the execution and its message in demanding that there should be at least four days between communion and execution.181 Later in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, several provincial and diocesan synods required that execution be delayed by at least one day.182 Haring has found that one for the future interesting rationale for every denial was set out by Robert Pullen, active in the twelfth century as teacher of theology in Oxford and Paris and finally cardinal. Pullen claimed that if a criminal was visited by the priest, confessed his sins, and was given Absolution and communion, others might be tempted to commit crimes. He also argued that through communion the Christian became the temple of God. Such a temple must not be profaned but protected. Therefore, the judge should either keep the priest away from the criminal or release her. If public safety made freedom impossible, the condemned and soon executed had to turn to remorse as the path to salvation.183 One can wonder if Pullen, when he called the execution a temptation, knew of cases where a crime was committed in order to be punished and meet a priest? Pullen at least holds out a shred of hope to the condemned who were not absolved; Cohen interprets their situation as hopeless, for: ”they died unconfessed and unshriven and thus eternally damned and excluded from all hope of reintegration within humanity at the end of time.”184 To die unshriven would eventually be rejected by the church. The practice of hindering the Absolution of the criminal was proscribed by the council of Vienne in 1311.185 The late medieval preoccupation with death fuelled a strong interest in eternity, and especially its gateway and the route thither. It has been said that the interest for death was not in it self particularly Christian, while there was a clearly Christian response in 181 Haring 1912 p 40 sq, Browe 1935 p 235 sq. 182 Browe 1935 p 266 sq. 183 Haring 1912 p 6 sq, 30 sq. Browe makes a little more positive interpretation of Pullen focusing on the impossible combination of communion and execution. Anyone that have received communion could not be executed. Despite this the condemned can have a hope through confession and Absolution, Browe 1935 p 235. 184 Cohen 1990 p 293 sq. 185 Browe 1935 p 249, Haring 1912 p 8 sq, see also Cohen 1990 p 295, Schuster 2007 p 701. 72
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