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Bigamy 139
pal oce has been thoroughly studied by legal historians). This
is evidently a misleading segregation where marriage symbolism
is concerned. The symbolism is not an afterthought or a playful
decoration. It is an essential element in their thinking . This was
apparent in the history of indissolubility traced above, and it holds
good also for attitudes to ‘bigamy’ and consummation.
Bigamy and dispensation
Document 3. 1, from the mid-thirteenth-century canonist Johannes
de Deo’s treatise on dispensations, is another example of a symbolic
analysis with practical social implications. Johannes sets out to explain
why in his view a dispensation is possible in some ‘bigamy’
cases and not in others. The passage is dicult because compressed,
but the sense of it seems to be as follows.With ‘true’ bigamy dispensation
is impossible, because it would go against the words of
St Paul—he means the remarks about ‘a husband of one wife’. (Incidentally,
this view of Johannes would not prevail, but that is not
the issue here.) So when is a candidate for holy orders truly bigamous?
The broad answer will be familiar by now. It is when the
sacramental symbolism is lacking from his previous married life,
because he has been married twice or married to a woman who had
been married at least once before. Johannes goes into a miniature
analysis of the type of sacramental symbolism which is not as it
should be with true bigamists. As for the undefective symbolism, it
is primarily the representation of Christ’s union with the Church.
However, there is secondary symbolism too (consignificatum est).
He specifies the union of the divinity with Christ’s flesh, a union
never broken. Then, as if by way of an afterthought, Johannes says
that there are three unions: the union of the Divinity to the flesh,
the union of the Divinity to the soul, and the union of soul to body.
Only this last one was ever divided—at the death of Christ. He adds
another union: that of the soul of the just person to God, a union
based on faith and charity, one that can sometimes be broken by
mortal sin.
This little analysis completed, Johannes returns to the practical
problem of when a dispensation by the pope is possible. His line
is that the sacramental symbolism is not defective in cases where
there are not two genuine marriages: that is, where one of the two is
invalid. He lists such cases. One seems to be bigamy in the modern
By Kuttner, Benson, and Gaudemet: see Introduction, n. 69.