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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
As the spirit of the age proclaims a new freedom from the traditional sexual ethic, discussion about marriage in the church today runs the risk of becoming bogged down in what are in one sense peripheral issues. Marriage is seen as an institutionalisation of eros, as the expression of a sexual ethic, and the question of any specifically Christian meaning of marriage is lost in ethical discussion.
This is not to imply that the ethical dimension is unimportant; but it is not the only dimension to be considered. The revolt against the late medieval and modern tradition, with its attendant rigidity, should not be allowed to obscure the search for a theology of marriage as a sign of the Kingdom, as a sacrament.
This has been tied to a hard line on the question of divorce and remarriage, to a doctrine of indissolubility that has been seriously questioned in recent years. Even more common perhaps is a pastoral praxis that, while freeing people from the more oppressive features of the old ideology, may also reduce the discussion of marriage as a sacrament to the status of a non-question. In justice it should be pointed out that the defence of an absolute indissolubility has been driven back to the question of sacramentality. In the practice of the modem church, as expressed in the Roman Curia, non-sacramental marriages are not indissoluble. Nor in fact are all sacramental ones; the maze of technicalities involved in this practice often defies the comprehension of the layman.
Consideration of marriage as a sacrament often appears indissolubly linked to this world of the canonists, to a legal structure that is more easily bypassed than challenged. At the same time, questions of sexual ethics retain their relevance against the background of the new praxis as they did against that of the old.
1 Cfr. Bishop, J., ‘Divorce and Remarriage’, New Blackfriars, 49 (1968), 588‐599Google Scholar; Kelleher, S. J., Divorce and Remarriage for Catholics, New York, Doubleday, 1973Google Scholar; Young, M. True‐J., ‘Divorce and Remarriage’, Commonweal (New York), November 22, 1974, 185‐190Google Scholar.
2 On the legal dimensions, cfr. Kelleher, passim.
3 This dies hard, even with people who challenge official practice. For example, James Young, C.S.P.: ‘Once we get that perspective together, then it will be obvious to us that many marriages that have ended in divorce never were sacramental marriages in the first place, and there was never any marriage bond’ (Commonweal, art. cit, p. 189).
4 Suppl., p. 42, a. 3 ad. 2.
5 ibid.
6 One of the worst consequences of ‘pastoral’ solutions is the assumption that if a marriage has broken up it must not have been real in the first place. This assumption is, I think, a relic of the old ideology, and the time has come to challenge it rather than to circumvent it. Why should only those marriages that survive be regarded as ‘real’?
7 SuppL, q. 42, a. 1, ad. 2.
8 Cfr. Audet, J.‐P., Manage et célibat dans le service pastoral de ľéglise, Paris, 1967, pp. 19‐34; 126‐137Google Scholar.
9 J.‐P. Audet, op. cit., p. 126.
10 Suppl., q. 41. The author maintains that marriage was rightly instituted before the fall of Adam and Eve (q. 42, 2); Aquinas, in the Summa Theologiae, insisted that the species would have been propagated through sexual union in the state of innocence (I, q. 98, 2) and notes (ad. 2) that sex would have been more pleasurable, as human nature would have been more pure and the senses keener.
11 Suppl., q. 42, a. 2.
12 ibid.
13 IV, C.G., ch. 78.
14 ibid.
15 ibid.
16 This could only increase the concern for legitimacy in marriage legislation, at a time when both wealth and power were a matter of inheritance. It could also reinforce the double standard: a wife might not be humanly expected to love a husband who was much occupied with other loves. She was expected to be faithful to him, and the security of property and power depended on it. To some extent the church, through insistence on fidelity and indissolubility, provided some protection to the rights of wives and legitimate offspring.
17 Schillebeeckx is right when he says that ‘a complete and finished theology of marriage is out of the question’ (Marriage, London, 1965, vol. I, p. xv). Nor can one attempt in a short article anything like the groundwork done in Schille‐beeckx's first two volumes. In volume II he provides a detailed history of the development of the doctrine of marriage as a sacrament, emphasising the juridical character of much of it, ‘a theological speculation on this juridical extrapolation’ (II, p. 94).
18 Schillebeeckx, II, 113.
19 Ibid., p. 112.
20 ibid., p. 120.
21 ibid., p. 121, 122.
22 ibid., p. 145, 146.
23 ibid., p. 144.
24 Another constant preoccupation was the evolving of a theory that would fit the marriage of the Blessed Virgin and Saint Joseph, which by none of the theories advanced would have been absolutely indissoluble.
25 III, C.G., ch. 123.
26 ‘It is obvious that sexual life is not condemned as evil. It belongs, however, to an imperfect order of things, which is destined to disappear: that of the present world (to use a rabbinical expression). This order of things will be superseded in the world to come’ (Grelot, Man and Wife in Scripture, Montreal‐Freibourg, 1964, p. 94). This is fair enough, as is the traditional notion that ‘voluntary continence anticipates the state into which we shall all enter after the resurrection of the body’ (ibid.). However, in speaking this way of the eschatological kingdom, we must not forget that not only marriage, but the church, with her sacraments, institutions, and hierarchical structure, also belongs to an ‘imperfect order of things, which is destined to disappear’. In the fullness of the kingdom, the order of signs gives way to the reality.
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