Definition
Sacrilegium is a term from Roman civil law with two distinct meanings:
1. The theft or misappropriation of sacred things — objects dedicated to religious use — or the removal of property from a holy place. The offense centered on the sacred character of the thing taken, not merely the act of taking.
2. By extension in imperial Roman law, any act of opposing or obstructing the execution of an imperial rescript or constitution. This broader usage reflects the quasi-divine authority attributed to imperial pronouncements in late Roman legal culture. The Codex records the maxim: *Sacrilegii instar est rescripto principis obviari* — it amounts to sacrilege to oppose the prince's rescript.
Neither meaning carries direct operative force in modern Anglo-American law. The term appears in historical legal texts, Roman law scholarship, and ecclesiastical law contexts, and researchers encounter it primarily when working with civil law sources, canon law materials, or early English legal writing influenced by Roman jurisprudence.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The act of violating or disrespecting something sacred or holy, whether a person, place, or object. Used broadly and often informally to describe any profound desecration.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The crime of violating or profaning sacred things; the alienating to laymen, or to common purposes, what has been appropriated or consecrated to religious persons, uses, or purposes.
The legal and common meanings are closely related, but the civil law term *sacrilegium* is more precise than casual usage suggests. In Roman law, it was a technical offense with specific elements — the sacred character of the object or place mattered as a jurisdictional and categorical question, not merely a moral one. The imperial extension (opposing a rescript as sacrilege) has no counterpart in ordinary English usage and represents a distinctly legal fiction built on the sacred-secular boundary of Roman imperial authority.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term is nearly always encountered in historical context rather than as living doctrine. Researchers should be alert to several navigational issues:
First, the double meaning is a consistent trap. Sources that cite *sacrilegium* may be referring either to the theft-of-sacred-property sense or the imperial-rescript sense, and the two are conceptually very different. Burrill is the most useful shelf source here because it is the only one among the three that records both meanings explicitly, with the critical maxim from the Codex.
Second, the ecclesiastical law tradition gave sacrilege its own developed doctrine entirely separate from Roman civil law usage. Canon law treated sacrilege as a sin and offense against the Church, with categories (personal, local, real) that do not map onto the Roman civil law definition. Researchers working in ecclesiastical archives or canon law sources will encounter a different taxonomic structure than Roman civil law texts use.
Third, early English common law absorbed some Roman-inflected concepts of sacred property through canon law channels, but *sacrilegium* as a technical term did not transplant into the common law system as operative doctrine. References to it in English legal texts are typically learned citations to Roman authority, not statements of common law principle.
Fourth, the imperial-rescript extension is important for researchers working on Roman constitutional law or the development of imperial authority in late antiquity. The maxim from Cod. 1.2 is a window into how Roman jurists constructed the sanctity of imperial command as analogous to religious obligation — a concept with downstream effects in medieval theories of royal and papal authority.
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Historical Dictionary Support
All three shelf sources agree on the primary definition — theft of sacred things or removal of property from a holy place — and all trace it to Calvin's *Lexicon Juridicum* and Brissonius. This consensus is straightforward and reliable for the core meaning.
Burrill substantially outperforms both Black's editions by recording the imperial-rescript extension, citing the Codex directly, and supplying the Latin maxim. The two Black's entries are identical in substance and omit this second meaning entirely, a meaningful gap for any researcher working beyond the simplest use of the term.
None of the shelf sources address the canon law development of sacrilege, which is a significant omission given how often researchers encounter the term in ecclesiastical contexts. The shelf sources are adequate for Roman civil law purposes but should not be treated as comprehensive for ecclesiastical law research.
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Jurisdictional Note
*Sacrilegium* as a technical legal term belongs to Roman civil law and has no direct counterpart as operative doctrine in common law jurisdictions. Some American states have criminal statutes addressing desecration of religious property or theft from places of worship, but these statutes derive from legislative enactment, not from *sacrilegium* as a common law heritage. Canon law jurisdictions (Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican) maintain developed doctrines of sacrilege that are independent of the Roman civil law definition.
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