Marsilius of Padua: The Defender of the Peace

To sum up, let us draw together what we have conveyed concerning the power or authority of the priestly keys given by Christ to the apostles, and say that in the sinner who truly repents, i.e. grieves for a sin committed, God alone effects certain things even with no preceding ministration on the part of a priest, viz. the illumination of the mind, the purging of the fault or stain of sin, and the remission of eternal damnation. But there are other things that God effects in the same sinner not by himself alone, but through the ministration of a priest, such as to show who, in the view of the church, is held to be loosed or bound from his sins in this world and is to be bound or loosed in another, i.e. those whose sins God has retained or forgiven. Again there is another thing that God effects in respect of a sinner through the ministration of a priest, sc. the commutation of the penalty of purgatory, which is owed by the sinner for the status of the world to come, into some satisfaction which is temporal or of this world. For he relaxes it in whole or in part according to the kinds of satisfaction that have been enjoined and the condition of the penitent, all of which should take place through the priest with the key of power according to discernment. So, too, the insolent are excluded by the priest from the communion of the sacraments, and those recovering their right mind are readmitted to it, as we said towards the end of the previous chapter.

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And this was the opinion of the Master in Book 4, distinction 18, chapter 8, when he said: ‘Regarding these ways of binding and loosing, in what sense is it true’, that: “Whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, shall be loosed also in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth, shall be bound also in heaven.”