and of absolution, while δέω “bind” signifies their respective and several opposites. Accordingly forms of absolution had to be provided which might be read over bodies found in such a condition, for it was thought that this might be brought about by well-nigh any curse, although an episcopal anathema was considered the most weighty and the most terrible. Nevertheless it might be that these conditions resulted from the curse of a parent even from an imprecation uttered by a man against himself, or from the ban of a priest, for in the Orthodox Church the power of excommunicating belonged to priests as well as to bishops, but they should not exercise it without episcopal sanction.[16] One such absolution runs thus: “Yea, O Lord our God, let Thy great mercy and marvellous compassion prevail; and, whether this Thy servant lieth under curse of father or mother, or under his own imprecation, or did provoke one of Thy holy ministers and sustained at his hands a bond that hath not been loosed, or did incur the most grievous ban of excommunication by a bishop, and through heedlessness and sloth obtained not pardon, pardon Thou him by the hand of Thy sinful and unworthy servant; resolve Thou his body into that from which it was made; and stablish his soul in the tabernacle of saints.”[17] So in the burial service an orison is made that the body may be dissolved into the dust of which it was made, διάλυσον εἰς τὰ ἐζ ὧν συνετέθη, and in a solemn Requiem, is offered the supplication, “Unbind the curse, be it of priest or of arch-presbyter,” Αῦσον κατάραν, ἐίτε ἱερέως ἐίτε ἀρχιερέως.
Naturally, as is clearly expressed, the curse which the Orthodox Church regarded as most weighty and most effective was the ban of excommunication by a bishop, and therefore the formula of excommunication doomed the offender to remain whole after death, and the body was not freed until absolution had been read over it and the excommunication formally revoked.
However, a considerable difficulty arose. It was discovered that excommunication sometimes failed to produce the expected physical result, and the body crumbled to dust in the ordinary way. Accordingly this had to be reckoned with and explained and Leone Allacci in his De quorundam Graecorum opinationibus[18] cites a nomocanon de excommunicatis which sets out to explain how it is that sometimes excommunication
