The Spiritual Effects of Excommunication

Abstract

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.