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Practices of Satisfaction, 1215–1700

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

John Bossy
John Bossy*
Affiliation:
University of York
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Extract

The title, and subject, of this piece is ‘satisfaction’, though its main locus in time is the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I chose the subject because it fitted in with our president’s preoccupations, and because it interested me; it turns out, to my surprise, to jog our elbow about some contemporary matters, as I guess he wished.

We had better start with the word, where there are two distinctions to be considered. The obvious one is between making up for, paying for, making amends, making reparation; and contentment, gratified desire, giving satisfaction, what you can’t get none of. I shall say that the first is the strong meaning, the second the weak one. The first is always other-directed, and entails an offence previously committed; the second is principally self-directed. ‘To content’ is a classical meaning of satisfacere, but it means to content someone else: to do something (facere), as against receiving something. A short history of the word in Latin and English records that the strong meaning emerged into late Latin as a description of church penance, and so passed into English in the fourteenth century. Its heyday was from then until the eighteenth. It referred to ecclesiastical penance (interrupted by the Reformation), the theology of the Redemption (encouraged by the Reformation), and in general public usage to the meeting of any kind of obligation, payment, atonement or compensation. From the eighteenth century it passed from public use, superseded by the weak meaning except in technical or professional fields. One professional usage, to which The Oxford English Dictionary gives a good deal of attention, is ‘to satisfy the examiners’: they think it is a case of ‘content’; may it be a case of ‘avert wrath’?

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 40: Retribution, Repentance, and Reconciliation , 2004 , pp. 106 - 118
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2004

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References

1 The Oxford English Dictionary, 2 vols (Compact edn, Oxford, 1971)Google Scholar, s.v. ‘satisfaction’, ‘satisfy’, etc. [hereafter OED]; An Elementary Latin Dictionary, ed. C. T. Lewis (Oxford, 1947), s.v. ‘satisfacio’, ‘satisfactio’; A. Rey et al., eds, Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, 2 vols (Paris, 1992), s.v. ‘satisfaire’, ‘satisfaction’.

2 Anselm, , Cur Deus Homo, PL 158, 359–431, 393–3 and 403–4 Google Scholar; Galtier, P., ‘Satisfaction’, in Vacant, A. and Mangenot, E., eds, Dictionnaire de theologie catholique XIV (1939), 1129–1210 Google Scholar, col. 113 s.

3 Lea, Henry Charles, A History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church, 3 vols (Philadelphia, PA, 1896), 2: 107, 169–231 Google Scholar; Tender, Thomas N., Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton, NJ, 1977), 318–40 Google Scholar; the text ofOmnis utriusque sexus in Enchiridion definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum, ed. Henricus Denzinger and Adolfus Schönmetzer (Freiburg, 1976), 264. Poschmann, B., Penance and the Anointing of the Sick (London, 1964)Google Scholar, and Vogel, Cyrille, Le Pécheur et la pénitence au Moyen Âge (Paris, 1969)Google Scholar supply a theological and historical perspective.

4 Galtier, , ‘Satisfaction’, 1200, 1205 Google Scholar.

5 Bossy, John, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London, 1975), 271 Google Scholar; Aveling, H., The Catholic Recusants of the West Riding of Yorkshire, 1558–1790 Google Scholar, Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society (Leeds, 1963), 25 r. This was the penance of a convert.

6 Lea, Auricular Confession, vol. 3; Poschmann, Penance, 210ff. The widely held opinion (as by Cajetan, in Lea, 3: 9) that indulgences only remit ‘enjoined penance’ seems to mean that they only apply to earthly penance; but for the complications see Tender, Sin and Confession, 328f.

7 Lea, Auricular Confession, 2: 229; Galtier, ‘Satisfaction’, 1208; Cajetani, T. de Vio, De peccatis summula (Paris, 1530), fols 260–2 Google Scholar; Evennett, H. Outram, The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation (Cambridge, 1968), 20–42 Google Scholar.

8 Luther’s Works, ed. Pelikan, Jaroslav and Lehmann, H. T., 55 vols (Saint Louis, MO, and Philadelphia, PA, 1958–1986), 48: 64–70 Google Scholar (Luther to Staupitz, 30-V-1518); 36: 86 (The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, 1520). Luther ignored medicinal satisfaction in the Ninety-Five Theses, but these were defended by the Dominican indulgence-seller Johan Tetzel in his counter-theses, which claim that indulgences do not remit them: Siggins, Ian D. Kingston, Luther (Edinburgh, 1972), 60–1 Google Scholar. Luther’s doctrine of confession is expounded by Tentler, Sin and Confession, 349–63.

9 Luther’s Works, 34: 336–7 (Preface to Latin Writings, 1545)Google Scholar; Watson, P. S., Let God be God! An Interpretation of the Theology of Martin Luther (Philadelphia, PA, 1970), 119–20 Google Scholar; Prayer Books of Edward VI, in Liturgies of the Western Church, ed. Bard Thompson (New York, 1962), 257, 280.

10 Luther’s Works, 35:25–33 (Ninety-Five Theses); 48:68 (Luther to Staupitz, 30-v-1518). Sermons on Indulgences, 1516 and 1517, in Siggins, Luther, 55ff. and Kidd, B.J., Documents Illustrative of the Continental Reformation (Oxford, 1911, repr. 1967), 29 Google Scholar; Luther’s Works, xlviii, 68. Thesis 40 seems to be taken from Augustine: Galtier, ‘Satisfaction’, 1145. Tyndale quoted by Thomas More, The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, in The Complete Works of St Thomas More, ed. Louis L. Martz et al, 15 vols (New Haven, CT, and London, 1963–97), 8.1: 90.

11 Lea, Auricular Confession, 2: 186.

12 More, Confutation, 66–90; Enchiridion symbolorum, 397–9, and the comment in Jedin, Hubert, Geschichte des Konzils von Trient, 4 vols (Freiburg-im-Breisgau, 1970), 3: 327, 330 Google Scholar; Galtier, , ‘Satisfaction’, 1206 Google Scholar; On the confessional-box, see my article, The Social History of Confession in the Age of the Reformation’, TRHS ser. 5, 15 (1975), 29–33.

13 Ginzburg, Carlo, The Cheese and the Worms: the Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, transl. John, and Tedeschi, Anne (London, 1980), 10 Google Scholar; Galtier, , ‘Satisfaction’, 1205 Google Scholar; Bouchard, Gerard, Le Village immobile: Sennely-en-Sologne au XVEIe siècle (Paris, 1972), 339 Google Scholar.

14 Billacois, François, Le Duel dans la société française des XVIe-XVIIe siècles: essai de psychosociologie historique (Paris, 1986)Google Scholar; Stone, Lawrence, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford, 1965), 242–50 Google Scholar.

15 Billacois, Le Duel, 70–81, 185.

16 Ibid., 137–89 and 163 for François de Sales.

17 Stone, Crisis, 243ff; objections by Billacois, Le Duel, 397 and Stuart Carroll, The Peace in the Feud in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France’, Past and Present, no. 178 (2003), 74–115.

18 Billacois, Le Duel, 31ff., 175; cf. Bartlett, Robert, Trial by Fire and Water: the Medieval Judicial Ordeal (Oxford, 1986), 103–26, 118 and 123 Google Scholar.

19 Ibid., 182–5 and 56, n. 62, quoting from Robert Dallington; Carroll, The Peace in the Feud’, passim; Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, MS 2887, fols 10–15 for Rosny and Epernon.

20 Roberts, Michael, Gustavus Adolphus: a History of Sweden, 1611–1632, 2 vols (London, 1953–8), 2 Google Scholar: index s.v. satisfactio; The Thirty Years’ War, ed. Geoffrey Parker (London, 1984), 121–44, 156–61, 182ff, 186.

21 Roberts, Michael, ed., Sweden as a Great Power, 1611–1697 Google Scholar. Government, Society, Foreign Policy (London, 1968), 140ff.Google ScholarPubMed; idem, ‘The Political Objectives of Gustav Adolf in Germany, 1630–1632’, in his Essays in Swedish History (London, 1967), 82–110, 99.

22 Roberts, Sweden as a Great Power, 136, 139, 153; OED, s.v. ‘restitution’, no. 4.

23 Roberts, Gustavus Adolphus, 2: 423, 639–40, and Essays, 95; Roelofsen, C. G., ‘Grotius and International Politics in the Seventeenth Century’, in Bull, Hedley, Kingsbury, Benedict and Roberts, Adam, eds, Hugo Grotius and International Relations (Oxford, 1992), 95–131 CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Haggenmacher, Peter, ‘Grotius and Gentili. A Reassessment of Thomas E. Holland’s Inaugural Lecture’, ibid., 133–76, 146, n. 50 and 154, n. 77 Google Scholar.

24 Grotius, Hugo, Defensio fidei catholicae de satisfactione Christi adversus Faustum Socinum senensem (Leiden, 1617: Oxford, 1636> edn)Google Scholar, 120.1 have not seen the new edition and translation by E. Rabbie and H. Mulder (Assen, 1990).

25 Ibid., 138.

26 Ibid., 54.