The Forgotten Practice of Christian Cursing

Scripture contains curses (though the Deformers removed many of them from the Liturgy) and the Church, for centuries, cursed the enemies of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. 

From The European Conservative

By Brian Scarffe

The Church must take more seriously its power to curse God’s enemies, for their sake and for ours.

t no longer seems controversial to claim that we live in a time both of ecclesiastical and civilisational crisis. All around us, old certainties are disappearing and structures of life disintegrating. But this is a crisis a long time in the making. Some suggest that many of our maladies began with the Reformation, with Luther’s rebellion against authority. But in attempting to identify a point in time at which everything started to go wrong, we simply continue what the reformers themselves set out to do, namely identify some golden age of a ‘pure Church’ to which Christians should return. More radical movements engaged in perhaps the first case of year zero thinking in which absolutely everything, even down to foundational moral questions—such as polygamy—would need to be rebuilt from the ground up.

This twofold practice of trying to identify a pivotal time in history at which the West’s trajectory suddenly took a negative turn and also trying to identify beliefs and practices that have been lost has turned into a veritable cottage industry both within and without the Catholic communion. Enjoyable new academic pastimes have emerged tracing the genealogy of our modern malaise to various scholastic disputes, with particular attention paid towards the introduction of nominalist tendencies in metaphysics. Ockham’s name often rears its head, more recently joined by Scotus—particularly among a group of maverick Anglicans who come under the moniker ‘radical Orthodoxy’—who have been at various times accused of misreading the Subtle Doctor. We also see two faces of St. Thomas Aquinas emerge, Aristotelian and Neoplatonic, leading to different schools of thought with suspicions about the pathological effects of the other’s misreading contributing to further divisions. Lively debates about the place of Hermeticism within the Christian tradition have also emerged, partly informed by the growing interest in Neoplatonism.

Similar projects have taken place in the study of ethics—with Alistair McIntyre’s After Virtue introducing the idea that we have gone through a cultural cataclysm of such proportions that we are no longer capable of talking about ethics as our mediaeval forefathers did. As a result, our struggles over questions of the meaning of marriage, contraception, and the value of unborn life suffer from a stunted language and a deformed philosophical paradigm. The economic sphere is not untouched by these questions either, with usury lurking behind debates over competing forms of capitalism.

But it is not only the conservative-minded who are looking for the cause of our troubles. The liberally inclined Dominicans of early 20th century France rejected the dry and lifeless scholasticism which they saw as being partially responsible for laying the groundwork for the Great War. They beheld the ashes of a Christian European civilisation which had been destroyed entirely by civilised Christian Europeans. In response, they felt that a new theology needed to arise, one that would seek to go back to the pure age of the Church Fathers. Manual texts which had been the medium by which generations of clergy had encountered ancient Christianity were seen as distorting the true spiritual vibrancy of the Early Church, a vibrancy to which they thought we must return. The genius of Thomas Aquinas also needed to be freed from the stranglehold of a scholastic tradition divorced from all historical perspective; Thomism, many felt, had slowly lost track of the true Thomas.

A certain optimism crept in as it seemed that an earlier and purer Church was reappearing on earth again. In the ‘60s, this led to the simplification of the Roman Rite at the itchy fingers of committees inspired by Pope John XXIII’s call for a new openness towards the modern world. But at the same time, the reforms were seen as a return to an older, purer, and simpler form of worship. For a time, the full weight of the Church’s scholarly endeavours was thrown at demonstrating this, and churches all over the Western world went through a catastrophic series of ‘renovations’ in which decades if not centuries of church architecture and design were destroyed. Unbelievably, this wanton destruction of sacred heritage was at times funded by the selling of valuable church properties.

A recurring theme concerns the identification of a bygone time when some truth had been grasped but is now lost. Each loss is felt to be the removal of a blessing which in turn reveals my underlying theme: fading blessings, or the imposition of a curse. Before further investigating a key thread in my interest—namely the place of the curse in Christianity—it would be worth noting that most of the points of loss identified, or times at which a key error emerges, occur after the extraordinary moment in 1054 when the two great halves of Christendom exchanged mutual anathemas, placing a curse upon each other’s houses. Blessing’s dark and forgotten sibling, namely malediction, has a long and distinguished history in both the Old and New Testament and in the age of the Church, each of which we shall now briefly consider before delving further into understanding why it is necessary and why without it there can be no proper understanding of blessing either.

My attention was first brought to this subject matter when in 2021 I stumbled across an article entitled “Bring Back the Imprecatory Psalms” in which the author laments the loss, from the liturgy of the hours, of these important and divinely sanctioned prayers which give voice to the cries of rage and despair which good people at times legitimately feel. In this article, particular attention was given to the fact that the loss of this scriptural and prayerful outlet of anger—particularly at the wickedness of evil men—has come at a time when the church’s institutional hierarchy has been embroiled in the most heinous corruption and scandals of abuse. When one reads some of the curse-like invocations of these Psalms, one is wielding a spiritual weapon against evildoers, a weapon that until recently had been wielded widely both informally by people of God and by formal authority in liturgical settings. Let us consider the history of this practice.

It should come as no surprise that the most obvious examples of curses uttered by God’s people or by God himself are found in the Old Testament, which is often caricatured for its wrathful God. Some of the very first recorded actions of God Himself would see him curse the ground after the sin of Adam and cursing Eve for eating the forbidden fruit (Gn 3:16-17). God then curses Cain for killing his brother, and as an act of mercy promises to curse anyone who would kill Cain as he lived out his accursed fate (Gn 4). The curses continue with God delivering a curse upon any who would curse Abram (Gn 12). Further curses are delivered to the wicked and to Israel and to all those who do not honour the Lord’s name throughout the books of Proverbs and Malachi.

But it is not only God who curses but also his servants. In a story whose deep and spiritual inner meaning has surely been lost in the sands of time we find the prophet Elisha cursing a group of youths in God’s name for making fun of his bald head. Not one to be seen as tardy in following through with His servant’s maledictions, God immediately prompts two bears to savage 42 of the young men to death. This is particularly interesting because it is a curse made for a personal offence rather than as an action in the cosmic battle between good and evil. Elisha’s master, Elijah, curses the whole land of Israel so that it will not receive any nourishing rain until he gives his word (1 Kgs 17:1), showing that the hand of God will turn in collective punishment against his people when they stray from faithfulness.

Jeremiah contains one of the most interesting curses in the Old Testament. God commands Jeremiah to take up a potters earthenware jug and to break it in the sight of all those of Israel, including the elders and priests, as a curse and a sign that Israel will be broken: “Thus says the Lord of hosts: so will I break this people and this city, as one breaks a potters vessel, so that it can never be mended.”

The rest of Jeremiah’s speech is worth reading. What is easily missed to the contemporary reader, however, is that at the time that Jeremiah was alive it was common practice outside of Israel to curse one’s enemies with a ritual which included the destruction of an earthen vessel or figurine. Thus, Jeremiah was practising divinely mandated magic.

In the New Testament, Jesus famously curses the fig tree which bore no fruit. Contemporary reactions to this verse vary from confusion to nervous avoidance—the latter particularly in the case of those who know that in the Old Testament a fig tree was often seen as a deeply spiritual metaphor for Israel herself. Jesus Christ’s lesson to the faithful: look at the power of the faithful man’s prayer, with the Son of God Himself deciding that no better example could be given than that of a curse. The cities of Tyre and Sidon, Bethsaida and Chorazin appear to come under the curses of Christ when he cries, reprimanding “Woe unto thee, Chorazin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works, which were done in you, had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes” (Matt 11:21-22).

This is legitimately interpreted as predictive, yet the text is clear with us that Christ is reprimanding, upbraiding the cities, giving some insight into the prescriptive/descriptive ambiguity that so many of these curses of both the Old and New Testaments fall into, not so much undermining the teaching of the text but rather our contemporary preoccupations. None of this should really come as a surprise to those of us who believe that the imprecatory Psalms are the words of the pre-incarnate Christ, the Eternal Logos who speaks through all Sacred Scripture.

We don’t have to wait long for the first papal curse. In Acts, chapter 8, we find the rock on which the church was built curse the first simoniac, Simon Magus, with the words: 

May your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain God’s gift with money! You have no part or share in this, for your heart is not right before God. Repent therefore of this wickedness of yours, and pray to the Lord that, if possible, the intent of your heart may be forgiven you. For I see that you are in the gall of bitterness and the chains of wickedness. 

Not only do we hear an echo of the Jeremiah curse mentioned earlier, where what happens to one thing happens to another by analogy, but scholars have pointed out similarities between Peter’s words and the contemporary practices of analogical sorcery; just as with the destruction of A, so it is with the destruction of B. Furthermore, explicit curses on behalf of the apostles also appear in Acts 13.

Finally, in the Book of Revelation we see beneath the great altar of the Lord all of those who had been redeemed, calling out for vengeance and asking how long the Lord would wait before taking vengeance. Among these saints would be many from the post-apostolic period, and as we now turn to the age of the Church we shall see the curses continue as a major aspect of Christian spirituality. 

Historians have noted a rich tradition of cursing in the British Isles and Ireland in particular. St. Patrick is recorded as cursing on a number of occasions, with one record giving us the detail that he raised his left hand (the right hand is the hand of blessing) whilst saying “May this impious one who blasphemes your name now be lifted away and quickly slain.” St. Berach can be found in a cursing exchange with a local druid, during which the saint says “May the wretched cursing man lose the use of his tongue lest he should try to offer even more blasphemous words to the true and living God.” A number of curses are to be found in the 9th-century law of the innocents written by the Abbot of Iona, St. Adamnan, where we find the key phrase “May the curse of God be on you.”

In a practice which mirrors the blessing of objects, monastic scribes would protect the books they were writing with a written curse, with one example reading “May an anathema slay anyone who steals this book away.” There is little evidence that either the cursing saints or their later recorders felt the need to justify any of these actions; curses were simply the other face of blessings.

That curses were sanctioned by the official structures of the church is also important. Council documents are littered with extraordinary condemnations of heresiarchs, but it is in connection with the practice of excommunication that the harshest curses can be found. The most extreme form of excommunication was conjoined with an anathema which the 17th century French Jesuit Jacques Eveillon described in the following way:

Anathema augments the punishments of excommunication beyond what simple excommunication does, such that the anathematised is more deprived of the protection of God, and more absolutely exposed and abandoned to the rage and violence of this furious enemy, and by virtue of the malediction that the Church pronounces against him; and for the same reasons it is called in the canons of excommunication ‘maledictus.’

The normative mediaeval rite for this type of excommunication was frightening enough: the Bishop, with 12 priests, all carrying candles would come together and solemnly pronounce the words: “We declare him excommunicated and anathematised and we judge and condemn to eternal fire with Satan and his angels and all the reprobate, so long as he will not burst the fetters of the Demon, do penance and satisfy the Church.”

Other rites were more severe still. St. Maedoc pronounced “Five diseases the Son of God inflicts on those whom I excommunicate, all who outraged: consumption, cholera, paralysis, sudden death, and hell.” Similar practices could be found in early France. The explicit nature of the curses associated with excommunication could not be clearer than in the proclamation of Pope Benedict VIII, who in 1014 declared:

May they be cursed in the East, disinherited in the West, interdicted in the North, and excommunicated in the South. May they be cursed in the day and excommunicated at night. May they be cursed at home and excommunicated while away, cursed in standing and excommunicated in sitting. May they be cursed in the spring and excommunicated in the summer, cursed in the autumn and excommunicated in the winter.

The Malediction of Bishop Ernulphus of Rochester, dated around 1124, is a record of an ancient Anglo-Saxon rite of excommunication which reads:

By the authority of God almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and of all the holy canons, and of the undefiled Virgin Mary, mother and patroness of our Saviour, and all the celestial virtues, angels, archangels, thrones, dominions, powers, cherubim, and Seraphim … We excommunicate and anathematise this malefactor … May the Father who created him, curse him. May the Son who suffered for us, curse him. May the Holy Ghost, who was given to us in baptism, curse him. 

The curses continue in a long litany with everyone from the Virgin Mary and the Apostles to the very heavens and the earth being invoked to curse the individual. Later it continues:

May he be cursed in eating and drinking, in being hungry, in being thirsty, in fasting, in sleeping, in slumbering, in walking, standing, in lying, in working, in resting, in pissing, in shiting, and in bloodletting. May he be cursed in all the faculties of his body. May he be cursed inwardly and outwardly! May he be cursed in the hair of his head! May he be cursed in his brains. 

It continues line after line when finally it finishes: “And may heaven with all the powers that move therein, rise up against him, curse and damn him unless he repent and make satisfaction. Amen.” There is such a rich history of Christian cursing in both the formal liturgical sense and in the tradition of spontaneous outbursts that we must simply move on in order to understand the broader point.

It should be clear by now that the practice of cursing has a time-honoured place in the Christian religion, and yet for a clearer understanding of its position in Christianity we must turn to the great ‘type’ of God’s redemptive act in the Old Testament book of Numbers. In this mysterious text, God punishes his people for their sins by sending fiery seraph-snakes (nāchāš śārāph) among them which bite and kill many (the word is the same in the Hebrew as that for the seraphim of Isaiah, chapter 6). When Moses cries out to God for deliverance, he is commanded to make a fiery serpent (or seraph) from brass, that the people might look to it and be cured of the deadly bites.

The narrative that unfolds in the Book of Numbers gives us a vivid spiritual symbol of God’s salvation plan which would one day come to completion on the cross when God incarnate would become a curse for us (Gal 3:13). But what is most striking is that the blessings that men receive at the foot of the fiery serpent on the pole are mirrored by the curses that they have received from the fiery seraphim sent by God. Both the blessing and the curse come from the same source—the fiery serpent-seraphim. The polar entanglements of blessing and curse are tied together in the singular figure of Love Himself precisely because its effects manifest in the type of reception found. To put it more plainly, the crucified Christ is a blessing for those who believe and a curse for those who reject him.

The modern world presents us with a picture of love which has become almost entirely sentimentalised. In the Anglophone world, this is compounded by the fact that our language often lacks subtlety in areas of discussion where subtlety is required, and hence we find ourselves unable to express the many different forms of love clearly and distinctly. Greek famously has four loves, and many other languages exhibit similar insights into the various forms, but to the modern Anglo mind the different kinds of love have become increasingly difficult to distinguish from mere niceness on the one hand and superficial (but perhaps intense) emotion on the other. 

The ancient Neoplatonists understood that the One was like a transcendent and ultimate Sun emanating the light of reality, thereby giving the gift of existence wherever its light reached. In baptising this great ancient strain of philosophy, Christianity personalised this emanating Being by showing the face of its burning fire to be Love Himself. Without any hint of sentimentalism, this vision of God as Love brings clarity to the notion of God as a consuming fire radiating light into the darkness and causing burning discomfort to those who love the darkness.

In this context, it becomes clear that the command to love one’s enemies is not to be taken in the trivial sense of just being nice to people who want to destroy you, but rather following in the Way, to make your presence a full gift of self—mirroring the gift of the One—and in doing so, in some circumstances, this may take the form of a curse. It is clear that such a curse must still entail willing the good of the other, even in the formal curses which we have considered, because the intention is always for the repentance of the wicked. 

The fiery serpent which Moses lifts for the people to look upon is intended to remedy the curse which itself has come from fiery serpents. The people must experience the dreadful spiritual state they are in by being exposed to the fiery seraphim emanating from God’s holiness—precisely so that they do not stay in their spiritual darkness, eventually to fall into the outer darkness itself. The God who is Light of Light wrestles with us to stop us turning back to look at the nothingness from whence we came, presenting us with blessings and curses along the way. The blessing itself, of the fiery serpent on the pole, Christ the slain lamb, has no coherent position outside a worldview that accepts the reality of curses. Where you find one, you will find the other. As one of the thieves on the cross by Christ’s side experiences the redemptive act as a curse, mocking and blaspheming unto his own destruction, his companion exposed to the same fiery seraph is healed. Without the blessing and the curse, you have only the sinning children of God slipping away from Being to Non-Being.

Returning to the anathemas with which the Eastern and Western wings of the Church cursed each other, it is now clear why all the other catastrophes—intellectual, spiritual, and societal—are rooted here. Bishops, wielding the authority of the pectoral cross—the symbol of both blessing and curse—brought down fiery serpents upon each other and since then we have all suffered the consequences.

Ironically, however, as we appear to be reaching the end of the road of dissolution which largely started in that fateful century, we no longer recognise the power of the curse at all, just as we stand in confusion concerning the very purpose and power of blessing. Entangled in a shallow understanding of love, which now dominates our shared imaginative landscape, most Christians and most ecclesial bodies consider it unthinkable to issue a curse against anyone—either within or without the Body of Christ. Yet the imperative to curse must be seen as a simple consequence of the terrifying reality of the crucifixion, for to reject the fiery serpents of the curse is to reject the very same fiery Serpent who gives healing and blessing.

Living in a land which has been blessed by uncountable Holy Masses, whose grace infuses the very ground on which we have built our civilisation, among forests which still remember the unending praise of the monks and nuns, generation after generation, lifting up nature herself to receive the blessing of the Creator, the Church must take more seriously its power to curse God’s enemies. It must do this for their own sake, as well as ours. The curses which the Church may bestow amount to a powerful and terrifying weapon, which should not be wielded lightly. It is a measure to which few applications spring to mind yet, there are options to consider.

That this land should now find itself with many institutions which—under the protection of the law—allow for the destruction of innocent unborn human life, executed in the name of freedom and flourishing no less, is one of the most unacceptable state of affairs to Christian people. A variety of strategies have been tested, the chief of which, namely prayer, has become increasingly difficult to exercise within certain local boundaries. The full force of the state has turned to protecting the system even from those who would silently pray. It is perhaps time to consider the forgotten instruments of Christian action to bring about justice for the most defenceless of God’s children.

A second potential theatre of implementation is seemingly close. Consider that we live in a time where every tribal hatred and every foreign war must play out on the streets of every Western capital. The press and politicians scramble to take the correct positions, delivering speeches condemning aggressors and so on and so forth. Yet one of the world’s oldest Christian nations, Armenia, which has undergone genocide in living memory, stands on the precipice of annihilation, and the same political and media classes meet this catastrophe with silence. Perhaps it is time for the bishops—and if the bishops refuse to wield their authority, the laity and lesser clerics—to raise an earthenware jar waiting in anticipation for wicked men who “sit in ambush in the villages; in hiding places to murder the innocent. With eyes stealthily watching for the hapless … lurking that they may seize the poor … thinking in their heart, ‘God has forgotten, he has hidden his face, he will never see it.’” (Ps 10).

Let the Apostles’ Successors hold the earthenware jar with its Azerbaijani name and pray “Arise, O Lord; God, lift up thy hand; forget not the afflicted. Why does the wicked say in his heart “thou will not be called to account? Break down the arm of the wicked and evil doer… Do justice to the fatherless and the oppressed, so that the man who is of the earth may strike terror no more.” And if, in their folly, wicked men take the sword to this ancient Christian people, let the people of God leave hold of the earthenware jar, letting it fall to the earth with the speed of a fiery seraph.