Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective

Meyendorff’s 1970 study of Christian marriage rests on a single claim, which he stated flatly: “It is impossible to understand either the New Testament doctrine on marriage, or the very consistent practice of the Orthodox Church without seeing Christian marriage in the context of the Eucharist.” From that claim follow the book’s characteristic positions — that marriage is a mystery of the Kingdom and not a contract, that the crowns are martyrs’ crowns, and that the bond is eternal and not dissolved at death.

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

The Eucharistic Thesis

The book’s governing sentence is Meyendorff’s own: “It is impossible to understand either the New Testament doctrine on marriage, or the very consistent practice of the Orthodox Church without seeing Christian marriage in the context of the Eucharist” (Meyendorff, Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective, as quoted in the publisher’s description, SVS Press, svspress.com).

The historical basis for the claim is the shape of the early rite. In the first Christian centuries there was no distinct wedding service. A Christian couple married according to the ordinary civil forms of their society, and their marriage became a Christian marriage — a mystery — by their receiving Communion together at the Liturgy with the Church as witness. Meyendorff’s summary of the early practice is that “the couple solemnly took Communion together, with the whole Church witnessing their pledge,” and he notes that the surviving common cup in the modern rite is the vestige of that eucharistic act (Meyendorff, “The Sacrament of Holy Matrimony,” OCA Department of Religious Education, 1975/1978/1989).

Two consequences follow, and Meyendorff pressed both hard.

Marriage is constituted by the Church’s blessing, not by the parties’ consent. In the Roman legal tradition — and in the Western sacramental theology built on it — the couple contract the marriage by consent, and the Church witnesses and blesses. In the Orthodox rite there is no exchange of vows in the Western sense; the priest crowns the couple and invokes God’s blessing, and it is that blessing and crowning, not the consent alone, that constitutes the sacramental marriage (Meyendorff, Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective, on the absence of vows and the priestly blessing, cited at The Mystery of Crowning). Marriage is received as a gift, not concluded as a contract.

Marriage is not a lower state. Because it is a mystery of the Kingdom, marriage stands beside monasticism as a parallel way to the same end, not as a concession to the weak. Meyendorff wrote the book partly against a residual Orthodox habit of speaking as though celibacy were the real Christian vocation and marriage the permitted alternative (see Orthodox Monasticism).

Against the Contractual Reading

The historical half of the book — marriage in Judaism, in the New Testament, in the early Church and under Roman law — is written to establish that the contractual model is a foreign import (SVS Press catalogue description, summarizing the book’s structure).

Meyendorff’s argument is that the Church took over the civil institution and transformed its meaning without at first replacing its forms; that the separate marriage rite emerges only when the Christian empire makes the Church’s blessing the legally constitutive act (a development he associates with the legislation of the middle Byzantine period); and that the theology which then developed in the East kept the eucharistic and eschatological meaning, while the West, working in the Roman legal tradition, developed a jurisprudence of consent, validity, impediments and nullity.

This is the ground of his sharp distinction from Roman Catholic practice on annulment. Because Orthodoxy does not locate the constituting act in consent, it does not ask whether a valid contract was ever formed; it does not, in the Roman sense, annul (Meyendorff, Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective, on the difference from annulment, cited at Marriage, Divorce and Oikonomia; see also Orthodox and Catholic).

Per METHODOLOGY §4.1, the Orthodox understanding is presented here as the Church’s; the Roman position is reported accurately in its own terms, as what it is — a different theology of the constituting act, examined by the Orthodox Church and not received.

The Crowning

The crowns are the interpretive center of the rite, and Meyendorff reads them in the tradition’s threefold way — but with a characteristic emphasis on the second sense.

“The crowns which are placed on the heads of the couple are martyrs’ crowns,” he wrote, “as indicated by the hymn ‘O Holy Martyrs’ which is sung” (Meyendorff, “The Sacrament of Holy Matrimony,” OCA Department of Religious Education). The troparion of the martyrs is chanted during the procession around the table; the crown is the crown of the witness who dies. Marriage, in this reading, is a martyrdom: a dying to self for the sake of another, undertaken publicly and for the Kingdom.

The crowns are also royal — the couple made king and queen of a domestic church — and eschatological: at the end of the rite the priest prays that God receive their crowns into His Kingdom, so that the marriage is oriented from the first toward the Kingdom that is its home (see The Mystery of Crowning, which develops all three senses and cites Meyendorff for the eschatological one).

The Eternity of the Bond

The most distinctive and most discussed of Meyendorff’s positions is that the marriage bond is eternal — that a marriage truly made in Christ is not dissolved by the death of a spouse but endures into the Kingdom.

The argument runs from the eucharistic and eschatological premise. If marriage is a mystery of the Kingdom rather than an arrangement for this age, then it is not a contract terminated by a term. The Orthodox rite, Meyendorff observed, contains no “until death do us part”: the couple are not joined for a period but crowned for a Kingdom.

The obvious scriptural objection — that in the resurrection “they neither marry, nor are given in marriage” (Matthew 22:30) — Meyendorff turns around: the reason marriage is not contracted in the Kingdom is that the reality which marriage foreshadows is there fully present, not that the union is annulled (Meyendorff, Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective, on marriage as an eternal, eschatological bond, as presented at The Mystery of Crowning).

From this he drew the practical corollary that the Church’s traditional reserve toward remarriage even after widowhood — the penitential character of the second-marriage rite, the honor paid to those widowed who do not remarry — is not archaic severity but the coherent expression of a real doctrine: the widowed spouse who does not remarry witnesses to the marriage’s endurance into the Kingdom (Meyendorff, Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective, on the eternity of the marriage bond, cited at Marriage, Divorce and Oikonomia).

[Disputed: how far the eternity of the marriage bond is Orthodox doctrine and how far it is a theologoumenon. That the Orthodox rite lacks an "until death" formula and that the second-marriage rite is penitential are facts of the service books. That the bond therefore persists in the Kingdom is a theological inference, drawn strongly by Meyendorff and widely received in modern Orthodox writing, but it is not defined by any council, and the Church's own permission of remarriage after widowhood (canonically unimpeded, though penitentially marked) sits in tension with the strongest form of the claim. Meyendorff himself presents it as the deep logic of the tradition rather than as a defined dogma. This collection reports it as his theology and as a widely-held theologoumenon, not as conciliar teaching (cf. METHODOLOGY §4.2 on distinguishing dogma from theologoumenon).]

Ephesians 5 and the Icon

The doctrinal warrant Meyendorff returns to is Ephesians 5, where St. Paul sets the mutual love of husband and wife within the love of Christ for the Church, quotes the primal word that the two shall be “one flesh” (Genesis 2:24), and adds: “This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:31–32). It is from mysterion mega that marriage is numbered among the mysteries at all.

Meyendorff’s reading of the passage — taken up in the repository’s own treatment — is that marriage is not merely blessed but iconic: the union of husband and wife images and participates in the union of Christ and His Church, and draws its meaning and its grace from that greater union (Meyendorff, Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective, on Ephesians 5 as the foundation, cited at The Mystery of Crowning).

The pastoral consequence is the one for which the book is loved: that the ordinary labor of a marriage — fidelity, forbearance, the bearing and raising of children, the daily practice of love — is a genuine path to deification, no less than the ascetic path of the desert (Meyendorff, Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective; see Theosis).

Influence

Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective has had an institutional afterlife rare for a theological monograph. It is the standard English-language text on the subject, prescribed for seminarians and given to engaged couples; it stands behind the repository’s own files on the mystery of crowning and on marriage and divorce; and its substance was largely taken up by the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America in the Synodal Affirmations on Marriage, Family, Sexuality, and the Sanctity of Life (1992) — a document adopted in the year of Meyendorff’s death, whose formulation on family planning tracks the position he had argued (Orthodox Church in America, Synodal Affirmations on Marriage, Family, Sexuality, and the Sanctity of Life, 1992; see Divorce, Remarriage, and the Pastoral Questions).

See Also

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. (The eucharistic thesis; Judaism, the New Testament, the early Church and Roman law; the absence of vows and the constituting blessing; the difference from annulment; the eternity of the bond; Ephesians 5.)
  • Meyendorff, John. “The Sacrament of Holy Matrimony.” OCA Department of Religious Education, 1975, 1978, 1989. (The couple’s common Communion in the early Church; the common cup; “the crowns… are martyrs’ crowns, as indicated by the hymn ‘O Holy Martyrs’ which is sung”; the penitential character of the second-marriage rite.)
  • SVS Press. Catalogue entry for Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective. svspress.com. (The quoted statement of the eucharistic thesis; the book’s contents and extent.)
  • Orthodox Church in America. Synodal Affirmations on Marriage, Family, Sexuality, and the Sanctity of Life. 1992.
  • Scripture: Genesis 2:24; Matthew 22:30; Ephesians 5:25, 31–32.