The Selling Of Indulgences In Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales

The selling of indulgences was popularized during the Crusades by Pope(WHO) in the eleventh century as a means for Crusaders to justify their atrocious sins. Stronger presence of Christian faith only masked the corruption of Church officials who continued to sell indulgences for their own benefits. While Martin Luther’s 95 Thesis and his work On Christian Liberty and in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Pardoner’s Tale from The Canterbury Tales both agree that the Church has become corrupt due to the Selling of Indulgences, they differ in that Luther believes the Church’s justification of faith is wrong while Chaucer believes the Church’s justification of faith is correct. In Martin Luther’s 95 Thesis and his work On Christian Liberty and in Geoffrey

Luther, on the other hand, believes the Christian religion as a whole has become corrupt due to Pope Leo X internal motivation. Luther both attacks and presents what he believes is the right way to gain justification in his 95 Thesis and work On Christian Liberty while Chaucer focusses on a sole individual to exploit the corruption of the Church rather than condemning the Christian religion as hypocritical. Chaucer believes The Pardoner has become corrupt due to his own inner motives, not once in The Pardoner’s Tale does Chaucer satirize the Christian religion. Chaucer’s, The Pardoner’s Tale is also more effective than Luther’s direct criticism because he uses the Pardoner to poke fun at himself and therefore exploit that he know’s what he is doing is unjust because he “know[‘s] [how] to preach against the vice. Which masters [him]—and that is avarice.” If Chaucer wrote the Pardoner’s Tale the same way but did not include that the Pardoner knew he was corrupt then the argument could be made that Chaucer believed the Christian religion had truly strayed away from the original doctrines as Luther describes in his 95 Thesis and work On Christian Liberty. Chaucer’s view on the corruptness of the Church differs from Luther’s view in that Chaucer believes a corrupt Christian figure is only corrupt because of the inner motive of greed not because his congregation entitles him to be