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136 Chapter 3
Innocent III’s decretal Debitum
Peter Damian seems to take it for granted that the rule banning
‘bigamists’ from the priesthood is not a dead letter, and the conviction
with which he expounds its symbolic meaning is unmistakable.
The eleventh-century reformer thought along the same lines as St
Augustine at the end of the Roman Empire. So did Innocent III
in the early thirteenth century. In 1206 the symbolic rationale of
the bigamy rules enabled him to solve a concrete case in a decision
that would be incorporated into the canon-law compilation of
1234, a compilation that remained in force until 1917. Thus many
commentators would reflect on the pope’s reasoning. The decretal
in question is known as Debitum (X. 1. 21. 5). It is important for
the history of both bigamy and consummation, the subject of the
next chapter. Innocent III’s pivotal role in the history of marriage
symbolism and its social impact will not have escaped notice.
A man marries a widow who had never had sex with her husband:
she comes to him a virgin, and dies before him. Can he become a
priest, or is he banned by the ‘bigamy’ rule? Innocent’s answer is
a meditation on the significance of the symbolism and at the same
time a practical legal verdict. He reasons as follows:
Since there are two things in marriage, namely the consent of minds and
the intercourse of bodies, one of which signifies the charity which obtains in
spirit between God and the just soul . . . while the other signifies [designat]
the conformity of flesh which obtains between Christ and the Church, to
which second thing pertains that to which the Evangelist bears witness:
‘The word was made flesh and dwelt among us’: therefore a marriage which
is not consummated by the intercourse of bodies is not suited to signify
the marriage which was contracted between Christ and the Church by the
mystery of the incarnation, in relation to which St Paul, expounding the
words said by the first-made man, ‘This now is bone of my bones and flesh
of my flesh, and because of this a man will leave his father and his mother,
and cleave to his wife, and they will be two in one flesh’, immediately adds:
‘ButthisIsayisagreatsacramentum [sacrament? symbol? mystery?] in
Christ and the Church’. Since, therefore, it is forbidden because of the
defect of the sacramentum for a twice married man [bigamus] or husband of
a widow to presume to be elevated to holy orders, because she [the wife]
is not the only woman of only one man, nor is he one belonging to one:
therefore, where the mingling of bodies is lacking with spouses of this sort,
this sign [signaculum] of the sacrament is not lacking. Therefore a man
who marries a woman who has been married to another man without ever
sleeping with him should not on this account be prevented from being