Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume VII.djvu/32

 EXCOMMUNICATION one time had a design to evade payment of the duties upon them ; a purpose of which the purchaser was wholly ignorant. (14 Wallace's Eeports, 44, 64.) EXCOMMUNICATION (Lat. ex, out of, and com- municatio, intercourse), the cutting off a mem- ber of a religious society from intercourse with the other members in things spiritual. This penalty was familiar to the pagan nations of antiquity, as well as to the Jews ; and from them it passed into use among Christians. In Greece, persons guilty of enormous crimes were given over to the Furies with certain terrible forms of imprecation. There were three kinds of excommunication among the Greeks. By the first, the criminal was excluded from all intercourse with his own family ; by the sec- ond, he was forbidden to approach any temple, or to assist at any sacrifice or public rite ; by the third, it was forbidden to give him shelter, food, or drink. The Romans borrowed the rite from the Greeks, and the formulas sacris interdicere, to forbid the use of sacred things, diris devovere, to devote one to the Furies, execrari, to curse, &c., have much the above meaning. According to Csesar, the highest punishment inflicted by the druids, among Cel- tic nations, was to exclude an offender from all their religious rites. Such a man was con- sidered by all as wicked and an enemy of the gods ; he was shunned even by his own kindred, denied all justice and hospitality, and lived and died in infamy. The Semitic races, in ancient and modern times, have practised excommuni- cation, and it is now in use wherever Moham- medanism extends. We have the testimony of Josephus that excommunication was prac- tised among the Jews, and he notes the ex- treme rigor with which the Essenes applied it. Among them, the criminal who was thus put out of the society of his brethren not only could hold no communication with them even for the necessaries of life, but was bound by vow not to ask food or shelter from strangers. Thus driven to subsist on herbs and hide in caves, they eked out a miserable life, which often ended in a tragic death. There were three kinds of excommunication among the Jews. The mildest form consisted in a tempo- rary exclusion from religious and social inter- course for 30 days. If during this interval the culprit did not repent, another term of 30 days was added, which was lengthened to 90 days if he still remained obdurate. If he per- sisted at the end of that time, he was visited with the more severe and solemn form of ex- communication, that is, publicly cast out of the synagogue, with awful execrations taken from the law of Moses. When this penalty and all other human means had been tried in vain, he was given over to the divine judgment as an irreclaimable sinner. In the early Christian church we find excommunication practised by St. Paul, and enjoined both by him and by St. John. In the post-apostolic ages it was the universal custom both in the East and West, modified only from the Jewish practice in ac- cordance with the requirements of Christian belief and worship. The lowest degree con- sisted in the refusal of eucharistic communion ; the next in exclusion from the church and the liturgical service ; the third in total exclusion, by solemn denunciation, from membership with the church, and from all intercourse, social or religious, with Christians. This highest degree of excommunication was accompanied in some instances by an awful form which explains the anathema maranatha of St. Paul. When the person excommunicated was not only guilty of apostasy or heresy, but one who sought to draw the multitude after him, a prayer was made by some churches that God should come down in judgment and cut the seducer off, as in the cases of Julian the Apostate and Arius. In the Latin church, since the publication of Gra- tian's Decretum, and the regular adoption of canon law, two kinds of excommunications have been described by canonists, the minor and the major. The former excluded the offender from the use of the sacrament and the benefit of certain ecclesiastical privileges and immunities. It was incurred for sins that were not public, or for communicating with persons under the solemn ban. The major ex- communication cut the offender off not only from church membership, but from social inter- course with Christians. He was solemnly and by name called vitandus, "to b shunned by all." As heresy, public apostasy, and great crimes by which excommunication was incurred, came early to be recognized as state offences and misdemeanors punishable by the laws of the empire, so it was soon decreed by statute that the excommunicated should incur privation of office and rank, loss of civil rights, and forfeit- ure of property. These dispositions became more or less a part of the common law of western as well as of eastern Christendom. When the Roman empire was restored in Charlemagne, and the German emperors were wont to receive the imperial crown from the pope, public excommunication pronounced against them was held to involve a forfeiture of their cro.wn. This was also held to be the case with sovereigns whose kingdoms were fiefs of the see of Rome. It was against such high offenders that the major excommunication was fulminated, with the awful ceremonies mentioned in history. In the present discipline of the Roman Catholic church the excommuni- cation of sovereigns is reserved to the pope, and has been very rarely practised since the 16th century. In 1570 Pope Pius V. excom- municated Queen Elizabeth of England, and formally absolved her subjects from their al- legiance. In the modern Greek church ex- communication cuts off the offender not only from the "communion of saints," but from all intercourse, religious or social, and consigns him, living and dead, to the evil one. The power of excommunication was maintained by the reformers, who claimed it as a prerogative