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198 Chapter 4
tighten or relax impediments to marriage, saying that a particular
cardinal whom he names had convinced him of this. Keeping the
focus for the moment on the rule about entry into a religious order,
he argues that the unconsummated marriage symbolizes only the
marriage of God and soul through charity. (At this point he makes
explicit his debt to Innocent III’s decretal Debitum (X. 1. 21. 5),
which keeps turning up in the history of marriage symbolism as a
social force.) The union of God and soul is not diminished but enhanced
by entry into a religious order, he argues. This he links with
another thought: the Virgin Mary was able to be Joseph’s spouse
and at the same time truly married to God. The implication is that
this was possible because the marriage of Mary and Joseph was unconsummated.
The parallel lines between symbol and symbolized
seem to come together in these points about virginity and marriage
to God. Probably he is breaking some basic rule of symbolic
discourse, but in any case his train of thought moves o· again to
the power of the Church to dissolve unconsummated marriages not
only because of entry into a religious order, but for any just cause. Is
this against Scripture—‘What God has joined together let no man
put asunder’? No, because that commandment refers to consummated
marriages. Where a marriage is not consummated, we (here
he is speaking as if with the pope’s voice) can decree what we like
about it. In practice the pope should use his bounded rather than
his unbounded power and only dissolve such marriages for a good
reason: laxity is not what Hostiensis wants. He is envisaging the
weighing of consequences or arguments: to outweigh the great undesirability
of ending a marriage, there should be proportionately
strong reasons. If, however, the marriage has been consummated,
the situation is transformed because it symbolizes something that
cannot be broken. To suggest that a consummated marriage could
be dissolved by entry into a religious order is like suggesting that
another faith or Church might replace the one Christ married, and
this suggestion would be heretical.
It is a strong statement: divorce and remarriage after consummation
would be like Christ discarding the Church and replacing
it with a new one. Throughout the passage symbolism is decisive.
Is this just a rhetorical ornament? Far from it: Hostiensis seems to
take it with extreme seriousness. Without the symbolic rationale,
the law could have been left with a fossilized rule: entering a religious
order ends an unconsummated marriage. With the symbolic