In attitude psychology, there is a phenomenon called the Sleeper Effect. It means that even after time has passed and things have changed, certain vague memories and attitudes remain. Like waking from a dream: even if everything in it has been forgotten, one still remembers, Oh, I really can't stand that person.
The difference between sleep and death lay only in whether one would wake again. If the long dream never ended and one became immersed in it, then even while asleep, one was as good as dead.
Under the rule of divine authority, people lived in order to go to heaven after death and avoid going to hell. So when the Church said there was a treasury of merit, that the merits cultivated by saints of old still had a surplus after fulfilling their own requirements for entering heaven, "sinners" spent vast sums on indulgences, forgetting the spiritual practice they ought to have undertaken while alive.
Once people accepted that they lived for happiness rather than to enjoy heaven after death, they began to focus on whether they were happy in the present.
They no longer considered poverty a blessing, nor did they long for pilgrimages. If one had money, naturally one bought things that brought joy—wine, food, spices, silk. Compared with the desert, a castle decorated with Venetian glass was certainly more comfortable to live in.
Asceticism and commercial society were contradictory, yet the wealthy still needed the Church's authority to make people believe that unequal wealth was only natural. Greed made people forget the danger of the gallows and do things harmful in the long term but beneficial and harmless in the short term. This fleeting sense of happiness was like a drunkard drinking rum. He was happy while drinking and while drunk, but once sober, he