This article argues that the church's strenuous efforts to publicize Magna Carta can only be fully understood when viewed in the context of canon law and pastoral care. The automatic sentence of excommunication that fell on anyone who infringed Magna Carta meant that every Christian in medieval England needed to know not just the general principles of the charter, but the contents of every clause. Clergymen had a duty to ensure that their parishioners did not unwittingly incur the sanction, thereby endangering their souls. Thus the threat of excommunication had a profound effect on the political awareness of English society, as a result of the church's obligation to look out for the spiritual welfare of its members.
Excommunication resulted in complete separation from the Christian community. This basic definition can be accepted without difficulty. To go further, however, is problematic.Excommunication's precise implications were far from clear. An excommunicate was to be shunned by all other Christians; he or she could not be buried in ecclesiastical ground and was unable to sue in court. Yet excommunication was also a spiritual sanction. A frequently cited canon from Gratian's Decretum defined anathema as 'damnation of eternal death'. 1 Nevertheless, in 1245, at the first Council of Lyons, Pope Innocent IV emphatically asserted, 'excommunication is medicine not death, discipline not annihilation'. 2 This decree, known as 'Cum medicinalis', added to an already significant body of canon law intended to ensure that clerics used excommunication justly, and sparingly. In the same period, theologians had reached a consensus that excommunication was not a curse, and did not send a person to hell. Yet excommunication continued to be 'burdened with great ambivalence', as Elisabeth Vodola has observed. 3 Despite the definition in 'Cum medicinalis' and the assurances of theologians, it was not uncommon throughout the middle ages for both churchmen and laymen to believe that excommunication resulted in 'misfortune in this world and damnation in the next '. 4 This observation is hardly new. Martin Luther complained about the problem as early as 1518. 5 The most full study of this tension is Alexander Murray's 1991 John Coffin Memorial Lecture, in which he explores the complexity of the issues at stake. Vodola and R.H. Helmholz 1 Anathema came to be understood as major excommunication.
This chapter discusses the implications of excommunication for the afterlife using legal texts, exempla, liturgy, chronicles, and curse formulae. Although theologians and certain legal texts emphasized that excommunication was not a permanent bar to salvation, it is argued here that the information conveyed to the majority of people implied that excommunication meant hell. Miracle stories and the rite of excommunication, in particular, implied damnation. The chapter also argues that legal procedures, which were increasingly emphasized in canon law, did not preclude the use of excommunication by clerics for their own ends. Instilling fear was a crucial part of excommunication’s potential to coerce sinners; it was in the interests of the institutional church and its members to give the impression that hell was the destination of excommunicates when they died.
Excommunication was the medieval church’s most severe sanction, used against people at all levels of society. It was a spiritual, social, and legal penalty. Bringing into dialogue a wide range of source material allows ‘effectiveness’ to be judged within a broader context. The complexity of political communication and action are revealed through public, conflicting, accepted, and rejected excommunications. Excommunication was a means by which political events were communicated down the social strata of medieval society.
This chapter explores attitudes to excommunication, and in particular attitudes to the idea that excommunicates would go to hell. It argues that while people generally believed in the serious consequences of being excommunicated—there is little to indicate that excommunication and its consequences were rejected in toto—the ever-present ability to seek absolution meant that practical, temporal considerations usually mattered more. Spiritual considerations and emotions were intertwined with worldly goals and desires. Thus people sought absolution with urgency when dying, but not otherwise. The rule that excommunicates should not be buried in ecclesiastical ground was enforced. There is, however, evidence of disquiet felt by those who had incurred excommunications automatically. These people desired absolution even though they had not been judicially or publicly excommunicated. Some excommunicates who remained under sentences did so because they believed that they had been treated unfairly. Conviction in the justice of their causes led them to reject ecclesiastical judgements. The ability to defer absolution until it suited the excommunicate ultimately meant that fear of hell was not the best way to ensure a swift reconciliation with the church.
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