can fail of its result. “Concerning persons excommunicate the which sadly incur episcopal excommunication and after death are found with their bodies ‘not loosed’ (ἄλυτα).”
Certain persons have been duly, rightly, and lawfully excommunicated by their bishops, as evil doers and transgressors of the divine law, and they have without penance and amendment, or without receiving absolution died in the state of excommunication, and so have been buried, and in a short time after their bodies have been found “loosed” (λελυμένα) and shredded joint from joint, bone from bone.
Exceeding strange and marvellous is this that he who hath been lawfully excommunicated should after his death be found with his body “loosed” (λελυμένος τὸ σῶμα) and the joints of the body separate.
So extraordinary a circumstance was immediately submitted to a conclave of expert theologians, who after long debate decided that any excommunicated person whose body did not remain whole had no more hope of salvation because he was no longer in a state to be “loosed” and absolved by the bishop who had excommunicated him, but that he was already damned in hell. If not absolutely essential, the removal of the ban was if possible to be affected by the same person who had pronounced it, and this provides, against an excommunicated person obtaining absolution too easily.[19] Of course a superior might rescind the anathema pronounced by one of his subjects, a bishop could always remove an excommunication pronounced by a simple priest, but under certain conditions this regulation must certainly prove excessively awkward. There is, for example, the well known instance told by Christophorus Angelus in his Ἐγχειρίδιον περὶ τῆς καταστάσεως τῶν σήμερον εὐρισκομένων Ἑλλήνων,[20] who relates that a bishop was excommunicated by a council of his peers, and his body remained “bound, as it were iron, for the space of a hundred years,” after which time a second council of bishops at the same place pronounced absolution, and immediately as they spoke the words the body “crumbled to dust.”
The nomocanon de excommunicatis goes on to say that “those that are found excommunicate, namely with their bodies whole and ‘not loosed’ (ἄλυτα), these require absolution, in order that the body also may attain freedom from the
