Divorce, Remarriage, and the Pastoral Questions

The second half of Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective takes up the hard cases: divorce and second marriage, mixed marriages, abortion, family planning and responsible parenthood, married clergy and celibacy. This is where Meyendorff’s marriage theology met the American parish, where it was most influential, and where it drew criticism — from those who thought he had conceded too much on some questions and too little on others. This file reports the positions and the criticism, per METHODOLOGY §4.2, without adjudicating.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration) / Orthodox Church in America

The Range of Questions

The book’s contemporary half addresses, in the publisher’s own list, second marriages, “mixed” marriages, divorce, abortion, family planning and responsible parenthood, married clergy, celibacy, and the monastic life (SVS Press, catalogue entry for Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective, svspress.com). It is a short book — 131 pages in the current printing — and these are treated compactly, which is part of why it has been both widely used and criticized for thinness on particular points.

Divorce and Second Marriage

Meyendorff’s position holds together two things that are easily separated to the detriment of both.

The ideal is absolute and is not negotiated. He quotes the Lord’s own word on divorce and states plainly that the Church cannot teach otherwise (Meyendorff, “The Sacrament of Holy Matrimony,” OCA Department of Religious Education, 1975/1978/1989, on the dominical teaching). Marriage is one, lifelong, and — on his reading — eternal (see Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective).

The economy is real and is exercised with sorrow. Where a marriage has already been destroyed — as in the case of unchastity, which the Lord Himself named — the Church “considers it possible to bless her sinful member for a new marriage union”; but “such a condescension always implies sincere repentance, and therefore, the rite of the second marriage possesses a marked penitential character” (Meyendorff, “The Sacrament of Holy Matrimony,” OCA Department of Religious Education).

The scriptural warrant is the Matthaean exception: “whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery” (Matthew 19:9; cf. 5:32), which the Orthodox tradition reads as acknowledging that unfaithfulness can rupture the one-flesh union (Meyendorff, Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective, on the Matthaean exception, cited at Marriage, Divorce and Oikonomia). The canonical limits — a third marriage barely tolerated with penance, a fourth absolutely forbidden since the Tomos of Union of 920 — are the Church’s, not Meyendorff’s, and he reports them (see Marriage and Divorce Law).

Where Meyendorff pressed hardest was in the other direction. He was a critic, not a defender, of the modern routinization of ecclesiastical divorce. The repository’s own disputed note on this question cites him on precisely that side: criticizing “the erosion of the marriage discipline and the routinization of ecclesiastical divorce,” against the more purely pastoral emphasis represented by Metropolitan Kallistos Ware’s presentation of economy as authentic compassion (Marriage, Divorce and Oikonomia, disputed note, side (a) citing Meyendorff and side (b) citing Ware). This is worth stating clearly, because Meyendorff is sometimes assumed, on the strength of his general reputation, to have been the lenient party. On divorce he was not.

Mixed Marriages

Here Meyendorff’s treatment has been read as strict. He states that “Orthodox canon law strictly forbids marriages of Orthodox Christians with the non-Orthodox” (Meyendorff, “The Sacrament of Holy Matrimony,” OCA Department of Religious Education) — a statement of the canonical rule, which the modern churches nevertheless dispense from very widely, permitting marriage with a baptized non-Orthodox Christian by economy while forbidding it with the unbaptized.

The tension between the canon and the practice is real and Meyendorff did not conceal it. What his treatment refuses is the comfortable pretense that the canonical position has changed. In a North American church in which mixed marriages are the majority of marriages celebrated, this was and remains an uncomfortable page.

Abortion

Meyendorff’s treatment is brief and unambiguous: the Orthodox tradition condemns abortion, and the condemnation is ancient and consistent. This has not been a point of controversy in the book’s reception (see Social Ethics).

Family Planning and Responsible Parenthood

This is the chapter that drew the most criticism.

Meyendorff’s position. Against a view that would make procreation the sole legitimate end of marital union — the position associated with the older canonical literature and with Roman Catholic teaching as restated in Humanae Vitae (1968), two years before Meyendorff’s first edition — he argued that the Orthodox tradition understands marriage primarily as a union in love and a mystery of the Kingdom, of which children are a fruit and a blessing but not the sole justification. He accordingly declined to lay down a general rule on the means of controlling conception, treating the question as one for the conscience of the individual Christian couple, exercised in the light of the Church’s teaching and in consultation with their confessor.

The institutional reception. The Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America adopted substantially this position in its Synodal Affirmations on Marriage, Family, Sexuality, and the Sanctity of Life (1992): “Married couples may express their love in sexual union without always intending the conception of a child, but only those means of controlling conception within marriage are acceptable which do not harm a fetus already conceived” (Orthodox Church in America, Synodal Affirmations, 1992). The document draws the one bright line Meyendorff had drawn — abortifacient means are excluded because abortion is excluded — and leaves the rest to conscience.

The criticism. Meyendorff’s chapter on family planning has been criticized, in Orthodox readers’ assessments, for lacking sufficient insight into and engagement with the Church’s tradition on contraception, and for resolving the question too quickly into “a personal act of conscience” and an “individual Christian couple” solution. [Disputed: whether Meyendorff's treatment of contraception is a faithful application of Orthodox principles or an under-argued concession. (a) The critical view holds that the patristic and canonical tradition speaks against the deliberate frustration of procreation more consistently than Meyendorff allows, that his chapter engages that tradition thinly, and that referring the matter to individual conscience amounts in practice to declining to teach. (b) Meyendorff's own view, and that of the OCA's 1992 *Synodal Affirmations* which followed him, is that the Orthodox tradition has never made procreation the sole end of marriage, that no council or canon addresses modern contraception as such, and that the properly Orthodox procedure in a matter the Church has not defined is pastoral discernment with a confessor rather than a general rule. Positions elsewhere in Orthodoxy range from stricter (some Greek and Athonite authorities, and traditionalist writers, hold to a prohibition of contraceptive means) to comparable with the OCA. **Sourcing note**: the critical view is here reported from Orthodox readers' reviews and popular commentary rather than from a scholarly monograph; this collection has not located a sustained academic critique of Meyendorff on this point, and the disposition is given accordingly. The Church has issued no pan-Orthodox definition, and this collection does not adjudicate.]

Married Clergy and Celibacy

Meyendorff wrote as a married priest, and the book’s treatment of the married priesthood, of celibacy and of monasticism is written from that standpoint. The Orthodox discipline — married men may be ordained; the ordained may not marry; bishops are chosen from the celibate — is reported and defended as a coherent arrangement rather than a compromise, and marriage and monasticism are presented as parallel vocations, both of them forms of self-emptying love, both of them crowned (Meyendorff, Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective; cf. The Mystery of Crowning, on marriage and monasticism as parallel ways).

The Wider Charge

Beyond the specific questions there is a general criticism of Meyendorff’s pastoral theology made from traditionalist quarters: that in this book, as in his ecumenical work, he was too ready to distinguish the Church’s unchanging faith from the Church’s historically-conditioned discipline, and thereby to open to revision things the tradition had held fixed.

[Disputed: whether Meyendorff's method in pastoral theology is a legitimate application of the distinction between dogma and discipline or an erosion of the tradition. (a) The critical reading, associated with traditionalist writers and with the milieu represented in the repository's own survey of the [ecumenism debate](../../orthodoxy/09-orthodox-distinctives/ecumenism-debate.md), holds that Meyendorff's characteristic move — showing that a practice arose in a particular historical setting and therefore need not bind absolutely — is corrosive when applied repeatedly, and that his readiness to refer contested questions to conscience weakened the Church's teaching office. (b) Meyendorff's own position was that distinguishing the unchanging faith from its changing historical expression is not a modernist innovation but the ordinary work of the theologian, and that the alternative — treating every inherited practice as dogma — is itself a departure from the tradition, since the tradition has in fact developed its discipline repeatedly. His book *Living Tradition* (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1978) is the extended statement of that methodological position. Both readings agree on what he did; they disagree on how to judge it. This collection does not adjudicate.]

What Is Not in Dispute

Whatever one concludes about the contested pages, three things about this book are agreed on all sides.

It recovered the eucharistic and eschatological meaning of Christian marriage for a generation of Orthodox in the English-speaking world that had largely inherited a sentimental or a legal understanding. It supplied a theological account of the crowning that has become standard. And it took the pastoral questions seriously enough to answer them in print, at a moment when much Orthodox writing preferred to leave them unaddressed. A book that gets criticized on its answers is a book that gave answers.

References

Meyendorff, John. Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1970; 2nd expanded ed. 1975; 3rd rev. ed. 1984; repr. 2000. (Second marriages, mixed marriages, divorce, abortion, family planning and responsible parenthood, married clergy, celibacy, monastic life; the Matthaean exception; the difference from annulment; the criticism of routinized ecclesiastical divorce.)
Meyendorff, John. “The Sacrament of Holy Matrimony.” OCA Department of Religious Education, 1975, 1978, 1989. (“When a marriage is already destroyed… the Church considers it possible to bless her sinful member for a new marriage union… such a condescension always implies sincere repentance, and therefore, the rite of the second marriage possesses a marked penitential character”; “Orthodox canon law strictly forbids marriages of Orthodox Christians with the non-Orthodox.”)
Meyendorff, John. Living Tradition. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1978. (The methodological distinction between the unchanging faith and its historical expression.)
Orthodox Church in America. Synodal Affirmations on Marriage, Family, Sexuality, and the Sanctity of Life. 1992. (“Married couples may express their love in sexual union without always intending the conception of a child, but only those means of controlling conception within marriage are acceptable which do not harm a fetus already conceived.”)
SVS Press. Catalogue entry for Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective. svspress.com. (The list of contemporary questions treated.)
Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Church. London: Penguin, 1993, Part II. (Economy as pastoral compassion — the counter-emphasis in the repository’s disputed note.)
Scripture: Matthew 5:32; 19:9. Tomos of Union, Constantinople, 920 (the limit of three marriages).
Paul VI. Humanae Vitae. 1968. (The Roman Catholic restatement against which Meyendorff’s chapter was written.)