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Indissolubility 77
A strikingly similar interpretation of Augustine was reached in a
more recent study:
Augustinebelieves...thatGodmademarriageindissolublesothatit
mightsymbolizetheunionbetweenChristandtheChurch....thelittle
sacrament (i.e., marriage bond) is a sacrament of the great sacrament (i.e.,
the mystery of the inseparable union between Christ and the Church).
Indissolubility is the salient feature of the comparison and the point of
assimilation.’
The individual elements of Augustine’s synthesis were not so
new. Indissolubility of marriage was a well-established idea in the
Christian writers of the first five centuries. Similarly,theideaof
symbolic marriage was important in the Christian ancient world
before Augustine, as well as in biblical texts that would of course
have been familiar. However, Augustine welded the two components
into a combination that would eventually become socially
powerful.
In his own day and for centuries after it, however, Augustine’s
ideas about indissolubility and symbolism had little to do with the
law and social practice around him: neither reflecting nor much affecting
them, so far as we can see. The Christian law of the expiring
Western Empire and its resilient Byzantine counterpart allowed divorce.
Studying the history of texts, studying ‘historical theology’,
oblig‹es d’^etre la r‹eplique de l’union du Christ ›a son ‹Eglise. . . . Le fondement (la
res) de ce sacrement, c’est que l’homme et la femme sont ins‹eparablement unis par
le mariage pour toute leur vie. La continuit‹e de ce sacrement est sauvegard‹ee dans
le Christ et l’ ‹Eglise’ (Kuiters, p. 10).
It was almost certainly independent, so the convergence confirms the truth of
the interpretation.
P. L. Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church: The Christianization of Marriage
during the Patristic and Early Medieval Periods (Leiden etc., 1994), 301.
‘Parmi les auteurs des cinq premiers si›ecles consid‹er‹es comme orthodoxes un
seul donne donc clairement au mari tromp‹e la permission de contracter ›a nouveau
mariage, l’inconnu d‹esign‹e sous le nom d’Ambrosiaster. Des signes d’une attitude
moins rigide ›al’‹egard des remari‹es peuvent ^etre d‹ecel‹es dans le canon 10 du concile
d’Arles et dans le canon 9 de Basile, mais rien ne permet de dire qu’ils acceptent
ces secondes noces: seules le font les ‹ev^eques bl^am‹es par Orig›ene’ (H. Crouzel, ‘Les
P›eres de l’ ‹Eglise ont-ils permis le remariage apr›es s‹eparation?’, in id., Mariage et
divorce, c‹elibat et caract›ere sacerdotaux dans l’‹eglise ancienne: ‹etudes diverses ( ‹Etudes
d’histoire du culte et des institutions chr‹etiennes, 11; Turin, 1982), 3–43 at 43).
Crouzel goes on to say that he is not personally an unquestioning advocate of
absolute marital indissolubility, but the interpretation of patristic texts should not
be a·ected by the modern scholar’s personal views.
Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church, 49–65. Reynolds argues that the