Untitled

Indissolubility 129
A similar formula is found in the ‘Supplement’ to the Summa theologica
(further research may well show it to be a topos). In a question
on ‘Whether a coerced consent makes a marriage void’ we meet the
remark that ‘marriage signifies the conjunction of Christ and the
Church, which is brought about in the liberty of love. Therefore it
cannot be brought about through a coerced consent’.
Explanations
To conclude: the law of indissolubility became e·ective from the
early thirteenth century on. Apparently contrary evidence—the
strictures of Hostiensis, the plethora of pre-contract cases—fades
away on closer examination. The law had teeth, but we need to
remember that legal separation was possible and also that freedom
at the point of entry into marriage was stressed, balancing the rule
of strict indissolubility.
We have traced the path of this doctrine from theological into
social history. Several compatible explanations have been given for
the timing: the influence of the ‘False Decretals’, which emphasized
the bishop’s unbreakable ‘marriage’ to his church; the spread of
celibacy in the power ‹elite of the clergy; the flowering of canon law
and church courts. All of these help to explain why indissolubility
moved from theory into practice in the central Middle Ages. These
forces account only for the timing, however, and a certain idea of
marriage marked in advance the lines along which they ran. In
history ideas can have a delayed-action impact. In recent centuries,
for instance, ideas of human equality and rights have been applied
to new categories of persons and situations gradually, long after the
basic principle had become a social premiss. People pay lip-service
to a principle for decades or centuries, but one day some group
takes it seriously.
Without the principle of indissolubility, one man to one woman
for life, the idea stretching back to Augustine and before, clerical
energies and legal organization would have been pointed in a different
direction. This takes us back to the beginning: the rationale
‘matrimonium significat coniunctionem Christi ad Ecclesiam, quae fit secundum
libertatem amoris. Ergo non potest fieri per consensum coactum’ (Supplementum,
q. 47, art. 3, in SanctiThomaeAquinatis...operaomnia,iussu...Leonis
XIII P.M. edita, xii (Roma 1906), ‘Supplementum’ section (separately paginated),
90. The remark comes in the ‘Sed contra’ section, which usually (as here) goes in
the direction of the writer’s own view, as expressed in the ‘Respondeo dicendum’
section.