Caput XXIV
The King Who Dined with the Excommunicated
A bishop excommunicates two royal brothers for repudiating their wives, and the king is later enticed by flattery to dine at their house.
The history of the English people records that a certain bishop excommunicated two brothers, men of the palace, for repudiating their wives. It happened that the king of that same people was passing by the house of these brothers. The king, enticed by many flatteries to turn aside to their house for lunch, at last consented.
The Bishop's Rebuke and the King's Prostration
The king, meeting the bishop after the banquet, prostrates himself in the road, but the bishop rebukes him for knowingly keeping company with the excommunicated.
When the banquet was over and he was already on his way back, he met the bishop who had excommunicated those brothers. The king trembled when he saw him, and leaping down from his horse, he prostrated himself in the middle of the road, just as he was, before the bishop. But the bishop, approaching him, touched him with the rod he held in his hand, saying: 'O king, it is not for me to acknowledge you, because you have acted against God, when you knowingly kept company with the excommunicated.'
The Prophetic Sentence and Its Fulfillment
The bishop pronounces that the king will die that year in the very house where he despised the excommunication, and the sentence is fulfilled; neither the king's death nor the bishop's power could undo the gravity of the offense.
'For this reason this sentence is upon you: you must die this year, in the very house in which you despised the excommunication.' And so it came to pass, just as it is read there. So the king could not expiate this guilt except by dying; and the bishop could not forgive even the king prostrated in the dust.
The Lesson: No One Is Above the Church's Judgment
The narrator draws the moral conclusion that even the bishop who issued the excommunication cannot forgive so grave a wrong without the most serious repentance.
From all this, then, we must conclude that not even the bishop himself—the one whose excommunication has been despised—can forgive a wrong of this gravity without the most serious repentance.1
Read the original Latin
Legitur in historia gentis Anglorum, quod quidam episcopus duos fratres Palatinos viros pro repudio uxorum excommunicavit. Contigit autem ut rex ipsius gentis juxta domum ipsorum transiret. Qui multis blandimentis delinitus, ut apud eos ad prandendum diverteret, tandem consensit. Expleto autem convivio, cum jam rediret, obviavit episcopo, qui fratres illos excommunicavit: quem cum vidisset intremuit, et exsiliens de equo in media, ut erat, via prostravit se coram episcopo. At ille appropinquans ad eum, ferula, quam manu tenebat, tetigit eum dicens: O rex, non est meum agnoscere tibi, quia contra Deum fecisti, quando te excommunicatis scienter sociasti. Idcirco ista sententia est de te: hoc anno mori habes in domo ipsa in qua excommunicationem contempsisti. Quod et factum est sicut ibi legitur. Ecce rex non potuit hunc reatum nisi moriendo expiare: ecce episcopus nec prostrato regi in pulvere potuit ignoscere.
Ex his ergo colligendum est, quia nec ipse episcopus, cujus excommunicatio contemnitur, sine gravissima poenitentia hujusmodi facinus ignoscere potest.
Notes
- 1 ↩poenitentia rendered as 'repentance' rather than 'penance' to capture the interior conversion implied by the context, though the sacramental sense of penance is not excluded.
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