious reason for the grant, involving “the honour of God and the profit of our neighbour.”²²⁸ Aquinas proceeds to argue that a person who lives near the church, along with its priest and clergy, gains the associated indulgence “as much as those who come perhaps a distance of a thousand days’ journey, because the remission . . . is proportion ate not to the toil, but to the merits which are applied.” His desire to celebrate the vast riches of the spiritual treasury, and the generous operation of the divine mercy, is evident.

      But, of course, caveats and conditions must be admitted. It is duly noted that sometimes a distinction may be expressed, as when the pope specifies that an indulgence of five years may be granted “to those who come from across the seas,” but only one of three years “to those who come from across the mountains.”²²⁹ Furthermore, Aquinas continues, when an indulgence is given in a general way to anyone who helps toward the building of a church, this must be understood as meaning “a help proportionate to the giver.” Consequently, “a poor man by giving one halfpenny (denarius) would gain the full indulgence,” but “not so a rich man, whom it would not become to give so little to so holy and profitable a work”—that difference is, as it were, assumed within the original grant of the indulgence, wholly in accord with the giver’s intention. In sum, the indulgence has the full value as set by the individual who makes it, and this may accommodate certain distinctions (as just illustrated) or changes (say, from one time period to another). Of himself the recipient does not have the power to maximize or minimize that value, to alter it in accordance with the degree of effort he may have put into attaining the indulgence—the point being that the merit involved comes not from him but from the spiritual treasury.

      Aquinas’s reference to the forty days’ limit on standard indulgences recalls a restriction which the Fourth Lateran Council had sought to impose. But there was an apparent loophole: if a man visits a church several times a day, does he not gain its forty-day indulgence on each and every occasion, thereby accumulating an extraordinary number of spiritual credits? It is all a matter of wording, explains Aquinas. If the indulgence is granted for a fixed term, as when it is said that “Whoever visits such and such a church until such and such a day, shall gain so much indulgence,” then the pardon can be gained only once. (Peter of la Palud disagreed—it can be gained once daily, he thought.)²³⁰ If, on the other hand, the indulgence is continuous—“as in the indulgence of forty days to be gained in the church of the Blessed Peter”—then “a person gains the indulgence as often as he visits the church”: quoties vadit aliquis, toties indulgentiam consequitur.²³¹ Clearly, living in Rome had enormous advantages. Little wonder that “Our Lord Jesus Christ” instructed St. Bridget of Sweden (d. 1373) to “go to Rome, where the streets are paved with gold and reddened with the blood of saints” and where there is “a shorter way” to heaven “because of the indulgences that the holy pontiffs have merited by their prayers.”²³²

      What, then, of St. Paul’s assertion that before Christ’s tribunal each one will receive what he has won, according to his works, whether good or evil (II Corinthians 5:10)? Or the psalmist’s statement that God repays to all according to their