Everyman on Organized Religion and Theology

 

The role and understanding of Death is strong in Everyman's understanding of salvation, as Death is the one that proclaim of God's coming judgement to him (105-111). In many ways, Everyman portrays a Protestant understanding of salvation as much as a Roman Catholic one. Achieving salvation is one of the most important themes in the play. While at first glace, Everyman may seem to teach works based salvation to the average Evangelical Christian, nothing could be further from the truth. First off, Everyman teaches the necessity of grace of salvation (as Roman Catholics and Protestants both believe). It is God that is the initiator for salvation (66-68) and only from God's grace can Everyman benefit as proven by Everyman's need for the sacrament of confession (540-544). While many Evangelical Christians may find Everyman to downplay the role of Sola fide with its strong emphases on the role of the sacraments for salvation, that is not to say that the play teaches Roman Catholicism either. Everyman identifies salvation with the sacrament of confession (540-544), with pilgrimage (66-70), with the Virgin Mary (552), and with extreme unction (711). However, salvation is never understood with the papacy. Of all the commands Death gives to Everyman, he never tells him about the submission to the Roman Pontiff as being necessary for salvation. The lack of emphases on the necessity of being in communion with and submitting to the Roman pontiff for salvation directly contradicts the infamous Unum Sanctum of Pope Boniface VIII, which teaches just the opposite. In this way, Everyman echoes the Protestant position that the head of the church is not the pope but Christ Himself (Psalm 118: 22, Matthew 24: 13, Ephesians 5: 23, Colossians 1: 18). In the play, God never understands Himself, or His authority with the bishop of Rome. In fact, the papacy is hardly mentioned in the play at all (126). Everyman puts much emphases on the sacraments for salvation, and by so doing, shows that Everyman on his own cannot achieve reconciliation with God (66-70) and (540-544). Further, while the sacrament of confession aids Everyman on his pilgrimage (540-544), so does the sacrament of extreme unction before Everyman's death (617-618). Knowledge informs Everyman of the seven sacraments that Everyman must take for salvation (706-711). Knowledge also guides him to the priesthood to receive the benefits of Christ (707). Interestingly enough, Five Wits speaks to Everyman while identifying the priesthood with the keys of the kingdom (715-717), though never makes mention of papal supremacy or infallibility. Five Wits also credits God for these sacraments as means of grace (727) and understands that it is God Himself that gives to Everyman salvation (731) while never referencing any role of the papacy as an the source of salvation for Everyman. Everyman was written in the fifteenth century when many in northern Europe (the ancestors of the later Protestants) were trying to reform the church from within (Bevington, 1975, p. 939). Besides the papacy, Death, much like the Protestants less than a century later, never understands indulgences or the honoring of relics (neither of which are mentioned in the play) as essential for salvation. Also, like the later reformer, John Calvin, who understood salvation as a process (Milner, 1970, pp. 62-65), Everyman does understand salvation as a process (552-553). 

What happens after death according to Everyman? The play holds to a common medieval view, which is that purgatory is a place for Christians, that at death, have to be purged for the consequences of their venial sins (617-618). While purgatory has been accepted by some reformed and evangelicals theologians in recent years, it has always been a controversial one. That said, C.S. Lewis discussed his support of the doctrine of purgatory in Letters to Malcolm and described his view of how the earlier understanding of purgatory in Medieval times had changed by the time of the Protestant Reformation (Lewis, 1964, pp. 145-147). While many Evangelical Christians will disagree with Lewis's opinion of what happens for the believer after death, they would likely find it interesting that Lewis believed purgatory was once held as a place for purification, though later, it was more emphasized for the sake of suffering. No doubt too, it can be said that the emphasis of suffering in Purgatory for those after death, rather than the purification from it, served as a money making machine by the church of Rome during the sixteenth century by insisting that the faithful pay for indulgences to earn their way to heaven. Much of the Roman Catholic understanding of what happens after death, is simply not dealt with in the play.