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Bigamy 133
necessary but not sucient to explain the medieval history of the
bigamy rules.
For historians of the Middle Ages, Augustine of Hippo’s rationale
in terms of Christ’s marriage to the Church is a sucient
starting point for causal explanation in terms of symbolic values.
In a passage that would run like a thread through the future law of
bigamy, Augustine put it thus:
In the future, the one city will be composed of many souls who have ‘one
soul and one heart’ in God, and after this earthly pilgrimage it will be the
perfection of our unity, in which all men’s thoughts will not be hidden from
each other, and will in no way be opposed to each other. For this reason
the sacrament of marriage has in our time been reduced to one husband
and one wife, so that it is not possible for a man to be ordained minister of
the Church if he has had more than one wife. This has been more clearly
understood by those who have decreed that a man who as a catechumen
or pagan had a second wife, should not be ordained. The concern here is
with the sacrament, not with sinning. In baptism all sins are forgiven, but
he who said ‘If you have taken a wife, you have not sinned, and if a virgin
marries, she does not sin’, and ‘Let her do what she wishes; she does not
sin, let her marry’ [1 Cor. 7: 28, 36], made it suciently clear that marriage
is no sin. Now to ensure the sacred nature of the sacrament, a woman who
has lost her virginity, even if she is a catechumen, cannot after baptism be
consecrated among the virgins of God. So similarly it has not seemed out
of place that a man who has had more than one wife, though not having
committed any sin, has not observed the norm, so to say, of the sacrament,
which was required not to gain the reward of a good life, but for the seal of
ecclesiastical ordination.
Augustine was writing at a time when priests could still have wives
but were not supposed to have sex with them. As the theory that
priests should be unmarried gained acceptance, the rule would have
come to refer to the categories just mentioned, twice widowed men
and widowers of widows. It applied to bishops, priests, and deacons;
in the Rome of late antiquity it seems to have extended to clerics in
minor orders too, but this was not general in the West; the rule was
extended to subdeacons in the course of the early Middle Ages.
Where the early medieval centuries are concerned, it is hard to
Augustine, De bono coniugali, 21[xviii], in Augustine: De bono coniugali; De
sancta virginitate, ed. and trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford, 2001), 39–41.
H. C. Lea, History of Sacerdotal Celibacy in the Christian Church, 3rd rev. edn.
(2 vols.; London, 1907), ch. 5, esp. 74–6.
Kuttner, ‘Pope Lucius III and the Bigamous Archbishop of Palermo’, 411–12.