THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
1907; H. G. Keyserliug, Unsterblichkeit. Munich, 1907; R. J. Thompson, Proofs of Life after Death : a Collation of Opinions, London, 1907; E. E. F. A. Albe, New Light on Immortality, London, 1908; F. C. Kempson, Future Life and Modern Difficulties, ib. 1908. The subject of course receives treatment in the various works on systematic theology.
IMMORTALITY, CONDITIONAL. See Annihilationism; Conditionalism; Immortality.
IMMUNITY: In the stricter sense, the freedom of certain persons or property from public duties and taxes. The word is sometimes, however, used in a wider sense, to include especially the right of Asylum (q.v.). After Christianity was recognized by the Roman Empire, the Church acquired for its possessions immunity from the class of imposts known in Roman law as munera sordida, and at the end of the fourth century also from extraordinary land taxes. The clergy, like the heathen priests before them, were free from all public service, and from inheritance taxes up to a certain point, though complete freedom from personal taxation can not be demonstrated. While these immunities were maintained in the Eastern Empire and in the Code of Justinian, they led in the West to difficulties which brought about their almost total abolition by Valentinian III. Nor is there anything like a general immunity of church property in the Frankish kingdom. The clergy were exempt from military service, and apparently from the poll tax where it was levied; but land taxes and feudal services resting upon property belonging to the Church or the clergy were not remitted. Under the Merovingians and Carolingians first certain churches and then whole dioceses and greater monasteries gained immunity by special privilege, as the temporal magnates also often did. From the sixth to the tenth century these privileges, based in their conception on the old immunity of the royal domain, remained essentially the same. Public officials were forbidden to visit the immune territory for the collection of taxes from its possessor or his subjects, or to use any force against the latter; where these taxes were still due to the king, they were to be paid through the landlord. Moreover, besides the collection of fines and similar payments, he enjoyed the right of jurisdiction in minor matters, though in those involving life or liberty he was still bound to defer to the regular courts.
After the tenth century the greater landowners, temporal and spiritual, began to acquire the higher jurisdiction also over the people on their estates. In the Carolingian period church property was protected by a heavy fine (600 soldi) against any one who violated it. This did not last long as applied to the whole estate, but was continued for the churches, cemeteries, and dwellings of the clergy. Freedom from military service continued as long as the old methods of raising an army were in force; but bishops and abbots were early summoned to the field, and when the feudal system was developed the duty of supplying men-at-arms rested equally on spiritual and temporal lords. The most determined opposition to any infringement on ecclesiastical immunities was not made against arbitrary royal imposts so much as against regular
municipal taxation such as came into vogue in the German and Italian towns in the twelfth century.
The decrees of the Third and Fourth Lateran Councils (1179, 1215) mark the beginning of efforts to secure complete immunity for the Church, which has been demanded constantly ever since. The Council of Trent asserted this claim, though in rather general terms; the bull In coena Domini (q.v.) threatened the violators of immunities with excommunication; and a special " Congregation of Jurisdiction and Immunity " has been in existence at Rome since 1626, though it is without significance to-day. The Syllabus of 1864 decisively maintained the essential right of the Church to immunity, although modern Roman Catholic writers generally leave the question open as to its derivation trom divine right, or even frequently deny it. Since the Reformation, however, the personal immunity of the clergy and the real immunity of property not serving directly for religious purposes have tended to disappear; and even in the European countries where the Roman Catholic Church has a history of special privilege, they are usually conceded, so far as they exist at all, to all organized religious bodies. (Siegfried Rietschel.)
Bibliography: Bingham, Origines, V., iii.; L. Thomassin, Velus et nova ecclesios disciplina, vol. iii., lib. i., chaps, xxxiii.-xlviii., Paris, 1728; P. Hinschius, Kirchenrechl, i. 123 sqq., Berlin, 1869; E. Friedberg, Die Grenzen zwischen Staat und Kirche, Tubingen, 1872; idem, Lehrbuch des . Kirchenrechts, pp. 142 sqq., 474 sqq., Leipsic, 1895; A. L. Richter, Lehrbuch des . Kirchenrechts, ed. W. Kahl, pp. 374 sqq., 1293 sqq., ib., 1886; F. Chamard, De Vimmunite ecclesiastique et monastique, Paris, 1878; W. E. Addis and T. Arnold, Catholic Dictionary, pp. 474- 475, London, 1903; KL, x. 443-448; and the literature cited under Asylum, Right of.
IMPANATION: One of the many modifications of the doctrine of the real presence of the flesh and blood of Christ in the Eucharist, which arose in opposition to the doctrine of transubstantiation. Rupert of Deutz (d. 1135) is the father of this idea. In commenting on Ex. ii. 10 (Opera, i. 267, Cologne, 1602), he explains how God connects the real flesh and blood of Christ with the real bread and wine in the Eucharist, without disturbing the substance of either, just as, in the womb of the virgin, he connected the Word and the human nature without changing the character of the latter. So, in theological terminology, the relation existing between Christ and the elements in the Eucharist would be, according to this theory, a hypostatic union similar to that existing between the divinity and the humanity in Christ. The word " impanation," however, was first used by Alger of Liege (d. 1131), who wrote against Rupert in defense of transubstantiation. In the period of the Reformation Carlstadt accused Osiander of holding the view of impanation; and the same accusation was preferred by the Romanists in general against Luther, who denied it.
IMPOSITION OF HANDS. See Laying on of Hands.
IMPOSTORIBUS, DE TRIBUS: The title of » writing often mentioned but little known, connected with an accusation in the year 1239 by Pope Gregory IX. against Emperor Frederick II., who