A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

The significance of this contrast is that the Purgatory-centred faith of the north encouraged an attitude to salvation in which the sinner, lay or clerical, piled up reparations for sin; action was added to action in order to merit years off Purgatory. It was possible to do something about one’s salvation: that was precisely the doctrine which Martin Luther was to make his particular target after 1517. So the difference between attitudes to salvation in northern and southern Europe may explain why Luther’s first attack on some of the more outrageous outcrops of the soul-prayer industry had so much more effect in the north than in the south. He was telling northern Europeans that some of the devotions which most deeply satisfied them, and convinced them that they were investing in an easier passage to salvation, were nothing but clerical confidence tricks. This message was of much less interest or resonance in the Mediterranean lands, which had not paid so much attention to the Purgatory industry.