Excommunication

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Excommunication is the formal act by which a religious community cuts a member off from its fellowship — barring the person from its rites, its sacraments, or the ordinary company of the faithful, and sometimes from all three at once. The Latin behind the word is plain: to be put out of communion. It is at once a penalty and a verdict, and across the traditions that practice it the deeper claim is the same — that belonging to the community is itself a good the offender has forfeited.

In the Christian West the practice took its sharpest legal shape. The early church already distinguished the merely disciplined from those wholly cut off, and by the high Middle Ages canon law had built an elaborate machinery around the sentence: a lesser excommunication barring the sacraments, a greater one — the anathema, pronounced with bell, book, and candle — severing the offender from the community of the living altogether. The instrument was wielded against heretics, but also against kings; the threat of it, and of the interdict that suspended worship across whole territories, made it one of the sharpest weapons the medieval papacy held. The Reformation churches kept a version of the discipline while rejecting the canonical apparatus, and Catholic practice itself was softened over the centuries, the medieval theatre of the anathema falling away.

Judaism developed its own form, the herem — a ban excluding a person from the life of the congregation. Its most famous instance is the herem pronounced by the Amsterdam community against the philosopher Baruch Spinoza in 1656, in language of unusual severity; the document survives, though the precise charges behind it do not. Islam, lacking a single sacramental church, has no exact equivalent, though the related charge of takfir — declaring a professed Muslim an unbeliever — performs some of the same boundary-drawing work and remains bitterly contested among jurists.

What every version shares is a structure worth naming. Excommunication is not chiefly a punishment inflicted on the body or the purse; it is the withdrawal of a relationship, the community formally unmaking a bond it had formally made. For those who practiced it this was no empty gesture: where salvation was held to run through the church’s sacraments, to be cut off from them was understood as a matter of the soul’s danger, and the sentence was framed — at least in principle — as medicinal, meant to bring the offender to repentance rather than to destroy. Historians have long noted how readily that pastoral logic served political ends, and how often the line between correcting a sinner and silencing an opponent ran thin. The two were never fully separable, because the power to admit and the power to expel are the same power, seen from its two sides.

→ Related: Heresy · Idolatry · Middle Ages