Divorce: Dissolution of Marriage
(A short, but accurate 800-word article found in the Encyclopedia of Early Christianity[1]; all bolding is mine.)
The attitude of ecclesiastical authors of the first Christian centuries toward divorce is of great importance, for they were the closest heirs of the thought of the apostles and they lived in a period like our own, when the civil law accepted divorce and divorce was commonplace among the upper classes. Tertullian, at the end of the second century, contrasts the first 600 years of Roman history, when there was not a single divorce, with the morals of his own time, when women “long for divorce as though it were the natural consequence of marriage” (Apol. 6).
For the Jews as for the pagans of antiquity, every dissolution of marriage (either divorce by mutual consent or unilateral rejection) made possible a new marriage. Roman civil law, as promulgated by pagan and Christian emperors, viewed marriage as a contract between two persons, which could be dissolved by both parties mutually or, under certain conditions, by one person unilaterally. Many of the church fathers, both eastern and western, contrasted the law of God with the civil law, often denominated the “law of the pagans,” even though during the fourth and fifth centuries the imperial power was officially Christian (e.g., John Chrysostom, Lib. rep. 2.1). The fathers rejected the idea that marriage is an ordinary contract that can be set aside by any human institution (cf. Matt. 19:6). They termed unjust the pagan or Roman law that punished the adultery of the woman but did not consider the man guilty of adultery if his paramour was unmarried. It is therefore most unlikely that the sense and purport of Roman law constitute a presumption in favor of the acceptability of remarriage among Christians. “The laws of Caesar are one thing, the law of Christ another; Papinian prescribes one thing, Paul something else,” says Jerome in connection with Fabiola, who after the death of her second husband, did penance for having remarried in violation of the laws of the church (Ep. 77). Augustine’s treatise On Faith and Works reveals that the church in theory did not agree to receive remarried divorced people to baptism and the eucharist. It must be admitted, however, that the church’s interdiction was not always the universal canonical practice.
Only one orthodox early Christian author, the obscure exegete known as Ambrosiaster, explicitly permits remarriage by reason of two limited circumstances: (1) a separation based upon fornication (Matt. 5:32), in which case a second marriage is permitted to the man alone; or (2) unbelief by the spouse (1 Cor. 7:15), in which case authorization is given to either sex. Otherwise, there is practical unanimity among the following authors and councils, who do not countenance remarriage after separation in general or, more particularly, separation after adultery involving one or the other or both marriage partners: Hermas, Justin, Athenagoras, Theophilus of Antioch, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origin, Tertullian, Council of Elvira, Council of Arles, Basil of Ancyra, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, Apollinaris of Laodicea, Theodore of Mopsuestia, John Chrysostom, Theodoret of Cyrus, Epiphanius, Ambrose, Innocent I, Pelagius, Jerome, Leo the Great, and Augustine.
The American canonist Victor Pospischil contends that certain fathers permit remarriage implicitly. Henri Crouzel, however, believes that Pospishil, relying on the unspoken argument, distorts the meaning of the passages in question. The extreme rarity of explicit affirmations call into question the accuracy of these “implicit allusions.”
The majority of fathers teach that the innocent spouse is obligated to dismiss the adulterous spouse or risk endangering the holiness and integrity of the conjugal union. Basil the Great is an exception: he thinks that the woman should receive the man back from his errancy, whereas the man is obligated to send away an adulterous wife (Ep. 198.9). The fathers are divided on the related question of whether it is necessary to be reconciled with the guilty spouse who has repented. Augustine counsels reconciliation; John Chrysostom considers it problematic; Cyril of Alexandria advises against it; and Jerome, on the basis of the Old Testament, forbids it. The Opus imperfectum in Matthaeum states that Moses permitted a second marriage because of “hardness of heart” (Matt. 19:7-8), but the apostles made only a single concession in the controversy: second marriage after widowhood. One sees clearly that in most patristic writings the expressions “rupture” or “dissolution” of marriage by adultery do not have a juridical sense, that is, they do not signify that new marriages are permitted and refer only to the cessation of common life, without affecting the state of marriage.
[the Bibliography for this article from the Encyclopedia has been purposely omitted]
[1] Margaret A. Schatkin, “DIVORCE,” Encyclopedia of Early Christianity, vol. 1, ed. Everett Ferguson (New York & London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2nd Edition, 1997), 340-341.