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Documents: 3. 2 251
clericaliter, et privilegio clericali gaudere. xxxii. di. Seriatim, Si qui vero.
Sed si velit vivere seculariter, negotiando, tabernam tenendo, vel tonsuram
dimittendo, tunc nullo gaudebit privilegio.
3. 3. Innocent IV (Sinibaldo dei Fieschi) on Decretals of
Gregory IX, X. 1. 21. 5: the symbolic understanding of
bigamy
This passage shows that Innocent IV explained ‘bigamy’ in symbolic
terms.
In the analysis in Chapter 3 I do not discuss the last part of this extract.
This is because I believe that at this point in his argument the symbolism
may be simply rationalizing a position that he and others held for other
reasons (whereas in the rest of the extract the symbolism is an active
ingredient in his thought, so to speak). Innocent seems to make his own
the strong line on bigamy, viz., that the wife the candidate for the priesthood
has lost must have been a virgin when they married. It must not only have
been her first marriage: she must not have had any other sexual partner
before. This raised for him and others the following tricky question. If the
wife had to have been a virgin when they married, why did it not matter
for strict legal purposes if the candidate had slept with a concubine since
his wife’s death?
I suspect the real reason was that too many men would have been barred
from the priesthood if there had been a rule that candidates be virgins
or even a rule that they had not slept with a woman since their wife had
died. The rule that if a candidate had been married before it must have
been once only and to a virgin would not eliminate so many. Who was
going to test whether the deceased wife was a virgin? In any case it was
more likely that a respectable woman would be a virgin before marriage
than a man of the same social status. In other words, there is a gender
asymmetry here explicable from the simple fact that it was a man’s world,
rather than from symbolism. Symbolism explains why the deceased wife
had to be a virgin, or the living wife, in the case of clerics in minor orders,
but not why the priest or cleric did not have to be a virgin too: there
a degree of pragmatic indulgence is a more probable explanation than
symbolism. Some symbolic justification or other had to be found, but it
could have been simply epiphenomenal, a cloak for the real reason, even if
contemporaries would not have seen that clearly. If I thought that this was
the case with symbolic reasoning generally, the thesis of this book would be
much weaker; however, it does seem to be true in the case of this particular
gender asymmetry.
Gratian, Pars I, D. 32, c. 14.
Gratian, Pars I, D. 32, c. 3.