Leo X and the Indulgence
On March 15, 1517, Pope Leo X issued the most famous of all indulgences. The beginning of the Reformation under the pontificate of the man who had gathered in Rome all the spiritual fruits and foundations of the Renaissance seems painful, yet natural and timely. Leo, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, was now head of the Medici family, which had begun and spread the Renaissance in Florence. Leo was a scholar, an ambitious poet, kind and open-handed, and a lover of the literature of ancient Greece and Rome and of the fine arts. In a corrupt environment he had good morals, and with his cheerful temper he was an example of gaiety and liveliness to the people of a city that had only recently left behind the distress and poverty of the previous century. All his faults, except superficiality, were minor. Leo did not separate the interests of his family much from those of the Church, and squandered the savings of his court on poets and on wars of doubtful worth. He was patient and indulgent, so that he enjoyed reading Erasmus's Praise of Folly, with its satire on church leaders, and throughout his pontificate, except in a few cases, he did not break the unwritten agreement by which the Church of the Renaissance gave philosophers, poets and scholars, who usually spoke in Latin, considerable freedom to share their ideas with the educated minority without shaking the fixed and unchanging beliefs of the common people.
Leo, who came from a rich banking family and was used to lavish giving, did not spare his own wealth, especially for others. He inherited from Julius II the papal treasury with its abundant reserve and emptied it before his death. Perhaps he was not much concerned to finish the great church begun by Julius, but he could not give up building a new St. Peter's to replace the old basilica, which was falling into ruin. A huge sum had been spent on the new church, and it would have been a disgrace for the Church to leave this great work unfinished. It seems that to raise the enormous cost of the new building he put the indulgence of 1517 on sale, with some reluctance.
Bargains With Princes
The rulers of England, Germany, France and Spain, seeing their national wealth flowing to Rome as the price of indulgences, raised their voices in protest. Leo showed flexibility before powerful rulers: he allowed Henry VIII to take a quarter of the money collected for himself; to win the consent of Charles I (who soon afterward took the imperial throne as Charles V) to the sale of indulgences in Spain he lent him 175,000 ducats; and he made an agreement with Francis I under which the French king might keep part of the Church's revenue in France. Germany, having no strong ruler to bargain with the pope, received less indulgence. Even so, the pope assigned the small sum of 3,000 florins to the emperor Maximilian and allowed the Fugger family to take from the indulgence income the 20,000 florins they had lent Albrecht of Brandenburg so that he could, by paying it to the pope, confirm his rank as archbishop of Mainz.
Unfortunately that see had lost its archbishop three times in ten years (1504–14) and had paid a large sum to the pope to confirm the first two archbishops, and the third archbishop, Albrecht, to spare the city from paying such a sum a third time, had been forced to borrow. The pope allowed the young archbishop to sell indulgences not only in Mainz but also in Magdeburg and Halberstadt. With each of Albrecht's preachers went an agent of the Fugger house who supervised their receipts and expenses and held one of the keys of the strongbox in which the money collected was kept.
Tetzel the Preacher
Albrecht's chief agent was Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar, with long experience and reputation in raising money. Since 1500 his main work had been selling indulgences. He usually had the support of the local clergy on his missions. When he came to a town, clergy, officials and simple-minded Christians went out in long processions to meet him with candles, banners and velvet or gold cushions bearing the pope's decree of indulgence, singing, while at the same moment the sound of organs and church bells filled the town. With such an imposing ceremony Tetzel eloquently proclaimed the pope's general indulgence to those who repented of their sins and paid, according to their means, a sum toward the cost of the new St. Peter's. He said in substance: may our Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on you and, through the merits of his suffering, forgive you; and by the authority given me by God, his blessed apostles Peter and Paul, and the holy pope in these regions, I absolve you from all church sentences however imposed, and from all your sins, disobedience and excesses, however grave, even from those whose pardon is reserved to the pope; I release you from the punishment of your sins in purgatory, and restore to you the purity and innocence you had at baptism, so that when you leave the world the gates of punishment will be closed to you and the gates of paradise opened; and if death does not come now, this grace will remain in force until your death. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. (The formula is given in the book in full and is abridged here.)
This skillful business was consistent among Christians with the official doctrine of the Church of the time on the sale of indulgences to the faithful. Even if Tetzel waived confession for a believer who wished to devote the indulgence to the soul of one dead in purgatory, he still had not departed from the very text of his archbishop's instructions. A Catholic historian writes that when Tetzel preached that payment was necessary, without expectation of contrition and confession, for the release of souls of the dead, as a Christian doctrine, he thought he was carrying out the mission the Church had entrusted to him. Following the view common in his age, he also taught that buying an indulgence would free every soul, without exception, from the punishment of sin. On such an assumption Tetzel's teaching in practice expressed the famous saying that as soon as the coin rings in the box, the soul springs from purgatory. The papal bull in no way sanctioned this. It was an understanding that grew out of an important theory of medieval scholasticism, not out of the teaching of the Church.
Myconius, a Franciscan friar who seems to have borne the Dominicans a grudge, reported Tetzel's actions in 1517 in these words: what this misguided monk says and preaches is unbelievable. By selling sealed letters he promises people that even sins they will commit in the future will be forgiven. According to him the pope's power is greater than that of all the apostles, cherubim, saints and even the Virgin Mary, since all of them are subject to Christ, but the pope is equal to Christ himself. This is probably exaggerated, but such a description by an eyewitness testifies to the disgust Tetzel's words aroused. A similar rumor, doubtfully attributed to Luther, claims that Tetzel said something outrageous about the Mother of God, which would be forgiven too by the purchase of an indulgence; it shows the same hostility toward his words. (The book's wording of this rumor is omitted here.) Tetzel obtained certificates from civil and church authorities that they had never heard such a story. Tetzel was a skilled salesman, but not a man who completely trampled his conscience.
Frederick the Wise and the Wittenberg Relics
If Tetzel had not entered the territory of Frederick the Wise, elector of Saxony, his name would not have survived in history. Frederick was a chaste and prudent ruler and had no doctrinal objection to the sale of indulgences. He had gathered 19,000 relics of saints in his castle church at Wittenberg and, to honor these relics, and then to raise the cost of building a bridge over the river at Torgau, he put on sale indulgences signed by the pope and appointed Tetzel to point out to the people the benefits of these indulgences. Yet he refused to hand over to Pope Alexander VI the money collected from the sale of indulgences for an all-out war against the Turks (1501) and put off payment until the war against the Turks should come to the stage of action; and when the war did not come, Frederick the Wise gave the money to the University of Wittenberg.
At that time Frederick, unwilling to let Saxon coin leave the country, and perhaps because of Tetzel's exaggerations, forbade the preaching of the indulgence of 1517 in his land. But Tetzel came so near the borders of Saxony that the people of Wittenberg crossed the border to buy indulgences from him. Several buyers brought these "papal letters" to Martin Luther, professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg, to confirm their value. Luther refused to confirm the value of the pope's indulgence. Tetzel learned of this refusal and denounced Luther, and so Luther's name remained in history.
The Ninety-Five Theses
Tetzel had misjudged the combativeness and stubbornness of this professor of theology. Luther at once drew up his questions, in ninety-five articles, under the title Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, in Latin. Luther himself did not consider its contents heretical, and truly they cannot be considered heretical. Luther was still a faithful, firmly rooted Catholic and had no intention of fighting the Catholic Church. By it he wished to expose the exaggerated claims of indulgences and the abuses of their sellers. He saw that the sale of indulgences had driven out of hearts the repentance that is required for forgiveness of sins, and had put sin on the market like a cheap commodity, in dealings with traveling merchants. Martin still did not deny the pope's spiritual authority to pardon human sin, and held that he could release those who had repented of their sin from punishments the Church had imposed on them in this world. But in his view the pope's power to free souls from purgatory, or to reduce the punishment of sinners, went no further than interceding for them with God by his prayers (Theses 20 to 22). Moreover Luther argued that all Christians potentially share in the blessings Christ and the saints provided, even if the pope does not confer these blessings on them by granting indulgences.
He did not hold the pope responsible for the excesses and exaggerations of the preachers and sellers of indulgences, but remarked slyly that this unrestrained preaching about indulgences has destroyed respect for the pope, even among intelligent people who constantly hear the common people ask why the pope, if he forgives some people for the sake of building a church, does not out of love and compassion free other souls from torment (Theses 81 and 82). At noon on October 31, 1517, Luther posted the text of his theses on the main door of the chapel of Frederick's castle at Wittenberg.
On the first of November each year, All Saints' Day, Frederick put the relics of the saints on display in this chapel, and a great crowd came to the church on that day. The public posting of theses, which the author arranged in defense of his views, was an old tradition of the medieval universities; and the door Luther chose for posting his treatise was usually a kind of university notice board. Luther attached to his text a polite invitation in this sense: out of love for our religion and faith and desire to make clear its meaning, we shall discuss the following propositions in a gathering held at the University of Wittenberg under the presidency of the Reverend Father Martin Luther, master of arts and theology; those who cannot be present at this debate are asked to send their opinions in writing.
So that all the people might understand his views, Luther translated the text into German and distributed it among them. In addition, with admirable boldness and courage, he sent a copy of it to Albrecht, archbishop of Mainz. In this way the Reformation began, with courtesy and piety, and without any previous plan.