INDULGENCE (Lat. in dulgent in, indulgence, from indulgere, to indulge). A term of Roman Catholic the ology, signifying the remission of temporal pen alties due to Sill, by one who has the power to distribute the spiritual treasures of the Church. An indulgence is not believed to remit guilt; only sacramental absolution avails for that; but it affects the punishment which would otherwise be inflicted in the regular exercise of ecclesiasti cal discipline. According to Bellarmine's state ment, one who has been absolved from guilt in the sacrament may be released from penalty by an indulgence. It is an act, not of 'order,' but of 'jurisdiction,' based upon the power of the keys. ( See KEYS, POWER OF.) So complete is this power held to be that the efficacy of an indulgence is believed, in a true sense, to satisfy divine justice, as well as to secure the remis sion of temporal penalties, whereby it is made to extend beyond this present life into the state of purgatory. The ground of this satisfaction is sought in the treasure of merit laid np by Christ and the saints, and always at the dis posal of the Church whenever need requires. This thesaurus meritornm is fundamental to the fully developed theory of indulgences. The clergy are its duly appointed custodians; its beneficiaries are the adherents of the Church throughout the world who avail themselves of its virtues; the indulgence is its channel of commu nication.
The history of indulgences begins with Roman law, where the word indulgentia means the re mission of a punishment or of a tax. From legal the word easily passed into ecclesiastical usage. A sovereign Church, like a sovereign State, might exercise clemency, instead of exact ing the full measure of punishment which the law required. But long-continued, and sometimes hitter, controversies indicate the doubts which many Christians felt as to the propriety of this contention, which finally led to the catastrophe of the sixteenth century, when Luther voiced the protest of a large section of Christendom against certain current abuses of the doctrine. The first important step toward establishing the dispens ing power of the Church was taken in conse quence of the Decian persecution. beginning A.D. 250, when the problem arose how to deal with the lapsed. These questions were answered by
the beginnings of penitential discipline. The further question of the relaxation of discipline was also answered on the side of mildness. The power of 'loosing' was declared to be no less real than the power of 'binding' (cf. :Matt. xvi. 19). Ambrose especially taught that the two were correlative, and the Church accepted his view. But the Council of Ancyra (A.D. 314) had al ready sanctioned the use of clemency, at the discretion of the bishop, and this position had been indorsed by the first Ecumenical Council at Nic:ea (325). Appeal was made to the ex ample of Saint Paul, who recommended a de gree of mercy toward the offender in Corinth (see II. Cor. ii. 6-8). The main exercise of this power, in the fourth and fifth centuries, was in shortening the canonical periods of penance, evi dence of which is found, for instance, in the teaching of Gregory of Nyssa.
By degrees a variety of substitutes for the canonical penalties were introduced. Fasting might be remitted in consideration of repeating a certain number of psalms, or of paying a tine (as by Theodore of Tarsus, Archbishop of Can terbury, in the seventh century). Almsgiving, pilgrimages, and holy wars came to be the most popular means of securing indulgences, especially in the period of the Crusades (q.v.). The Connell of Clermont (1095) asserted that the pilgrimage to the Holy Land took the place of all other penance. With the decline of the Crusades in dulgences were offered for fighting against here tics, such as the Albigenses and Russites (q.v.). The first great jubilee indulgence was published by Pope Boniface VIII. in 1:300. The fully de N eloped scholastic theory upon which indulgences are based is found in Thomas Aquinas and Alexander of Hales. The importance there at tached to tho 'treasure of merit' naturally led to a popular belief among the ignorant that pardon for sin and immunity from punishment were matters of ecclesiastical bookkeeping—that they could be bought and sold. It was in view of this popular impression, and the undoubted abuses which grew out of it, that Luther pub lished his theses on indulgences in 1517, the event which marks the beginning of the Protes tant Reformation. See Luvuas.