The Forgotten Practice of Christian Cursing

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.