Alongside of this view, according to which the pos- sessor of the po\ver of the keys officiates essentially as judge in foro ecclesiw, another is entertained, which finds its strongest exponent in Leo the Great, according to whom the priest is intercessor and mediator for the pen- itent before God. This particular view, in its successive developments, has exerted the greatest influence in ex- panding the priestly power of the keys. This position is assigned to the priest in all late penitential books. Its nature is clearly defined by Alcuin, who, from the analogy of Leviticus (v, 12), in which the sinner is ad- vised to seek the priest with his sacrifice, draws the con- clusion that Christian penitents also must bring their sacrifice of confession to God by way of the priest, in order that it may be pleasing to and secure the forgive- ness of the Lord {Adfratr. inprorinc. Gothorum, ep. 96). For this very reason he calls (in his De officiis divinis) the priest "sequester ac medius inter Deum et peccato- rem hominem ordinatus, pro peccatis intercessor." This sacertlotal intercession received a higher import in the 11th or 12th century by the De vera et falsa p)(enitentia, a work attributed, though incorrectly, to Augustine. It develops the following doctrines: 1. That the priest in confession stands in God's stead — his forgiveness is God's forgiveness ; for does not Christ say, " Whom j-e hold to be loosed and bound, but on whom ye practice the work of justice or of mercy?" (cap. xxv). 2. Gregory the Great had already laid down the dogma that by pen- ance (but not by absolution), sin, which m itself was ir- remissible, became remissible, i. e. became an expiable guilt by the personal activity of the penitent. This thought was modified in the work just alluded to, so that in confession, it is true, the sinner is not cleared be- fore God, but the committed offence is changed from a mortal to a venial sin (cap. xxv). 3. Such sins no longer incur eternal, but simply temporal punishment, and may be atoned for, cither in this world Ijy works of confession, or after death in purgatory, where the jiain to be endured fur them shall far exceed any torments which the martyrs ever suffered in tliis life. This thought was taken up by the Yictorinians, and from it was developed a complete system. Hugo of St. Victor regarded the priest as the visible medium which man, spellbound by his senses, needs in his approaches to God, and which God uses to pour upon the human heart his mercies ; yea, in virtue of this position he does not hesitate to refer the passage in Exodus xxii, 28 to the priests, and to call them gods (comp. lib. ii,/)c sacr. \-)t. xiv, cap. 1). And why should he not? Had not pope John VIII, in the year 878 (Epist. G6), already assumed for himself the power, in virtue of his authority from Peter, to bind and to loose, to absolve from all sius, those who had fallen in battle for the Church ? and had not bishop
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Jordanus, of Limoges, in 1031, at the council held in that city, developed the principle that Christ had intrusted to his Cliurch such a power, that slie may loose after death those whom in life she had bound? (Mansi, xix, 539; Gieseler, Ch. lligi. ii, 1, § 35, note K"). Hugo's principles quickly spread among his contemporaries. Cardinal Tul- leyn says that confession made to the priest means vir- tually (quasi) confession to God ; and Alexander III de- clares that what the priest learns in confession he does not learn as judge, but as God ("ut Deus," cap. 2, ap. Greg. De offic.judicis ordin. i, 31). Now if we behold in the priest an intermediate being between God and man, surrounded by a splendor before which the laj'man's eye is blinded, it is no more than reasonable to expect that his acts must gain in importance, and his position ap- proach nearer and nearer to the office of God's repre- sentative. Hugo beholds the sinner bound by a twofold bondage — by an internal and external, by hardness and by incurred damnation ; the former God loosens by con- trition, the latter by the assistance of the priest, as the instrument by which he works. Here also the resur- rection of Lazarus serves both as example and as proof (lib. ii, pt. xiv, cap. 8). His pupil, Richard of St.Victor, goes a step further in his tract De potesiate lif/tmdi e( solvendi. Loosing from guilt, the effects of which are manifest in imprisonment (impotency) and servitude (sin service), God alone performs, either directly, or indi- rectly by men, who need not necessarily be priests ; it is done even before confession, by contrition. The loosing from etei-nal punishment God performs by the priest, to whom, for this purpose, the power of the keys has been intrusted; he changes it (i. e. the punishment) into a transitory one, to be absolved either iqion earth or in purgatory. The loosing from tirinsitor// punishment is effected by the priest himself by changing it into an ex- ercise of penance, which is done by the imposition of a corresponding satisfaction.
If hitherto we find independently, side by side, two opinions, namely, that tlie administrator of the power of the keys either judges infuro ecclesim or as an interced- ing mediator, we need not wonder that the advance of doctrinal development soon effected a dialectical union of the two. Eichard of St. Victor evidently aimed at such a fusion ; the great scholastics of the 13th century accomplished it ; and Thomas Aquinas is to be especially regarded as the author of the doctrine defined by the Council of Trent. Alexander of Hales, in his Summn Theolori'ia (pt. iv, qu. 20, membr. iii, art. 2), opens with the sentence, " The power to bind and to loose really belongs only to God ; the priest can simply co-operate." But wherein shall this co-operation consist? Never would the priest take the liberty' to absolve any one did he not suppose him to be loosed by God. Alexander is the first writer who meets the alternative as to whether the priest is to be regarded as deprecator or as judge. He holds him to bo both in one person ; the former he is before God, the latter before the penitent. But the power to loose he can exercise only after God has loosed. He is to the sinner simply an interpreter of what God has already accomplished in him, or is doing in reply to priestly intercession. Alexander of Hales then proceeds to the question whether the priest can remit eternal pun- ishment. He replies (membr. ii, art. 2), that as eternal pnnislmient is infinite, and cannot be severed from the offence, the priest does not possess any power to remit it; only God, whose powers have no bounds, can do this. On the other hand, the power of the keys can extend to temporal (or finite) punishments, inasmuch as the priest is God's instituted arbitrator. He explains this in detail thus : God's mercy forgives so that it does not affect his justice. His justice would require a measure of punish- ment exceeding our powers of endurance ; therefore he has instituted, in his mercy, the priest as arbitrator, and given him authority to levy the divine punishment, and also, in virtue of Christ's sufferings, to remit a portion of it, for which God's justice need not be exercised. To the question whether the kevs have authority also over v.— E