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title: The Indissolubility of Marriage: The Theological Tradition of the East
author: Alexander Schmemann
date: 1967-10-18
source: https://archive.org/details/bondofmarriageec00bass/
comment: Archive.org says this paper was delivered at an interdenominational symposium sponsored by the Canon Law Society of America and held at the Center for Continuing Education at the University of Notre Dame. The ["Comment and Discussion"](#comment) section is, I therefore assume, a Catholic response to Schmemann's article.
---
ALEXANDER SCHMEMANN*
\* Dean of St. Vladimir’s Theological Seminary, Tuckahoe, New York. Father Schmemann is the author of *Sacraments and Orthodoxy* (1965), and *The World as Sacrament* (1967).
## [I.](#I) {#I}
I must begin this paper by stating the initial paradox of
the Eastern Orthodox approach toward marriage. On the
one hand, the Orthodox Church explicitly affirms the
indissolubility of marriage;[^1] yet, on the other hand, she
seems to accept divorce and has in her canonical tradition
several regulations concerning it.[^2]
How can these apparently contradictory positions be reconciled? And, first of
all, what does this paradox mean? Is it an uneasy compromise
between the maximalism of theory and the minimalism of practice, that famous “economy” which the
Orthodox seem to invoke so often in order to solve all
kinds of difficulties? I think that no answer can be given
to any of these questions before an attempt is made to
understand the complexity of the Orthodox teaching about
marriage.
[^1]: See F. Gavin, *Some Aspects of Contemporary Greek Orthodox Thought* (London, 1923), pp. 384 ff.; Bishop Sylvester, *Orthodox Dogmatic Theology*, 4 vols. (Kiev, 1897), pp. 539 ff.
[^2]: N. Suvorov, *Kurs Tserkovnago Prava* (Manual of Canon Law), (Yaroslave, 1889), II, 331 ff.
A western Christian may not realize that this teaching
has never taken the form of a consistent and systematic
doctrine in which the liturgical rites, the canonical
requirements, the theological interpretations and finally the
demands of reality would be expressed within a unified
framework. Does it mean, however, that there is no
Orthodox doctrine of marriage, doctrine which would in turn
serve as a norm for practice? No! But it means that this
doctrine has not been given a “juridical” formulation and
remains, as much of Eastern Orthodox theology in general,
in the state of affirmations rather than explanations, is
expressed more often in liturgical rites rather than canonical
texts, and finally, serves as a guiding principle rather
than explicit legislation.
The starting point for any elucidation of this doctrine is,
of necessity, in the Orthodox understanding of matrimony
as *sacrament*. Here one must keep in mind that in the
Orthodox Church, sacramental theology has never been
formulated in clear and precise definitions as in the West.
It is true that in postpatristic manuals of dogmatics much
of the western approach to sacraments has been rather
uncritically adopted. This “westernized” theology, however,
so obviously contradicts the earlier and more normative
Orthodox tradition, that of the Fathers and of the liturgy,
that it cannot be accepted as an adequate expression of
the Orthodox “lex credendi.” When speaking of the
sacrament of matrimony, we must, therefore, see it within a
wider perspective of the Orthodox meaning of sacraments
in general.
It is sufficient for our present subject to stress that the
sacrament or *mysterion* in the Orthodox tradition implies
necessarily the idea of a *transformation*, of a “*passage*”
from the old into the new and, therefore, an eschatological
connotation.[^3] The sacrament is always the passage from
“this world” into the Kingdom of God as already
inaugurated by Christ, and of which the Church herself is
the “sacrament” in “this eon.” Thus, in the baptismal
death and resurrection, man is not simply absolved of his
original sin but is truly “transferred” from the old creation
into the new. In the sacrament of anointment, he is
introduced into the Kingdom inaugurated on the day of Pente-
cost by the Holy Spirit. In the Eucharist the Church
fulfills herself by ascending to the Kingdom of God, to “His
table in His Kingdom.” All sacraments are considered
eschatological in the sense that they manifest and
communicate in this world the reality of the world to come.
Hence, and this is the second important observation, all
sacraments are fulfilled in the Eucharist which, according
to the patristic teaching, is the “sacrament of sacraments”
because it is in a very concrete sense the sacrament of the
Kingdom. Finally, all sacraments are truly sacraments of
Christ, i.e., are ontologically connected with his death,
resurrection and glorification.
[^3]: See my book *Sacraments and Orthodoxy* (New York, 1965).
How are these categories applicable to matrimony
which, different in this from all other sacraments, does not
seem to be directly and immediately connected with the
“Christ event” and which exists as a universal and natural
institution outside the Church? The answer to this
question is given partially at least in the liturgical celebration
of matrimony.
## [II.](#II) {#II}
The present liturgy of matrimony in the Orthodox
Church consists of two services—the Betrothal and the
Crowning—the first service taking place normally in the
vestibule of the church and the second, having primarily
the form of a procession which introduces the couple into
the Church. We may leave out of this paper the
description of the complex development of these services and
the various strata of symbolism with which they were
adorned on the liturgically fertile soil of Byzantium.[^4] Let
us rather concentrate on the fundamental significance of
this peculiar “liturgical dualism” of matrimony.
[^4]: See A. Raes, SJ., *Le Mariage dans les Eglises d Orient* (Chevotogne, 1958).
There can be no doubt that the first service—the
Betrothal—is nothing else than the Christianized form of the
marriage as it existed always and everywhere, ie., as a
public contract sealed before God and men by those
entering the state of marriage. It is, in other terms, the
Christian “blessing” or “sanction” of the marriage, its
acceptance by the Church. It appears rather late in the
history of the Church and at a time when for all practical
reasons the civil society coincided with the Church and
when the Church was given an almost exclusive control
over family. In the early pre-Constantinian Church, the
only requirement for the members of the Church who
wanted to marry was the preliminary permission of the
bishop.[^5] This means that the Church did not consider
herself to be the performer of the marriage as such and early
documents stress the recognition by the Church of all
civil laws governing the marriage.[^6] But if the Church did
not “institute” the marriage, she was given the power to
“transform it” and such is the real meaning of
*matrimony as sacrament*. “Lo, I make all things new”: this from the
beginning was also applied to marriage. And, it is this
“transformation” of the marriage that constitutes the
content of the second service mentioned above—the Crowning
—which begins precisely as all Christian sacraments with
a procession. The procession signifies that the “natural”
marriage is taken now into the dimensions of the Church
and, this means, into the dimensions of the Kingdom. The
earliest form of this service was the simple participation
of the newly married in the Encharist and their partaking
as “one flesh” of the Body and Blood of Christ.[^7] Even
today, though it has severed its connection with the
Eucharist, the rite of matrimony keeps the indelible mark
of its Eucharistic origin and the common cup given to
the couple at the end of the service points back to the
Eucharistic chalice.[^8]
[^5]: St. Ignatius, *Ad Polycarpum*, 5 v.
[^6]: See for example, *Epistola ad Diognetum*, v. 6; Athenagoras, *Lecatio Pro Christianis*, chap. 33, Migne, *PG* 6, 965; Ambrose, *De Inst. Virg.*, 6, Migne, *PL*, 16, 316; John Chrysostom, *Hom 56 in Genes*, 29, *PG* 54, 488.
[^7]: See A. N. Smirensky, “The Evolution of the Present Rite of Matrimony and Parallel Canonical Developments,” *St. Viadimir's Seminary Quarterly*, 8 (1960), 40, n. 1.
[^8]: See A. Raes, *op. cit.*, p. 49.
In this sacramental transformation, the marriage
acquires new dimensions. Its content and goal now is not
mere “happiness” but the *martyria*, the witness, to the
Kingdom of God. It is given the power to be a service of
Christ in the world and a special vocation within the
Church. Above everything else it is a sacrament of the
Kingdom, for the family is one of the basic *antitypa* of the
Kingdom.[^9]
[^9]: See *Sacraments and Orthodoxy*, pp. 59 ff.
The whole patristic tradition deals with matrimony
almost exclusively in these categories in which the marriage
is connected with the great mystery of Christ and the
Church.[^10] This tradition, in other terms, is interested in
the marriage as transformed and fulfilled in Christ and
the Church—this transformation being also the fulfillment
of the natural marriage. It deals, so to speak, with the
ideal marriage which has died to its natural limitations
and has risen to a new life in which it is totally
transparent to Christ and to His Kingdom. This marriage, it is
obvious, is indissoluble and the very categories of
dissolubility or indissolubility simply do not apply to it. It
transcends them because by its very nature it is already a
transformed and transfigured marriage. And, in a certain
way, it is only such marriage that the Church teaches and
reflects upon and, in a sense, only such marriage is
recognized by her and it is only to such marriage that her
positive evaluation of matrimony is referred. An example of
this can be seen in the canonical regulations forbidding
the ordination of all those whose marriage is not
“perfect,” i.e., first and unique on both sides. The marriage,
thus, belongs to the *theologia gloriae* as in fact a part of
ecclesiology and eschatology. The Church rejoices, so to
speak, in this foretaste and anticipation of the Kingdom
of God.
[^10]: See A. Raes, *op. cit.*, p. 8 and also S. Troitsky, *Christianskaia Philosophia Braka* (Christian Philosophy of Marriage), (Paris, 1934).
## [III.](#III) {#III}
There exists, however, another dimension of the
marriage—this one rooted in the pastoral mission of the
Church in the world. If the fundamental doctrine, or
better to say, *theoria*, vision of the marriage, as still expressed
in the liturgy, belongs to the early, maximalistic and
eschatological period of the Church, this second dimension
is the fruit and the result of the long and painful
pilgrimage of the Church through history. It would be
improper to describe it as a lowering of the standards and
as compromise with all kinds of “real situations.” For it
belongs to the very essence of the Eastern Orthodox
tradition to keep together, in a truly antinomical way, on the
one hand the “impossible” demands on man—demands
that entered the world when God became man so as to
“make man God”; and on the other hand the infinite
compassion toward man of the One who took upon Himself
the sins of the world. Regarding marriage, it is as if, in
one and the same breath, the Church were proclaiming
its Divine nature and destiny, yet also, its existential
ambiguity—the marriage as one of the major battlefields
between the good and the evil, between God and the
devil, between the New Adam and the old; marriage as
inexorably rooted in the tragedy of the original sin. The
Church keeps the glorious vision revealed to her by
Christ; she gives the gift to all, but she also *knows* the
“impossibility” for man fully to accept both the vision
and the gift. Just as in the Eucharist the Church, while
inviting her members to communicate says: “Holy things
are for the holy,” shows that only “One is Holy,” the
maximalism of the Church’s revelation about marriage is
precisely that which makes her condescending to the
unfathomable tragedies of human existence.
The whole point therefore is that this is not a
“compromise” but the very antinomy of the Church’s life in this
world. The marriage *is* indissoluble, yet it is being
dissolved all the time by sin and ignorance, passion and
selfishness, lack of faith and lack of love. Yes, the Church
acknowledges the divorce, but she *does not divorce!* She
only acknowledges that here, in this concrete situation,
this marriage has been broken, has come to an end, and
in her compassion she gives permission to the innocent
party to marry again. It is sufficient, however, to study
only once the text of the rite of the second marriage to
realize immediately the radical difference of its whole
“ethos.” It is indeed a penitential service, it is
intercession, it is love, but nothing of the glory and joy of that
which has been broken remains.[^11]
[^11]: See Hapgood, *Orthodox Service Book*, pp. 302 ff.
In practice, all this may be deeply misunderstood.
During the long centuries of the Church’s organic connection
with Christian states, she had to accept many functions
and duties, if not contrary, at least alien, to her nature.[^12]
This has been reflected in the liturgy and in ecclesiastical
legislation and requires a detailed and patient study. If,
however, one asks about the “essence” of the Orthodox
teaching about marriage, one finds it in this apparently
paradoxical tension—its belonging to Christ and His
Kingdom and, therefore, its indissolubility on the one hand
and the pastoral recognition of its human frailty and
ambiguity on the other hand. Only within this tension a
fruitful study of the Orthodox concept and practice of
both marriage and divorce becomes possible.
[^12]: See A, N. Smirensky, *op. cit.*
# [COMMENT AND DISCUSSION](#comment) {#comment}
The ancient Christian traditions of the East converge with
the belief of the Catholic West in a common affirmation of the
sacramental holiness of marriage. In the plan of redemption
the earthly reality of marriage has been transformed in Christ
into an image, an icon, of the union of Christ with the Church.
Man and wife are joined in a permanent relationship to each
other that transcends the limitations of natural compatibility as
a witness of the fidelity of the Lord to His people. In this
perspective divorce and remarriage are more than a failure
of personal commitment. They are a tragedy for the Church,
the broken pieces of a holy ideal shattered by sin and human
weakness.
The pastoral concern of the Church for the tragedy of
broken marriage is to respond to human frailty with healing
forgiveness. In the Christianity of the East, this forgiveness
implies permission to marry again. The Church neither grants nor
acknowledges divorce, but to the lonely and abandoned it
sorrowfully grants the right to take another spouse. For the
person and for the Church this is a penitential recognition of
the harsh reality of sin and the deep need for God’s grace.
The liturgical form of the second marriage itself expresses the
paradox of sin and grace in the words of an antinomy that
encapsulates the very life of the Church itself. For the Church’s
role in the world is a constant reconciliation of opposites, the
glory of ideals *in statu Patriae* and the reality of sin *in statu viae*.
The theology of marriage, its liturgical expression and
canonical discipline belong to the area of antinomy. It is
precisely in the acceptance of the consequences of this antinomy
in the life of the Church that there is to be found the greatest
difference between Orthodox and Latin belief. Between
Oriental and Latin traditions the most fundamental discrepancy
does not lie in the interpretation of the exceptions of Matthew’s
Gospel or even in the understanding of sacramentality in
regard to marriage. Rather, it is to be found in diverse
conceptions of the nature and role of the Church in the world.
In Byzantine eclesiology the life of the Church moves
constantly upon two different levels of reality. The dichotomy of
the Kingdom of God revealed and present in a yet unredeemed
and sinful world gives rise to a conflict of opposites that
belongs to the very nature of the Church. Within this context
there exists the parallel development of theological reflection
upon the sacramental indissolubility of marriage and the
canonical provisions designed to meet its failure. There is a
theology of marriage as a reflection of the Kingdom and a
juridical counterpart mirroring human weakness.
Three main stages mark the historical evolution of the
Oriental Church’s approach to marriage and divorce. In the
primitive Church we find a basic acceptance of marriage as it
existed in the world. The writings of St. Ignatius of Antioch
portray a bishop living among his people and uniting them into
one community in Christ. He knew the faithful and brought the
blessings of the Church to them at every personal change in
the status of their lives. It is not clear that St. Ignatius speaks
of a sacramental action in the blessing of marriage, but his
words fit into an ecclesiological concept in which all
sacraments are involved in the one sacrament of the Church. The
holiness of marriage lies within the holiness of the Church, It is
the Church that transforms life and marriage. But first the
Church had to accept and bless the life that existed. She had
first to accept the worldly reality of marriage.
In the pre-Constantinian Church we find an acceptance of
marriage as it existed in Roman society, including all the
regulations and customs of marriage prevailing at that time.
At the same time the great effort to proclaim the Kingdom of
God effected a gradual transformation of society. Within the
community of the Church all things are made new. Marriage
came to have a new meaning for the baptized in relationship
to the central and allembracing reality of the Eucharist.
Marriage received the acknowledgment of the bishop as the
head of the community of the faithful. With this came the
gradual integration of matrimony into the constitutional act
of the Church, the holy Eucharist.
Then came the great and tragic confusion created by the
reconciliation between the Church and the empire. On the
one hand it was a glorious triumph for the Church. On the
other it created enormous problems for both Church and
state. An extremely complex semi-Christian society provided
an environment for a disconcerting mixture of roles. At this
time the Church had not yet developed its own specific system
of canonical legislation. It made every effort, however, to
influence the civil legislation by Christian principles. The state
sanctioned the canons of the councils as state laws, but the
Church did not sanction state law as canons. The Church’s
legislation was integrated into civil legislation, but civil
legislation was never to become a part of the Church.
Between Church and state there was a hesitant and uneasy
balance. The Church saw itself as the Body of Christ and the
temple of the Holy Spirit. Yet to the state it was mainly a
society, a corporation, a visibly structured organization. The
conversion of Constantine, real as it was, was still completely
within the pagan presuppositions of conversion. The Edict of
Milan was not a Christian document. It was a typically
syncretistic pragmatic gesture. The more Constantine became
Christian the more intolerant he became. By the end of the
century Theodosius said that everyone who was not a Christian
was a mental case and should be burned. This is far from the
freedom in which the Church rejoiced at the Edict of Milan.
The Church’s teachings on marriage could not be imposed
upon the state in their entirety, because the reality of greatest
concern to the Church lies beyond the province of the state.
What occurred was a gradual effort to transform society in
general and, in so doing, bring to bear upon the law a strong
moral influence. Divorce became more and more difficult to
obtain. Women moved up the social ladder to a greater equality
with men. Fundamentally, however, the tension continued to
exist between the human reality and the Christian ideal.
Marriage was one of many great sectors of society to be
Christianized, transformed and introduced to new dimensions of
‘meaning, But this was only possible within the Church and not
within the logic of civil legislation.
The third stage occurred when the Church, in the person
of bishop or priest, became the minister of marriage. In a
vacuum of leadership, the Church received the total
responsibility for the familial sector of social life. Born of this necessity
were the purely temporal dimensions of the Church's dealings
with civil and societal realities. It seems that the Church was
almost forced to take on functions that do not naturally belong
to it. Christianity assumed the role of the pagan state religions
of the old empire. The Church was given a responsibility by
the state to fulfill a civil role in society in regulating the
temporal life of man. At this stage the sacramental view of
marriage began to be translated into canonical prescriptions.
The notion of the indissolubility of marriage took on extensive
juridical implications.
Looking back upon this era, Orthodox theology makes a
distinction between the disciplinary tradition of the Church
as a whole and the various canonical traditions of the
particular churches. Reasons for divorce and remarriage changed,
were expanded or restricted by the different national churches
at various times in history. But the Church itself always looked
upon divorce with the greatest reluctance. It always sought
to distinguish a temporal responsibility on the level of social
relationships from its essential role in integrating man into
the Kingdom. The Church felt no basic need to exercise judicial
authority in the temporal order. Its primary task was to refer
temporal life to the order of revelation and sacramentality.
Today the Church no longer controls the destinies of civil
socicty. It no longer exercises a purely social jurisdiction. But in
the present stage of transition, it still acts as if it must cling
to that power and responsibility. The Church still feels the
weight of an ancient responsibility for all temporal
arrangements. Within the ambiguities of this situation, Orthodox
practice now wavers between the Byzantine or Russian
imperial legislation on what constitutes grounds for divorce and
the legal rules of the states and nations in which she lives.
The ambiguity of the Church’s stance between a theology
that stresses the indissolubility of marriage and the canonical
practice that allows dissolubility is not to be understood as a
compromise with the world. It is precisely the lot of the Church
in the world. Sin is not a juridical crime. It is a rebellion against
God. The Church confronts the reality of sin both *in statu Patriae*,
from which stems her teachings and eschatological
orientation, and *in statu viae*, from which comes her pastoral
concern for man.
Within Orthodox tradition there is no such thing as divorce.
The Church can no more remove the sacramentality of a
marriage than she can remove the consecration from the
Eucharistic Host. The Church simply grants the right to
remarry in certain cases. What about the previous marriage? The
ontological status of that first marriage is simply never made
a matter of question. To ask the question supposes a static
view of reality. Within the dynamic action attributed to the
Holy Spirit by Orthodox theology, marriage can exist only
while people actually live a marriage. If the marriage is not
lived, it is dead. It is nothing. The real problem is not the
abstract, Aristotelian essence that might remain, but what is to be
done in pastoral terms with the existing situation. This is where
the mechanics of canonical procedure in allowing remarriage
are rooted.
The basic question today is not how to delineate various
new juridical reasons to allow divorce and remarriage. It is
rather the question of what constitutes the sacramentality of
marriage and how close does this sacramentality constitute
a reality that can be expressed in juridical terms. What is the
relationship between what can be described as the maximum
of the Church’s teaching, which is not only an ideal, but the
revelation of the true ontology of marriage and the real
situation of man?
Is the dialectic between indissolubility and dissolubility just
a matter of toleration or rather a category of tension which has
to be kept if the Church is to fulfill her mission among men?
Unless we ask the most basic questions about the nature of
marriage and its relationship to the mission of the Church, the
very sensitive question of divorce and remarriage will not be
solved. The whole complicated development of the Church’s
teaching on marriage is one expression of her fundamental
relationship to the world. It is only from a study of this relationship
in which the problem is truly rooted that a solution can be
found.
In Orthodox tradition sacrament or “mysterion” implies
necessarily the idea of a transformation, a passage from the
old into a new dimension of both meaning and reality. The
Church’s salvific mission to the world is fulfilled in a presence
to the world in as far as the world can be transformed and has
to be transformed by it. The world is not something wholly
separated from the Church. It is the very matter of the
Kingdom. In this sense, marriage is transformed by the Church and
in the Church, while divorce remains a part of the morality
of the world. It is a morality that the Church cannot be
indifferent to or spurn. She must not only be interested in the
morality of the world but must also transform it to a new
reality.
Dr. Noonan's paper concluded quite convincingly that some
Christians considered marriage dissoluble at a particular time
in history. He did not go beyond this premise to generalize
upon this practice of the Church as being decisive for a later
period. “It has been done for two hundred years in the past.
Therefore, it can be done today” was not his conclusion. This
type of argumentation would run counter to the reality of
growth inherent in the nature of man and religion. It would be
a type of legal positivism foreign to Christianity.
Morality develops into a greater refinement of norms and
a greater perceptiveness of judgment from reflection upon the
existing situation of man in the light of primary principles. At
one time slavery was accepted by Scripture, by tradition and
by the Church. But today no one can consider slavery morally
acceptable or even indifferent. The argument that it was
accepted at one time does not prove that it can be accepted
again. The Church moves with history and adjusts itself to
developing human reality. As with the eventual rejection of
slavery, so in the understanding of marriage there may be an
evolution from an acceptance of dissolubility to belief in its
absolute indissolubility. The ultimate criterion will not be the
practice of the past, but the meaning of Christian marriage
in the light of the real human situation today.
On the other hand, the argument from the *praxis ecclesiae*
does have a negative value. Development cannot imply
contradiction. The Church is based upon a revelation and an
institution in which tradition is implied. The *quod traditur* is an
essential element in a revealed religion. To be Christian means
to be traditional because tradition belongs to the
revealed religion. So there exists the antinomy of developing
human nature that precludes a happening of one time from
being normative for all time and the need to study history to
find the negative limit beyond which contradiction excludes
continuity. The problem of tradition is closely connected with
the meaning of the theology of real development in doctrine.
We cannot say that at one time the Church believed one
thing and at a later time she believed another in contradiction
to it. The Church, in fact, in the early period was largely
unconcerned with the institutional expressions of society.
However, from the very beginning she had a notion of man, a
notion of society and a notion of the destiny of man, which
ultimately excluded the possibility of man’s being enslaved.
Again, the Church had from the beginning, in the New
Testament and in the Fathers, an intuition, an understanding, a
vision of marriage as indissoluble. Yet this vision could not be
made an immediate practical possibility because of the
extremely adverse social conditions of the time. The teaching had
to develop gradually. It was only at the time of the Emperor
Leo VI in the tenth century that matrimony as a liturgical
service was made obligatory for all Christians of the empire.
This became the pastoral and missionary means of the Church
to reach the people. Legislation prior to this time was mainly
concerned with problems of regulating marriage and divorce.
Now it became a question of how to impose upon the people
the Christian view of marriage. The liturgical form developed
as a teaching of what marriage should be. Christian history
shows the explicitation, not the change, of a particular truth.
There is a slow and patient evolution within society that brings
about a real development.
When we study the past, we study it not only in the effort
to see how many metamorphoses took place, but how certain
basic ideas—God, man, history, world, nature—developed and
were refined. It would be a catastrophe if today we suddenly
proclaimed, as a kind of ecumenical achievement, that whereas
in the past we had thought of marriage as indissoluble, today
we all agree that it is dissoluble. On the other hand, to simply
maintain the old tradition of absolute indissolubility would be
equally intolerable. We are moving today, not in the direction
of a liberation of marriage from medieval conceptualizations,
but rather toward a deepening awareness of what has always
been central in the belief of the Church, regardless of the
inadequacy of the juridical or philosophical categories in which
it has been expressed. For almost two thousand years, the
Church has proclaimed that marriage is sacred and
indissoluble. Yet all the while she has reluctantly accepted its
dissolution to some extent as a tragic human failure.
There will always be a clash between the Kingdom and the
world, the ideal and the exception, the eschatological hope
and the reality. This dialectic between lofty goal and the
reluctant acceptance of failure must maintain a proper balance
in order that a real development may occur. Where the
dialectic is ignored or overemphasis is given only one side, ultimately
the impasse results in stagnation. Both sides of the dialectic
have a role. St. Paul said that in the Kingdom “there is neither
male nor female,” yet he treated women in the same category
as children and slaves. The role of women in the Church
suffered in the imbalance of the latter perspective. It is only
when we explore more fully the reasons why St. Paul
enunciated the fundamental equality that a restoration of balance
can be achieved. In similar fashion, between ideal and
exception the imbalance resulting from an overemphasis upon
the ideal will be corrected by exploring the implications of the
human reality that makes exception possible.
In the theology of marriage of the Eastern traditions the
primary point of departure is not the natural properties of
marriage, but the supernatural union that it images. In the
liturgy of matrimony the last act of the rite is the coronation:
“Now receive these crowns in God’s Kingdom.” In its ultimate
reality marriage is not measured by its current cultural
acceptance. It is an icon of the Kingdom. Marriage transcends
happiness. It transcends contract and even the family. But
having defined marriage in these supernatural terms,
Orthodoxy still remembers the natural dimension of marriage. The
tension between the two exists and is inescapable. It is
important, however, that the starting point of understanding
begin, and not end, with revelation. The modern reduction of
marriage to happiness and sexual fulfillment to which the
Church may add a transcendent demand is not adequate. For
Christians marriage is primarily a union witnessing the union
of Christ and the Church.
At the time of the revival of the study of Roman Law which
inspired the science of canon law in the Western Church, a
juridical conceptualization overtook the personal and
theological vision of marriage. The canonical conception came to center
upon consent and copula, instead of divine mystery and human
relationships. With this came a canonical refinement of the
conditions for the validity of the marital contract. Rather than
the *consortium totius vitae* of an earlier humanism or the
“mysterion” of the Fathers, marriage came to be equated with
contractual obligations and rights. A whole machinery was
set up in the Latin Church to adjudicate the validity of
marriages according to the canonical definition of a unique
contract giving the right to bodily acts of reproduction. In an
effort to achieve legal clarity, both the personal elements of
this unique relationship and the supernatural context of
mystery were pushed to the background. Consequently, where we
in the Church should be speaking of the common life of two
spouses who are children of God, we are probing in tribunal
practice the conditions of a contract for bodily acts. The result
is a sterility of vision that has reduced the great mystery of
human and divine love to an unreal formulation of legal rules.
The Church’s primary task in marriage today is to proclaim
the full richness of both divine revelation and human
understanding. It is not to inform the world that the Church now
accepts new rules for allowing divorce and remarriage. We
must become less interested in the judicial forum, and more
concerned about a catechesis of marriage. In fact, all that we
say about the indissolubility or dissolubility of marriage implies
a grasp of the preliminary question, what is marriage. It is
toward an understanding of this sacred mystery that we must
now strive together from all the traditions of the Christian
experience.