The Interdict

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: is derived from Roman law, and was first used in the sense of a prohibition.'8 The earliest cases cited as interdicts are called excommunications in the sources; and not, indeed, until the adoption of the word in a technical sense by the papal chancellery under Alexander II15 is there any regular and...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: is derived from Roman law, and was first used in the sense of a prohibition.'8 The earliest cases cited as interdicts are called excommunications in the sources; and not, indeed, until the adoption of the word in a technical sense by the papal chancellery under Alexander II15 is there any regular and consistent use of the word even by officials. In a canon of Innocent III the interdict is described as cessatio a divino- rum celebrations or a divinis, and other writers of the same period fail to distinguish it from ban and excommunication.18 The usage still varied in 158s.19 Having shown that the emergence of the local interdict as a distinct discipline resulted from the opposition to general excommunication on the ground of its excessive severity and injustice, we will now examine the various theories that have been advanced in regard to the purpose of the interdict. It has been argued that the interdict was intended as an expression of disapproval of someone's misconduct.20 Instances inwhich this is true, and in which disapproval of an act is the sole purpose, are so rare as to be negligible. It has also been stated that the interdict was designed as a mode of propitiating an offended saint. A forcible objection to this, however, is the fact that propitiation of saints is never mentioned in the sentence as the purpose of an interdict. The theory that the interdict was intended to warn the faithful from future transgressions is untenable because of lack of proof in the sources, an objection which applies with equal force to the view that the interdict was designed to secure the spiritual improvement of the offender (poena medicinalis). That this last-named purpose was sometimes present one may not deny, but it cannot be considered otherwise than incidental, in view of the e...