indulgence

/in dul"jeuhns/, n., v., indulgenced, indulgencing.

n.

1. the act or practice of indulging; gratification of desire.

2. the state of being indulgent.

3. indulgent allowance or tolerance.

4. a catering to someone's mood or whim; humoring: The sick man demanded indulgence as his due.

5. something indulged in: Her favorite indulgence was candy.

6. Rom. Cath. Ch. a partial remission of the temporal punishment, esp. purgatorial atonement, that is still due for a sin or sins after absolution. Cf. plenary indulgence.

7. Eng. and Scot. Hist. (in the reigns of Charles II and James II) a grant by the king to Protestant dissenters and Roman Catholics freeing them from certain penalties imposed, by legislation, because of their religion.

8. Com. an extension, through favor, of time for payment or performance.

v.t.

9. Rom. Cath. Ch. to provide with an indulgence: an indulgenced pilgrimage to Rome.

[1325-75; ME < L indulgentia. See INDULGE, -ENCE]

Syn. 3. sufferance, forbearance, allowance.

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In Roman Catholicism, the remission of temporal punishment for a sin after the sin has been forgiven through the sacrament of penance.

The theology of indulgences is based on the concept that, even though the sin and its eternal punishment are forgiven through penance, divine justice demands that the sinner pay for the crime either in this life or in purgatory. The first indulgences were intended to shorten times of penance by substituting periods of fasting, private prayers, almsgiving, and monetary payments that were to be used for religious purposes. Pope Urban II granted the first plenary, or absolute, indulgence to participants in the First Crusade, and subsequent popes offered indulgences on the occasion of the later Crusades. After the 12th century they were more widely used, and abuses became common as indulgences were put up for sale to earn money for the church or to enrich unscrupulous clerics. Jan Hus opposed them, and Martin Luther's Ninety-five Theses (1517) were in part a protest against indulgences. In 1562 the Council of Trent put an end to the abuses but not to the doctrine itself.

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▪ Roman Catholicism

      a distinctive feature of the penitential system of both the Western medieval and the Roman Catholic church that granted full or partial remission of the punishment of sin. The granting of indulgences was predicated on two beliefs. First, in the sacrament of penance it did not suffice to have the guilt (culpa) of sin forgiven through absolution alone; one also needed to undergo temporal punishment (poena, from p[o]enitentia, “penance”) because one had offended Almighty God. Second, indulgences rested on belief in purgatory, a place in the next life where one could continue to cancel the accumulated debt of one's sins, another Western medieval conception not shared by the Eastern Greek church.

      From the early church onward, bishops could reduce or dispense with the rigours of penances, but indulgences emerged in only the 11th and 12th centuries when the idea of purgatory took widespread hold and when the popes became the activist leaders of the reforming church. In their zeal, they promoted the militant reclamation of once-Christian lands—first of Iberia in the Reconquista, then of the Holy Land in the Crusades—offering “full remission of sins,” the first indulgences, as inducements to participation.

      Papal pronouncements, oral and written, were often vague, however, and raised many questions among the pious. To clarify all these issues, the Scholastic (Scholasticism) theologians of the 12th and 13th centuries worked out a fully articulated theory of penance. It consisted of three parts: contrition, confession, and satisfaction. The debt of forgiven sin could be reduced through the performance of good works in this life (pilgrimages, charitable acts, and the like) or through suffering in purgatory. Indulgences could be granted only by popes or, to a lesser extent, archbishops and bishops as ways of helping ordinary people measure and amortize their remaining debt. “Plenary,” or full, indulgences cancelled all the existing obligation, while “partial” indulgences remitted only a portion of it. People naturally wanted to know how much debt was forgiven (just as modern students want to know exactly what they need to study for examinations), so set periods of days, months, and years came gradually to be attached to different kinds of partial indulgences.

      One did not, however, have to do it all by oneself. Medieval Christianity was a vast community of mutual help through prayer and good works, uniting the living and the dead in the Church Militant on earth, the Church Suffering in purgatory, and the Church Triumphant in heaven. The good works of Jesus Christ, the saints, and others could be drawn upon to liberate souls from purgatory. In 1343 Pope Clement VI decreed that all these good works were in the Treasury of Merit, over which the pope had control.

      This highly complicated theological system, which was framed as a means to help people achieve their eternal salvation, easily lent itself to misunderstanding and abuse as early as the 13th century, much sooner than is usually thought. A principal contributing factor was money. Paralleling the rise of indulgences, the Crusades, and the reforming papacy was the economic resurgence of Europe that began in the 11th century. Part of this tremendous upsurge was the phenomenon of commutation, through which any services, obligations, or goods could be converted into a corresponding monetary payment. Those eager to gain plenary indulgences, but unable to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, wondered whether they might perform an alternative good work or make an equivalent offering to a charitable enterprise—for example, the building of a leprosarium or a cathedral. Churchmen allowed such commutation, and the popes even encouraged it, especially Innocent III (reigned 1198–1216) in his various Crusading projects. From the 12th century onward the process of salvation was therefore increasingly bound up with money. Reformers of the 14th and 15th centuries frequently complained about the “sale” of indulgences by pardoners. And as the papacy weakened in this period, secular governments increasingly allowed the granting of indulgences only in return for a substantial share of the yield, often as much as two-thirds. The princes got most of the money, and the popes got most of the blame.

      People also wondered whether they could gain an indulgence for someone who had died and was presumed to be in purgatory. If so, in acting out of charity for someone else, were they then obliged to confess their own sins, as they would if they sought to obtain an indulgence for themselves? Although these concerns were surfacing as early as the 13th century, it was only in 1476 that Pope Sixtus IV declared that one could indeed gain an indulgence for someone in purgatory. Sixtus, however, left unanswered the problem of the necessity of personal confession. This profound uncertainty surrounding penance threatened to sever completely the nexus between the confession of sin and the achievement of salvation.

      That is precisely what happened in the early 16th century. In northern Germany a Dominican friar, Johann Tetzel (Tetzel, Johann), was credited with hawking indulgences for the dead by saying, “When a penny in the coffer rings, / A soul from Purgatory springs.” Aristotle was right: every “system,” natural or man-made, moves inexorably toward corruption, degeneration, and death. The system was finally killed by a young Augustinian friar in a neighbouring territory, Martin Luther (Luther, Martin). He was not (as is widely thought) moved originally to a critique of the system by these abuses but rather by his own terrible spiritual suffering. In any case, he drew up a devastating document, the Ninety-five Theses of October 1517. In number 82 he blew the lid off the system. Cleverly reporting the “keen criticisms of the laity,” he vitiated papal control of the Treasury of Merit by writing that the laity

ask, for example: Why does not the pope liberate everyone from Purgatory for the sake of love (a most holy thing) and because of the supreme necessity of their souls? This would be morally the best of reasons. Meanwhile he redeems innumerable souls for money, a most perishable thing, with which to build St. Peter's church, a very minor purpose.

      With this blast, Luther began to knock down the house of cards, and by 1520 he came to the full realization of his immensely liberating theological message: salvation is free, and one does not have to do anything, much less pay anything, to obtain it. Virtually all forms of Protestantism (Protestant Heritage) would reject all or most of the penitential system, including indulgences.

      The Roman Catholic church conceded very few points to Luther or the other Reformers. One of the points was justification by faith (but not by faith “alone,” as Luther insisted in his misrendering of Paul (Paul, the Apostle, Saint)), and another was the fateful connection between money and indulgences. While reasserting the place of indulgences in the salvific process, the Council of Trent (Trent, Council of) condemned “all base gain for securing indulgences” in 1563, and Pope Pius V (Pius V, Saint) abolished the sale of indulgences in 1567. The system and its underlying theology otherwise remained intact. Exactly 400 years later, in 1967, Pope Paul VI modified it by shifting the stress away from the satisfaction of punishment to the inducement of good works, greatly reducing the number of plenary indulgences and eliminating the numerical system associated for so long with partial indulgences.

Lawrence G. Duggan

Additional Reading

The older but still standard works on indulgence are Nikolaus Paulus, Geschichte des Ablasses im Mittelalter vom Ursprunge bis zur Mitte des 14. Jahrhunderts, 3 vol. (1922–23, reprinted 2000), and Indulgences as a Social Factor in the Middle Ages, trans. by J. Elliot Ross (1922; originally published in German, 1920); and Bernhard Poschmann, Der Ablass im Licht der Bussgeschichte (1948). Henry Charles Lea, A History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church, 3 vol. (1896, reprinted 1968), is hostile but contains much useful material. Other valuable introductions are Joseph Edward Campbell, Indulgences: The Ordinary Power of Prelates Inferior to the Pope to Grant Indulgences (1953); “Indulgences,” in New Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7 (2003), pp. 436–441; Elisabeth Vodola, “Indulgences,” in Joseph R. Strayer (ed.), Dictionary of the Middle Ages, vol. 6 (1985), pp. 446–450; Philip Lyndon Reynolds, “Indulgences,” in Hans J. Hillerbrand (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, vol. 2 (1996), pp. 314–315; and F.L. Cross (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd ed., ed. by E.A. Livingstone (1997), pp. 829–830. The early development of problems is dealt with in Christopher Tyerman, The Invention of the Crusades (1998). The working of the system in the late Middle Ages is discussed in Lawrence G. Duggan, “Fear and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation,” Archive for Reformation History, 75:153–175 (1984).Lawrence G. Duggan

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