Anathema

Anathema (pronounced uh-nath-uh-muh)

(1) Something or someone that one vehemently dislikes.

(2) A formal ecclesiastical curse by a leader or governing council of a church, excommunicating a person or denouncing a doctrine.

(3) A person or thing accursed or consigned to damnation or destruction.

(4) A technical definition of any imprecation of divine punishment.

(5) A curse or execration.

1520s: From the Middle English, from the Church Latin anathema (an excommunicated person or the curse of excommunication) derived from Greek anathema (a thing accursed; dedicated to evil, from anatithenai (to dedicate).  Interestingly, the original meaning was "a thing devoted" (literally "a thing set up” (to the gods)).  The construct was ana (up) + tithenai ("to place").  It was originally a votive offering but by the time it reached Latin, the meaning had progressed through "thing devoted to evil," to "thing accursed or damned" and the meaning in the Ancient Greek term was influenced by the Hebrew herem, leading to the sense of "accursed", especially in religious matters.  In later ecclesiastical use, it became applied to persons, institutions and even ideas as a Divine Curse; the technical, legal meaning of “a formal act or formula of consigning to damnation” dating from the 1610s.  One mistake which has endured for centuries is the use of maranatha, taken as an intensified form.  It’s a misreading of the Syriac maran etha "the Lord hath come", which follows anathema in scripture (I Corinthians 16:22) but is no way connected and the error persists because of the large number of references in medieval texts, written by scribes who for years duplicated the original error.  Anathema is a noun, anathematic & anathematical are adjectives, anathematization & anathematizer are nouns, anathematize is a verb and anathematically is an adverb; the noun plural is plural anathemata (because of the special history, the form anathemas is not an alternative).

Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December 2011.

Historically, in the early Christian church, the issue of an anathema signified an exclusion from the community of the faithful on grounds of heresy.  By the late medieval period, canon lawyers had developed a distinction between anathema and excommunication, apparently because of the need for technical devices in the handling of actual heretics (permanently to be excluded from communion) and those behaving badly (subject to a kind of ecclesiastical sin-bin, those punished able to be re-admitted to reception of the sacraments upon repenting).  In the west, the 1917 Roman Code of Canon Law abandoned the distinction between major and minor excommunication but in the east, the Orthodox maintained the rule, something confirmed by Bartholomew I (Dimitrios Arhondonis (b 1940); Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople since 1991) as recently as 2021.  The current (1983) Code of Canon Law does not contain the word anathema but documents of anathema continue to be issued by Orthodox Patriarchs, the most dramatic of which were those around the great disputes within Russian Orthodoxy after the 1917 Russian revolutions.

The Latin forms, for those who think English formations are difficult.