Anathema

Anathema is a word that fell from the temple shelf. In classical Greek an anathema was a thing set up: the dedicated tripod, the votive shield, the offering placed on high in a sanctuary. The Septuagint used the cognate to translate the Hebrew herem, that which is devoted, irrevocably handed over to God, and since what was devoted was often devoted to destruction, the word's luminous and dark senses fused: set apart for God, and therefore removed from human use, and therefore, when applied to a person, accursed. Paul writes the dark sense fluently, wishing himself anathema for his brethren's sake, and pronouncing it on any who preach another gospel, and Christian usage followed him. From the fourth century the councils made it a formula: doctrinal canons closed with ei tis, anathema esto, if anyone says thus, let him be anathema, so that the church's definitions advanced behind a hedge of enumerated condemnations, Nicaea against the Arian formulas, Chalcedon's christological boundaries, Trent's hundred-plus canons against the Reformers.

Later Latin canon law distinguished anathema as excommunication delivered with full solemnity, bell, book and candle in the popular memory. The trajectory, from gift to curse, is not an irony but a logic: both senses mean handed over wholly, taken out of ordinary circulation, and the word's history is a reminder that the sacred is the category of the set-apart, whichever direction the setting runs.

In July 1054 Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida, legate of a pope who had in fact died in April, strode into Hagia Sophia during the liturgy and laid on the altar a bull excommunicating the Patriarch Michael Cerularius and his associates; the patriarch's synod promptly anathematized the legates in return. Historians are unanimous that the moment was less decisive than its legend, the excommunications were personal, not of churches, arguably invalid, and East and West continued to interact for centuries, but symbols do not consult historians, and the exchanged anathemas of 1054 hardened into the accepted birthdate of the schism between Rome and Orthodoxy. What makes the story singular is its ending.

On 7 December 1965, in simultaneous ceremonies in Rome and Istanbul, Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I issued a Joint Declaration removing the sentences: the two churches regretted the offensive words on both sides, and consigned the excommunications of 1054 to oblivion, erasing them, the text says, from the memory and the midst of the Church. The gesture dissolved no doctrinal difference, and both sides said so plainly; the schism's substance, papal primacy above all, remains in negotiation six decades later. But as an event in the grammar of anathema it is nearly unique: the most famous curses in Christian history were formally unsaid, establishing that what a church binds with a formula it can, with sufficient penitence and daring, loose again.