are remitted unto them; and whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained[1]"? This would indicate an early date indeed. Yet the date matters little as compared with the main fact that the ecclesiastical doctrine of the incorruptibility of excommunicated persons was at some time borrowed from paganism.
The other half of the popular superstition, namely that those whose bodies were 'bound' by excommunication or otherwise, and whom the earth did not 'receive,' were ejected by her and re-appeared as revenants, caused the Church some embarrassment. Sometimes the alleged resuscitation of such persons was condemned as a mere hallucination of timorous and superstitious minds; at other times it was accepted as a fact and explained as a work of the Devil designed to lead men astray, and acting upon this idea the clergy often lent their services to absolve and to dissolve the suspected corpse.
Leo Allatius[2] reflects both these views and shows their effect upon the conduct of the clergy. After describing the actual appearance of such bodies, which gained for them the name [Greek: tympaniaioi], 'drumlike,' he introduces the second half of the superstition by saying that into such bodies the devil enters, and issuing from the tomb goes about working all manner of destruction; and he adds that when the body is exhumed, 'the priests recite prayers, and the body is thrown on a burning pyre; before the supplications are finished, the joints of the body gradually fall apart, and all the remains are burnt to ashes.' Yet shortly afterwards he states, 'This belief is not of fresh and recent growth in Greece; in ancient and modern times alike men of piety who have received the confessions of Christians have tried to root it out of the popular mind.' There is a clear contrast between the conduct of 'the priests' in one passage and that of the 'men of piety' in the other. The clergy did not as a body adopt a single and consistent attitude towards the popular superstition.
Similar inconsistency marks the nomocanon concerning vrykolakes, from which I have given selections along with the rest of Leo's account in the last section; these passages, for convenience of reference, are here repeated:
'Concerning a dead man, if such be found whole and incorrupt, the which they call vrykolakas. . .
