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[1046], but had become already ‘an inheritor of everlasting torment.’
‘But,’ continues the nomocanon formulated by these theologians, ‘they that are found excommunicate, to wit, with their bodies whole and “not loosed” (ἄλυτα), these stand in need of forgiveness, in order that the body may attain unto freedom from the “bond” (δεσμόν) of excommunication. For even as the body is found “bound” (δεδεμένον) in the earth, so is the soul “bound” (δεδεμένη) and tormented in the hands of the Devil. And whensoever the body receive forgiveness and be “loosed” (λυθῇ) 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[1047] 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 had pronounced a sentence of excommunication, afterwards turned Mohammedan, while the victim of his curse, though he had died in the Christian faith, remained ‘bound.’ The matter was reported to the Patriarch Raphael, and at his instance the Turk, though after much demur, read the absolution over the Christian’s body, and towards the end of the reading, ‘the swelling of the body went down, and it turned completely to dust.’ The Turk thereupon embraced Christianity once more, and was put to death for doing so.
Most graphic of all is a story attributed to one Malaxus[1048]. The Sultan having been informed—among other evidences of the power of Christianity—that the bodies of the excommunicated never obtained dissolution till absolution was read over them, bade seek out such an one and absolve him. The Patriarch of the time accordingly made enquiries, which resulted in his hearing of a priest’s widow who had been excommunicated by a predecessor, the Patriarch Gennadius. Her story was that having been rebuked by him for prostitution she publicly charged him with an attempt to seduce her. Gennadius had answered the charge by praying aloud one Sunday in the presence of all the clergy, that, if her accusation were true, God would pardon her all her sins and give her happiness hereafter and let her body, when she died, dissolve; but, if the charge were slander and calumny against himself, then by the will and judgement of Almighty God he exercised his power of severing her from the communion of the faithful, to remain unpardoned and incorruptible. Forty days afterwards she had died of dysentery and having been buried remained incorrupt.
Exhumed at the Sultan’s instance the body was found to be still sound and whole, of a dark colour and with the skin stretched like the parchment of a drum. It was then removed and kept for a certain time under the Sultan’s seal, until the Patriarch decided to absolve it. As he read the absolution the crackling of the body as it broke up could be heard from within the coffin. It was then again kept for a few days under the Sultan’s seal, and when finally the coffin was opened the body was found ‘dissolved and decomposed, having at last obtained mercy.’ And the Sultan was so impressed by the miracle that he is recorded to have exclaimed, ‘Certainly the Christian religion is true beyond all question.’
Suchlike stories, together with the formula of excommunication and the nomocanon above quoted, prove conclusively that the Church did not merely acquiesce in one part of the popular superstition but authoritatively sanctioned it and utilised it for her own ends. The incorruptibility of the dead body under certain conditions was made an article of faith and an instrument of terrorism, which, as will appear later[1049], the ill-educated peasant-priests did not scruple to wield widely as an incentive to baptism, a deterrent from apostasy, and a challenge to repentance.
The name by which ecclesiastical writers designated a person whose body was thus ‘bound’ by excommunication, was one which has already been explained, τυμπανιαῖος[1050] or, in another form, τυμπανίτης[1051]—swollen until the skin is as tight as a drum. This word, which now survives, so far as I know, only in one island, and in the seventeenth century, to judge by Leo Allatius’ reference to it, was certainly less common than the word vrykolakas, had probably at one time, before Slavonic influence was felt, belonged to the popular as well as to the ecclesiastical vocabulary; and it was, I suspect, borrowed by the Church from popular speech at the same time as she borrowed from popular superstition the idea of dead bodies being ‘bound’ and withheld from corruption by a curse.
At what date this appropriation took place I cannot determine; but it must certainly have been before Slavonic influence was widely felt; for, when once the Greek revenant had acquired the baneful characteristics of the Slavonic vampire, the clergy would surely never have claimed as a new thing the power to ‘bind’ the dead by excommunication, when the laity (and indeed many of their own calling too) believed that persons so ‘bound’ became rampant and ravening vrykolakes. The belief must therefore have been incorporated in ecclesiastical doctrine at a time when the Greek people spoke of the incorrupt dead as τυμπανιαῖοι, ‘drumlike,’ and conceived of them as reasonable revenants.
The process by which the belief came to obtain the sanction of the Church is not hard to guess. The ambiguity of the words λύω, ‘loose,’ and δέω, ‘bind,’ may well have been the starting-point. If, on the one hand, the apostles, or the bishops who succeeded them, treated certain sins as ‘having no forgiveness neither in this world nor the world to come,’ and in the exercise of their power to bind and to loose included in their formula of excommunication some such phrase as Leo Allatius records, καὶ μετὰ τὸν θάνατον ἄλυτος καὶ ἀπαράλυτος, ‘and after death never to be “loosed”’ (meaning thereby ‘absolved’); while, on the other hand, the Greek people were hereditarily familiar with a pagan belief that the dead bodies of persons who lay under a curse were not ‘loosed’ (in the sense of ‘dissolved’); then the common-folk for their part would necessarily have understood the ecclesiastical curse as a sentence of ‘non-dissolution’; while the clergy would have been less than Greek if they had not seen, and more than Greek if they had not seized, the handle which popular superstition gave them, and by adding to their accustomed formula (μετὰ τὸν θάνατον ἄλυτος, ‘after death never to be “loosed”’) such apparently innocent words as ὥσπερ αἱ πέτραι καὶ τὰ σίδηρα[1052], ‘even as stone and iron,’ substituted the idea of ‘dissolution’ for that of ‘absolution’ and definitely committed the Church to the old pagan doctrine.
If this conjecture as to the process by which the popular belief became an article of the Orthodox faith be correct, a further suggestion may be made as to the date at which the process began. If the word ‘loosing’ was misunderstood by the Greeks when used in the formula of excommunication, it would equally have been misunderstood in the words of Christ, ‘Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth, shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth, shall be loosed in heaven[1053].’ Was it then the knowledge that these words were commonly misinterpreted by the Greeks which led the author of the fourth Gospel to reproduce them in a less equivocal form: “Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained[1054]”? This would indicate an early date indeed. Yet the date matters little as compared with the main fact that the ecclesiastical doctrine of the incorruptibility of excommunicated persons was at some time borrowed from paganism.