Arun Michael

The Economy of Salvation: Indulgences in Medieval Europe

Crucially, medieval theologians distinguished between the guilt of sin (culpa) and the temporal punishment due for sin (poena). Confession and absolution, in this framework, removed guilt and the threat of eternal damnation, but the debt of temporal punishment remained, to be paid either in this life through penitential acts or in the next through the sufferings of purgatory. It was precisely this residual temporal punishment that the indulgence addressed. An indulgence did not forgive sin itself. Rather, it remitted, wholly or in part, the temporal punishment that remained after guilt had already been absolved through confession. The doctrinal machinery that made this remission possible was the concept of the "treasury of merit," systematized most fully by theologians such as Alexander of Hales and later Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. According to this doctrine, the merits of Christ and the saints, being infinite and superabundant, formed a spiritual treasury upon which the Church, through the authority of the pope as Christ's vicar, could draw.