Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/416

 lawfully excommunicated should after his death be found with his body "loosed" ([Greek: lelymenos to sôma]) and the joints thereof sundered'

This 'exceeding marvellous' occurrence was therefore submitted to the consideration of learned divines, whose verdict was to the effect that any excommunicated person whose body did not remain whole had no more hope of salvation, because he was no longer in a state to be 'loosed' and forgiven by the bishop who had excommunicated him, but had become already 'an inheritor of ever-*lasting torment.'

'But,' continues the nomocanon formulated by these theologians, 'they that are found excommunicate, to wit, with their bodies whole and "not loosed" ([Greek: alyta]), these stand in need of forgiveness, in order that the body may attain unto freedom from the "bond" ([Greek: desmon]) of excommunication. For even as the body is found "bound" ([Greek: dedemenon]) in the earth, so is the soul "bound" ([Greek: dedemenê]) and tormented in the hands of the Devil. And whensoever the body receive forgiveness and be "loosed" ([Greek: lythê]) from excommunication, by power of God the soul likewise is freed from the hands of the Devil, and receiveth the life eternal, the light that hath no evening, and the joy ineffable.'

The whole doctrine of the physical results both of excommunication and of absolution appeared to Leo Allatius to be indisputable, and he mentions several notable cases in which the truth of it was demonstrated. Athanasius, Metropolitan of Imbros, is quoted as recording how at the request of citizens of Thasos he read the absolution over several incorrupt bodies, 'and before the absolution was even finished all the corpses were dissolved into dust.' A similar case was that of a converted Turk who was subsequently excommunicated at Naples, and had been dead some years before he obtained absolution and dissolution at the hands of two Metropolitans. More remarkable still was a case in which a priest, who(Cambridge, 1619), cap. 25, where is told the story of a bishop who was excommunicated by a council of his peers, and whose body remained 'bound, like iron, for a hundred years,' when a second council of bishops at the same place pronounced absolution and immediately the body 'turned to dust.']