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140 Chapter 3
sense, when a man marries a second time during his first wife’s
lifetime, so that the second marriage is invalid. Another situation
listed is that of a man in holy orders (probably he means a subdeacon
or someone of higher rank) who marries a woman who is not a
virgin. In this case the marriage is null. It would in fact have been
null even if the woman were a virgin. After 1139 it was clear law
that the marriage of a cleric in major orders (a subdeacon, deacon,
or priest) was not only illicit but also invalid. So why does John
raise the case in the context of ‘bigamy’ and what di·erence does it
make whether the woman was a virgin?
The fact that the woman is not a virgin may have been introduced
by Johannes because a rigorist understanding of ‘bigamy’
sometimes included marriages to women who had previously slept
with another man, whether or not they were widows. Reading between
the lines, John’s point may be this: if a priest invalidly marries
a virgin, he can after separating from the woman and undergoing
a long penance obtain a dispensation from a bishop to resume his
priestly oce. On the other hand, if the woman had not been a
virgin, an episcopal dispensation would not be enough, because
the sexual union had been akin to bigamy, bigamy by extension so
to speak.
A casuistry of bigamy and its implications
If we take Innocent III’s decretal Debitum and Johannes de Deo’s
analysis together, an important conclusion about the social relevance
of marriage symbolism begins to emerge. The rationality of
marriage symbolism was the basis of a casuistry of ‘bigamy’ cases,
providing the principles that could enable discrimination between
apparently similar cases and settle the law when its application
to ambiguous instances was unobvious. Incidentally, we have here
a criterion for distinguishing between unthinking ‘tradition’ and
‘value rationality’ as determinants of social action. Value rationality
is not just about general principles, far from it, but they are an
important element, and can be invoked and applied by casuistry to
settle ambiguous concrete cases. Tradition alone could not provide
such a casuistry. Its social relevance was confined to men who had
been married and widowed.
The remainder of this chapter deals with people who did not seek
to become priests. Section (b) deals with second weddings, and the
final section with married clerics in minor orders. In neither case