Damnatory meaning

The sense of the damnatory clauses has, however, not been weakened.

But, though in 1680 he published his Unreasonableness of Separation, his willingness to serve on the ecclesiastical commission of 1689, and the interpretation he then proposed of the damnatory clauses of the Athanasian creed, are proof that to the end he leaned towards toleration.

damnatory clause for those who do not accept this teaching.

As he informed Gilbert Sheldon, then warden of All Souls, in a letter, he was fully resolved on two points - that to say that the Fourth Commandment is a law of God appertaining to Christians is false and unlawful, and that the damnatory clauses in the Athanasian Creed are most false, and in a high degree presumptuous and schismatical.

He was also a supporter of the movement for abolishing the recitation of the Athanasian Creed in the public services of the Church of England, believing, as he said, that the "presence" of the damnatory clauses, "as they stand and where they stand, is a real peril to the Church and to Christianity itself," and that those clauses "are no essential part" of the creed.