www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life Faith & Theology Divorce in Orthodoxy

How, precisely, then do you get around the writings of the early Fathers which all speak of marriage as transcending the grave? Why their almost universal opposition to remarriage in the ideal (even if allowing it as oikonomia), if marriage bonds are terminated by death?


It just isn't. It's just that simple. First, something allowed as a concession does not have the same status as a sacrament such as Crowning. Second, if you go back into the liturgical sources, you find that (contrary to current Orthodox usage) Crowning took place within the context of the Divine Liturgy, because it is an ecclesial, not a private action; and thus, like all the Holy Mysteries, it was sealed by reception of the Eucharist. But Second Marriage was never celebrated within the boundaries of the Divine Liturgy, and was never sealed with the Eucharist--hence it lacks standing as a Holy Mystery.

I also note in passing you denied that the Rite of Second Marriage is penitential, yet all the sources agree that it is.

The penitential aspect of the Rite of a Second Marriage is perceptible to academics but something easy to miss in reality.

1. The Rite is only used when both spouses have a divorce.

2. Two penitential prayers are added at the end of the Betrothal service (not understandable anyway for either Greeks or Russians.)

3. The regular service of Crowning is foreshortened but that is not perceived as anything penitential.

In short the penitential aspect (two prayers in a lengthy service) is far from evident to those getting married or to anyone attending the wedding.

If you have copies of these Services please have a look and you will see what I mean.

I suppose that question of "how do you get around the patristic teaching" could equally be asked of the Catholic Church? Why do you allow marriage after the death of a spouse if the Tradition opposes it?

But *did* the Fathers speak of marriage as transcending the grave? Saint John Chrysostom does not. He sees it as temporary and earthly only. Here is his commentary on 1 Corinthians 7:

"Because man is prone to strong lustful feelings, and because all men are not strong enough to be celibate, the Church allows the temporary union of marriage as an alternative to sin".

-oOo-

1 Corinthians 7 ~ "To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain unmarried as I am. But if they are not practicing self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion."

This is a deformation of the canonical Tradition. It should be used for all second marriage, in keeping with the understanding that one marriage per lifetime is the norm.


So, you don't actually explain the rite to the people who are receiving it?

.

In the authentic Tradition, there are no crowns in second marriage. How could there be, when, technically, the Church still views remarriage as bigamy, and thus something which requires excommunication (three to five years, according to Basil the Great) and an extended period of penance?


In short, some Churches are diluting the Tradition in order to accommodate contemporary sensibilities, which just happen to be grounded in Western conceptions of marriage.

Again, Athenegoras the Apologist:

"He who rids himself of his first wife, even if she be dead, is an adulterer in disguise because he transgresses the hand of God, for in the beginning, God created but one man and one woman".

Epiphanius:

"Second marriages are not to be condemned, but are held in less honor"

Gregory Nanzianzen:

"A first marriage is in full conformity with the law; a second is tolerated by indulgence; the third is noxious. But he who exceeds this number is a swine".

And of course, Basil the Great (Canon 4):

"As regards trigamy and polygamy we have decreed the same canon as in the case of digamy, analogously. For it is a year in the case of digamy, but two for the others. As for those who are guilty of trigamy, they are excommunicated for the space of three years and often four years. For such a marriage is no longer to be called a marriage, but polygamy, or rather mitigated fornication. Wherefore the Lord told the Samaritaness who had had five husbands in succession,
'and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband' as being no longer themselves worthy when they have exceeded the measure of digamy to be called by the appellation of husband or wife. We have taken to the custom of condemning trigamists to five years excommunication not on the ground of any canon but only on the ground of usage followed by those who have preceded us. But it behooves us not to exclude them entirely from the Church, but instead to entitle them to listening in some two years or three, and thereafter to permit them to co-standers, though obliged to abstain from communion with that which is good, and then after exhibiting some fruit of repentance, let them be restored to the status of persons entitled to communion."

Do we really want to say that widows and widowers who remarry are committing bigamy? Why, Saint Paul himself allows them to remarry (2 Cor.7.) It's unlikely that he saw second marriage as bigamy.

The authentic tradition means no crowns...? To remove the crowns would be a piece of revisionism since crowns have been used in second marriages for centuries and centuries. It was this kind of revisionist thinking in liturgical and sacramental matters which caused Fr Schmemann and Fr Meyendorff to be banned from seminaries in Russia in the period after Perestroika when their writings started to appear in Russia.

I find myself unable to agree. In the Russian Church we are using the identical forms for Marriage and Second Marriage which go back unchanged for centuries before the 1917 Revolution. The English translation of these ancient forms comes to us with the blessing of Patriarch Saint Tikhon. These sacred Rites have absolutely nothing to do with any wish "to accommodate contemporary sensibilities, which just happen to be grounded in Western conceptions of marriage."

Dear Stuart,

I am familar with all these writings. However I do not see any of them proving the contention that second marriages are not sacramental.

That brings up a question... are the marriages of Catholic widows and widowers not sacramental? If that is the teaching then what exactly are they?

Your compassion is commendable, but it has always been the nature of the Orthodox Church to uphold the ideal while allowing concessions for human frailty. The ideal is one sacramental marriage per lifetime, but the Church is merciful, as Christ is merciful, and allows second marriages "by economy", but these are not sacramental either in form or intent. They may, by the divine grace and gift of the Holy Spirit, grow into such, but they are not, per se, sacramental.


I would guess no more than two.


It might also have been their steadfast opposition to the communist regime, including their broadcasts on Voice of America. Perestroika never meant "all is forgiven"--indeed, even after the fall of the Soviet Union the Russian government continued to persecute in absentia those who had materially aided the West. While neither Father Alexander nor Father John were spies, they did lend a lot of material aid to the West.


This comes perilously close to being something we might hear from Father Vasily Vasilevich. The extent to which Russian Orthodox theology was influenced both by Latin methods and categories from the 17th through 19th centuries is pretty well documented.


Can you think of some way that something described as (at best) tolerated and (at worst) noxious can also be "sacramental"? I can't.

But it does beg the question of why one would only allow three marriage. Does ROCOR support quadrogomy, and if not, why not, given that all these remarriages are, in your view, sacramental.


I have serious reservations about the entire Latin theology of marriage, from the definition of the couple as ordinary ministers of the sacrament, to the concept that any sacrament can be a mere life contract. Understanding the development of the Latin doctrine of matrimony within its historical context, it seems pretty clear that it grew organically from pragmatic pastoral considerations without much deep theological reflection; it took a long time for matrimony to even be recognized as a sacrament in the West.

That said, I find it difficult to reconcile the Latin teaching about the indissoluability of marriage on the one hand with its view that marriage vows are terminated with the death of a spouse, thereby allowing unlimited remarriage within those parameters. By my lights, those remarriages would not be sacramental, but by the doctrine and canon law of the Latin Church, they are.

This is just one reason why I feel that Eastern Catholics should not be bound by Latin marriage regulations in matters such as divorce and remarriage--they are not consistent with the Orthodox Tradition, which is older and more developed than the Western Tradition. As I noted, until the issuance of the Code of Canons in 1917, most Eastern Catholic "rites" were governed by the Orthodox nomocanons on marriage.

Let me say that every second marriage celebrated in the Orthodox Church is as fully sacramental as the first marriage.

Yes, the permission to marry a second time is “"tolerated as condescension to human frailty and weakness".... but the Mystery of Marriage is not “less than” because of that permission given through economia.

If any Orthodox person who reads this list is in a second marriage after a divorce and is getting anxious that their marriage is not sacramental please make contact with your bishop and ask him.

I had exactly this situation with a Croatian Catholic-Serbian Orthodox second marriage. The Catholic wife had her Orthodox husband starting to doubt that their marriage was a Sacrament. The only way to assuage his conflict was to put him in contact with the bishop who assured him that his second marriage was indeed a true and authentic Sacrament (Tainstvo.)

Episcopus locutus est, causa finita est.

Unless the episcopus is wrong, of course. Such things have been known from time to time.

This seems to me to be questionable. You have shown us from the tradition of the universal Catholic Church via its holy Fathers that marriage after the death of a spouse is considered something very reprehensible. But I find it hard to accept that the Catholic Church denies the sacramentality of marriages for widows and widowers -indeed I know that it doesn't. So your words have a strange ring to me since they are at variance with the practice of your own Church.

A maximum of three marriages seems to have been the practice of the Catholic Church, attested by many Fathers. At some time in history the Roman Catholic Church altered this limitation of three marriages and began to allow multiple marriages if each was ended by death, so that now if a Catholic widow should have the sorrow of burying four husbands she may still marry a fifth. Do you know in what period the Church of Rome did away with the maximum of three marriages?

You, Father, have a strange way of presenting the Catholic communion as being some sort of monolithic institution. My Church is not Western, is not Latin, and is bound by Western theology or Tradition. As I noted, until 1917, the Orthodox nomocanons governing matrimony were also used by the Greek Catholics, and it is an example of blatant latinization that the Greek Catholics are currently compelled to follow Latin practices in regard to marriage. Archbishop Joseph (Raya) was certainly very vocal in his opposition to this distortion of our Tradition.


This must have happened before the reign of the Emperor Leo VI (886-912), whose attempt to marry for a fourth time--with the formal approval of the Pope--led to a schism between Rome and Constantinople, and the finalization of the prohibition on fourth marriages. Apparently, the West never had any rules regarding remarriage after widowhood, having adopted wholesale and christianized the Roman legal perspective of marriage as life contract. But, as I said, the Latin theology of marriage developed late and appears to have been governed by an attempt to regulate common pastoral practices.



Well, I don't know about "revisionism", but a canon attributed to Nicephorus the Confessor (ca. 806-815, but almost certainly later) specifies: "Those who enter into a second marriage are not crowned, and are not admitted to receive the most pure mysteries for two years; those who enter into a third marriage are excommunicated for five years". This, of course, is a reiteration of Canon 4 of Basil the Great--so the practice of the Orthodox Church appears to have been fairly constant between the fourth and ninth centuries.

A look at ancient Orthodox service books also reveals that the Sacrament of Matrimony was indeed performed within the context of the Divine Liturgy, and was sealed with the couple receiving the Holy Eucharist. Insofar as the canons required a couple entering a second marriage to abstain from communion, obviously the rite of second marriage could not take place within the Divine Liturgy, could not be sealed by the Eucharist, and thus cannot be considered a Holy Mystery.

The Fathers never say that a second marriage is not sacramental because, for them, it was entirely self-evident. Prior to the tenth century, there was no such thing as a "Rite of Second Marriage"--the Church simply did not bless second marriages at all, because civil marriage remained an option for the divorced or widowed. All the Church did was apply the canonical penances and readmit these people to communion after the requisite period of time (i.e., two years or five years).

It is not until Leo VI issued his Novella 89, giving the Church sole responsibility for administering marriage within the Empire, that the Church had to confront the need to do something about people who wanted to remarry. Civil marriage was abolished, so the Church had to develop its own rites. And it is at this point that the Church developed the rite of second marriage, and at this point that the Church deliberately determined that this rite would have a penitential cast and would be considered sacramentally deficient. The Church allowed and tolerated remarriage, but in no way could toleration be considered approval, and in keeping with its belief in the unicity and eternity of the marriage bond, remarriage had to be associated with repentence.

Now, if we wanted to be entirely consistent with the practice of the ancient Church in our modern society, with the existence of civil marriage, the Church could remove itself entirely from the business of second or third marriages. Divorcees and widowers who wish to remarry could do so in a civil ceremony, and then apply to the Church for readmission to communion. The situation today has reverted to that prior to Novella 89, and the Church could and probably should revert as well, rather than diluting its theology of marriage, especially at a time when people are so thoroughly confused about the real sacramental nature of Christian marriage.

In the meanwhile, the Church ought to be honest with itself and recognize the extent to which its pastoral practices have compromised with and departed from the Tradition. You could, I suppose, say that the doctrine of marriage has "developed", but I thought that term was in bad odor in Orthodox circles.

This reasoning has the unfortunate effect of meaning that mixed marriages between Catholic and Orthodox which cannot take place in the Liturgy and cannot be sealed by the Eucharist cannot be considered a Holy Mystery!!

Indeed, the eminent Fr John Meyendroff confirms that is the case:

"Orthodox canon law strictly forbids marriages of Orthodox Christians with the non-Orthodox (Sixth Ecumenical Council, canon LXXII). What has been said earlier shows clearly that the whole teaching of the Church implies that a Christian marriage is a marriage between two members of the Body of Christ, which is expressed by the common participation of the couple in the Eucharist, their taking Holy Communion together. Originally, the marriage service itself took place as part of the Sunday Liturgy. "Mixed marriage" became possible only when the marriage ceremony was separated from the Liturgy."

So the application of canon law and early church practice renders Catholic-Orthodox marriages strictly forbidden and non-sacramental.

http://www.holy-trinity.org/morality/meyendorff-marriage.html

This is not my reasoning but it is a necessary conclusion from your own application of reasoning to marriage. It strikes me though that you are not taking sufficient care to remain within the parameters of contemporary church understanding and practice. This creates situations which do not apply in the reality of church life and pastoral practice..

You've got a very legalistic Latin mindset for an Orthodox. If you want to be technical, the Orthodox Church is violating its own canons by allowing such marriages in the first place (as Meyendorff indicated). But insofar as Greek Catholics have, to a large extent, returned Crowning to its liturgical setting, and the Orthodox continue to celebrate it outside of the Liturgy, well, what does that say?


On the other hand, that depends entirely on whether you believe that Catholics are or are not part of the Body of Christ. When we examine the history of the first millennium, when everything was, ostensibly, hunky-dory in the Church, we find many extended periods in which communion was broken between Rome and Constantinople. In some instances, these separations lasted for many years. We see nothing that indicates either side saw the other as, somehow, not the Church (that really only begins to happen much, much later--some say as late as 1724).

We also see numerous instances of marriages across Church lines, within a liturgical setting, and sealed by the Eucharist. The subject needs more study, especially insofar as the entire issue of divorce and remarriage was never an issue in Catholic-Orthodox polemics until, oh, the 1960s.

But, nice effort to sidestep the issue. I hope now, at least, you will concede that the entire purpose of the rite of second marriage was to provide a non-sacramental means by which divorces and widowers could remarry after the abolition of civil marriage?

Also, one might want to consider the application of the pre-9th century approach of not blessing second unions in church, but having second marriages conducted by a civil ceremony, with the Church merely covering repentance and restoration of communion. If you are entirely hot and bothered by mixed marriages, then the same rule could be applied there, as well.


Therein lies the rub. I think contemporary Church life and pastoral practice isn't doing very well, neither for Roman Catholics, Greek Catholics or the Eastern Orthodox. In everything else, we speak of a "return to the mind of the Fathers", but not here. Why?

There is no doubt in my mind that whenever I officiate at a second marriage whether for those who are divorced or widowed it is a fully sacramental marriage.

That is the Orthodox position. If Roman Catholic and Eastern Catholics do not consider the marriages of widows to be sacramental, well, honestly, that is the first time in my life I have heard that from a Catholic. But then I have not kept abreast of all the changes which happened after Vatican II.

Myself, I don't do half-marriages or pseudo-secular marriages or perform blessings for Christians to live in cohabitation.

The permission to marry a second time is "tolerated as condescension to human frailty and weakness".... This does not say and does not mean a second marriage is not a Sacrament. The Mystery of Marriage is not "less than" because of that permission given through economia.