5 - Anathema Sit: Condemnation and Punishment

Summary

Why on earth should we respect a set of silly rules made by some men one day and changed by some more the next?

In 1150 CE, the tenets and structures of the Latin Church were far from established. So the ‘rules’ – what was and was not permitted behaviour for Christians – were anything but consistent, and were still being worked out as the Middle Ages progressed. Theologians in the universities that were growing in the twelfth century wrestled with a volume of often contradictory decisions from church councils that had taken place since the early days of Christianity, starting with Nicaea in 325 CE. Attempts were made to synthesise sprawling and inconsistent texts, and many of the edicts from such councils were clearly in response to very specific questions from the bishops in attendance. It is also important to bear in mind that, just because pious Christians were not supposed to do something, they refrained from doing so. Societies and the people within them have always been as diverse as they are today. People break the rules. Sometimes the rules vary from place to place. Sometimes nobody cares if you do something you’re not supposed to. Nevertheless, what we can broadly say is that onomantic divination was generally not approved of by medieval church authorities, but at the same time it does not seem that anybody caught in the act would have been punished particularly harshly.

Chapter 4 established that onomancies are extant in a large corpus of manuscripts produced in late medieval Britain. However, as discussed in Chapter 1, onomancy belongs in the category of divination, a practice which had been condemned since the time of the late Roman Empire. This had not always been the case: in ancient Greece and Rome the systems of divination and polytheistic religion were not at odds with one another. In fact, certain forms of divination were a key part of Greek and Roman religion. It was with the rise of monotheistic Christianity as the principal religion of the Latin West that the divinatory arts became problematic. The first part of this chapter will outline the changes in divination's status from the ancient to the medieval eras, and then discuss the main theological condemnations of divination of all kinds, from Augustine in the fourth century through to Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth.