What an Anathema Is — and What It Is Not

An anathema is not a curse, not a magical formula, and not a consignment of a soul to hell. It is the Church’s declaration that a teaching stands outside her faith and that whoever holds it obstinately has thereby placed himself outside her communion. This file establishes that from the word’s scriptural and conciliar use, from the Synodikon’s own formula, and from the Church’s canonical practice — and states as clearly what an anathema is not.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Word

The Greek anathema (ἀνάθεμα) is a Septuagint word before it is a conciliar one. It renders the Hebrew ḥerem, the thing “devoted” — set apart from ordinary use and handed over to God, whether for consecration or for destruction. The related form anathēma (ἀνάθημα) is used in Luke 21:5 of the votive offerings adorning the Temple; the sense common to both is separation from common use. Something anathematized is no longer among the things one handles.

In the New Testament the term is used of a person’s standing with respect to the Church and the Gospel. St. Paul writes that if anyone — “though we, or an angel from heaven” — should preach a gospel other than the one received, “let him be anathema” (Galatians 1:8–9); and “If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be anathema” (1 Corinthians 16:22). Most instructive of all is Romans 9:3, where the Apostle says that he could wish himself “anathema from Christ” for the sake of his kinsmen — which shows unambiguously that the word does not mean “damned by God,” since Paul is not contemplating his own damnation as something he could wish upon himself as an act of charity, but a separation from the community of Christ that he would accept if it could purchase theirs.

The pattern is consistent: anathema names a separation, and it names it with respect to the visible Church and her confession.

The Conciliar Use

From Nicaea onward the councils used the word to seal their definitions. The formula is invariably attached to a proposition: those who say such-and-such, the Catholic Church anathematizes. What is anathematized in the first instance is a teaching; persons come into the formula insofar as they hold it.

This is exactly the pattern the Synodikon follows. Its condemnations are almost all of the form “To them who say / think / do not confess…”; the named heresiarchs appear as the identified proponents of the positions already condemned. Even where a personal clause is severe — Isaac Argyros, who “remained obdurate in his impiety” — it specifies the doctrinal fault and the refusal of repentance (Synodikon of Orthodoxy, received Greek text of the Triodion; English translation circulated from Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston).

The Synodikon’s Own Formula

The Synodikon states its own theory of the act, in the sentence that opens the anathemas: “These acclamations, like blessings of fathers, are inherited by us, their sons, who zealously emulate their piety; but likewise do the curses seize upon those parricides and disdainers of the Master’s commandments. Wherefore, we in unison, since we constitute the plenitude of piety, lay upon the impious the curse which they have put upon themselves” (Synodikon, received text, introduction to the anathemas; the Louth/Lash translation of BL Add. 28816 reads: “we, as the community of piety, publicly inflict on them the curse which they have brought on themselves”).

Everything hangs on the final clause. The Church does not represent herself as imposing a doom, but as publishing a separation the heretic has effected. The theological grammar is declaratory, not creative: the anathema announces a fact rather than making one. The same grammar governs the severest of the iconoclast anathemas, which describes its objects as “already being putrified members, and having cut themselves off from the common body of the Church” (Synodikon, received text).

If one wanted a single-sentence Orthodox definition of anathema, this is it: the Church’s public declaration that a man, by his obstinate holding of a condemned teaching, has separated himself from her communion.

The Condition of Obstinacy

The Synodikon’s own procedure includes the offer of remedy and the refusal of it. Its heaviest iconoclast clause falls on those who are “not counseled by the Mosaic law… nor convinced to return to piety by the apostolic teachings, nor induced by patristic exhortations and explanations to abandon their deception, nor persuaded by the agreement of the Churches of God throughout the whole world,” and who are therefore “incorrigibly possessed by this deception” (Synodikon, received text). The clause on Isaac Argyros records that “the Church asked, as formerly She had often done, for his return and repentance,” and that he refused (received text).

Anathema is thus the terminus of a pastoral process, not its opening move. This corresponds exactly to the Lord’s own procedure in Matthew 18:15–17: private correction, correction before witnesses, the judgment of the Church, and only then the treatment as “a heathen man and a publican.” Error is not anathematized; obstinate error is.

Anathema and Excommunication

Orthodox canonical practice distinguishes degrees of separation, and the distinction is worth stating even though its terminology varies across the canonical literature.

The lesser penalty — aphorismos, excommunication in the narrow sense — suspends a person from Holy Communion for a stated period or until a condition is met. It is the ordinary instrument of pastoral discipline, is applied to persons rather than to teachings, is temporary by design, and does not remove the person from the Church. It is by far the more common act.

Anathema is the greater and rarer. It attaches to heresy, and it declares a separation from the body of the Church rather than a suspension within it. It is pronounced not by a confessor or a parish priest but by a council or a synod. It is not time-limited, but neither is it irrevocable: it lapses upon repentance, and the Church has in fact lifted anathemas (see below).

Two further points must be made about anathema’s limits, because they are the points most often confused.

It is not a sentence on a soul. The Church does not claim to know, and does not pronounce, where any man stands before God. Her competence is her own communion. The distinction between the visible boundary of the Church and the secret judgment of God is basic to Orthodox ecclesiology, and no anathema crosses it (see Ecclesiology).

It is not a curse. A curse invokes harm; an anathema declares a status. The Synodikon’s own word for what it publishes is “the curse which they have put upon themselves” — that is, a self-inflicted consequence, not an imprecation launched by the Church. Nothing in the act is thought to do anything to the person in the manner of a spell; the Orthodox tradition has no such category.

Who Can Pronounce One

The answer is: a council or a synod of bishops, acting for the Church, and no one else.

The Synodikon’s history confirms this without exception. Every stratum this collection has been able to date entered the text after a synodal judgment: the anathemas from the council of 869–870, the clauses from the Tome of Union of 920, the eleven chapters after the synod of 1082, the Eucharistic chapters after the councils of 1156–57, the Palamite chapters after 1351 (Frederick Lauritzen, “The Layers of Composition of the Synodikon of Alexius Studites,” Studia Ceranea 7 [2017]: 121–128, at 122, 124, 126–127; and see The Later Strata, The Palamite Chapters).

It follows that no individual — priest, monk, layman, blogger, or bishop acting alone — is competent to anathematize. A believer who tells another that he is anathema has not performed an ecclesial act; he has made a private assertion with a borrowed word. This is not a modern liberal qualification but the plain requirement of the canonical order, and it is reinforced by the patristic cautions collected in The Sobriety of the Fathers.

Anathemas Can Be Lifted

Because an anathema declares a separation rather than fixing an eternal fate, it can be removed when the condition that produced it changes — and the Church has removed them.

The best-documented modern case is the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1971, which annulled the anathemas laid by the Great Moscow Council of 1666–67 on the old rites and on those who kept them, declaring them “as though they had not been” and recognizing the old rites as equally salvific. Whatever one thinks of the seventeenth-century events, the 1971 act establishes the principle: an anathema is an ecclesial judgment, and the Church that made it can unmake it.

A second case, of a different kind, is the mutual lifting of the personal anathemas of 1054 by Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras in 1965. That act, it must be said precisely, removed anathemas that were from the beginning directed at named individuals — Humbert and his fellow legates on one side, Cerularius and his associates on the other — and it did not restore communion or resolve any doctrinal question (see The Scope of the Anathemas and From 1848 to 1965, where what the 1965 act did and did not do is set out in full). It is cited here only to make the structural point: anathemas are acts, and acts can be reversed by the authority competent to make them.

The Medicinal Intent

Orthodox canonical theology understands penalties as therapeutic rather than punitive: the canons are medicine for the soul, and the bishop who applies them is described in the tradition as a physician. That framework applies to anathema too, in two ways.

Toward the one anathematized, the act is intended to bring him to his senses. St. Paul’s own use of separation makes the aim explicit: delivering a man to Satan “for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus” (1 Corinthians 5:5). The purpose of publishing the separation is that the separated man should feel it and return; this is why the Synodikon records repeated invitations to repentance before the anathema falls.

Toward the Church, the act protects the faithful from a teaching that would harm them. Fr. Lawrence Farley presses this point for a modern readership: precision in doctrine is pastoral care, not intellectual sport, because a false account of Christ disables the Christian life it purports to describe (Lawrence Farley, “Defending the Synodikon,” Orthodox Church in America, Reflections in Christ). The Synodikon’s own image — the heretic as a “putrified member” cut off from the body — belongs to medical rather than judicial vocabulary.

Five Things an Anathema Is Not

To close, and for the avoidance of doubt:

Not a curse. It invokes no harm; it declares a status.
Not a damnation. It says nothing about where anyone will be in the age to come. That judgment is God’s, and the Church does not anticipate it.
Not permanent by nature. It lapses on repentance, and the Church that pronounced it can annul it.
Not available to individuals. It is a conciliar act, and any private use of the word is not an ecclesial act at all.
Not a judgment on the sincerity, intelligence, or moral standing of those affected. It is a judgment on a proposition, and on the refusal to abandon it after correction.

What it is, positively, is the Church saying out loud where her faith ends. She does that because she believes there is such a thing as her faith; and a body that cannot say where its confession ends will shortly be unable to say what it is.

References

Scripture: Galatians 1:8–9; 1 Corinthians 5:5; 1 Corinthians 16:22; Romans 9:3; Luke 21:5; Matthew 18:15–17.
Synodikon of Orthodoxy. Received Greek text as printed in the Triodion; English translation circulated from Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston. (The introduction to the anathemas; the iconoclast clause on incorrigibility; the clause on Isaac Argyros.)
Synodikon of Orthodoxy. Trans. Andrew Louth, edited to London, British Library, Additional MS 28816 by Archimandrite Ephrem (Lash). (The parallel wording of the self-exclusion formula.)
Lauritzen, Frederick. “The Layers of Composition of the Synodikon of Alexius Studites.” Studia Ceranea 7 (2017): 121–128. (Every datable stratum follows a synodal judgment.)
Farley, Lawrence. “Defending the Synodikon.” Orthodox Church in America, Reflections in Christ. (Doctrinal precision as pastoral care.)
Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, 1971, act annulling the anathemas of the Great Moscow Council of 1666–67 on the old rites. (Anathemas can be lifted.)
Tomos Agapis (1971), documents of the mutual lifting of the anathemas of 1054 by Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras, 7 December 1965. (Cited here for the structural point only; on what the act did and did not do, see the Great Schism collection.)