The other half of the popular superstition, namely that those whose bodies were ‘bound’ by excommunication or otherwise, and whom the earth did not ‘receive,’ were ejected by her and re-appeared as revenants, caused the Church some embarrassment. Sometimes the alleged resuscitation of such persons was condemned as a mere hallucination of timorous and superstitious minds; at other times it was accepted as a fact and explained as a work of the Devil designed to lead men astray, and acting upon this idea the clergy often lent their services to absolve and to dissolve the suspected corpse.
Leo Allatius[1055] reflects both these views and shows their effect upon the conduct of the clergy. After describing the actual appearance of such bodies, which gained for them the name τυμπανιαῖοι, ‘drumlike,’ he introduces the second half of the superstition by saying that into such bodies the devil enters, and issuing from the tomb goes about working all manner of destruction; and he adds that when the body is exhumed, ‘the priests recite prayers, and the body is thrown on a burning pyre; before the supplications are finished, the joints of the body gradually fall apart, and all the remains are burnt to ashes.’ Yet shortly afterwards he states, ‘This belief is not of fresh and recent growth in Greece; in ancient and modern times alike men of piety who have received the confessions of Christians have tried to root it out of the popular mind.’ There is a clear contrast between the conduct of ‘the priests’ in one passage and that of the ‘men of piety’ in the other. The clergy did not as a body adopt a single and consistent attitude towards the popular superstition.
Similar inconsistency marks the nomocanon concerning vrykolakes, from which I have given selections along with the rest of Leo’s account in the last section; these passages, for convenience of reference, are here repeated:
‘Concerning a dead man, if such be found whole and incorrupt, the which they call vrykolakas...
‘It is impossible that a dead man become a vrykolakas save it be that the Devil, wishing to delude some that they may do things unmeet and incur the wrath of God, maketh these portents and oft-times at night causeth men to imagine that the dead man whom they knew before cometh and speaketh with them, and in their dreams too they see visions. Other times they see him in the road, walking or standing still, and, more than this, he even throttles men.
‘Then there is a commotion and they run to the grave and dig to see the remains of the man ... and the dead man—one who has long been dead and buried—appears to them to have flesh and blood and nails and hair ... and they collect wood and set fire to it and burn the body and do away with it altogether....’
Then, after denying again the reality of such things which exist κατὰ φαντασίαν, in imagination only, the nomocanon continues:
‘But know that when such remains be found, the which, as we have said, is a work of the Devil, ye must summon the priests to chant an invocation of the Mother of God, ... and to perform memorial services for the dead with funeral meats.’
The self-contradiction of the pronouncement is exposed in the phrases which I have italicised. Clearly if such remains are found and the dead man is so affected by the work of the Devil that special services for his repose[1056] are required, the theory of hallucination is untenable. But this very inconsistency of the nomocanon, though according to Allatius it is of uncertain authorship, proves it, as I will show, a very valuable document of the Church’s traditional teaching on this matter.
S. Anastasius Sinaita, who became bishop of Antioch in 561 and died in 599, refers to revenants in a passage which, literally rendered, runs as follows[1057]: ‘Again it appears that devils, by means of false prophets who obey them and with their aid work signs and heal bodily diseases to the delusion of themselves and others, present even a dead man as risen again, and (in his person) talk with the living, in imagination (ἐν φαντασίᾳ). For a devil enters into the dead body of the man, and moves it, presenting the dead man risen again as it were in answer to the foolish prayer of the deceiver. And the evil spirit talks as it were in the person of the dead man with him whom he is deluding, telling him such things as he himself wishes to tell and answering also further questions....’