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Bigamy 161
cleric at the same time is an indication of how large this class of
clerics in minor orders may have been: it could have extended far
beyond the boundaries of what modern historians normally think
of as ‘the clergy’. However, the immediately relevant point is the
canonist pope’s conviction that it was fine to be a married cleric,
but to marry twice or to marry a non-virgin was totally contrary to
clerical status.
The suspicion that symbolism informs this sharp distinction is
confirmed if one turns to Innocent IV’s commentary on the Decretals
of Gregory IX, X. 1. 21. 5, the decree Debitum of his predecessor
but one, Innocent III, a key text in this history. Innocent IV was
hard-headed as a canonist just as he was as a political decisionmaker,
but there is nothing pragmatic about his analysis of bigamy
in the commentary on this decretal (see Document 3. 3 below),
which is full of symbolism. Interestingly, he uses the word sacramentum
to mean something close to ‘representation’ (or perhaps the
union that is represented, for as with the text on which he is commenting
there is a little ambiguity). Thus carnal union between a
husband and a wife is a ‘sacrament’ of Christ’s incarnation. Only
in a marriage between two spouses, and not more than two, is there
a representation of one Church subject to one Christ.
Innocent IV asks how one gets this ‘sacrament’ out of the authority,
by which he seems to mean the Genesis passage (2: 23–4)
to which the Pauline Ephesians 5: 30 refers. Innocent points to the
use of the grammmatical singular for ‘bone’, ‘flesh’, and ‘wife’, and
to the sentence ‘they shall be two in one flesh’.
Moving down the decretal he is explaining, Innocent IV comments
that ‘between two only’—indicating that this is the only marriage
for each partner—symbolizes the one Church subject to one
husband. In a second marriage this sacramentum, representation,
is lacking. Such a marriage could actually signify that a plurality
of Churches were attached to one husband. He is in e·ect saying
that a second marriage symbolically misrepresents the unity of the
Church, an idea familiar by now.
If we take together the two extracts from Innocent IV’s commentary,
we can say the following. Here we have a work which enjoyed
Cf.J.F.vonSchulte,DieGeschichte der Quellen und Literatur des canonischen
Rechts, ii (Stuttgart, 1877; repr. Graz, 1956), 92, on his extremely practical outlook.
‘AndAdamsaid:Thisisboneofmybones,andfleshofmyflesh;...Wherefore
a man shall leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; they shall be
two in one flesh.’