Marriage, Divorce, and Oikonomia

The Orthodox Church holds the ideal of one lifelong marriage as an icon of the one, unbreakable union of Christ and the Church, and yet, out of pastoral compassion for human weakness, it tolerates by oikonomia the dissolution of a dead marriage and a second or third marriage, celebrated with a penitential rite. This file treats, soberly and from both sides, the ideal, the exception, the canonical limit of three marriages, and the theology of economy that holds the two together.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Ideal: One Marriage

The Orthodox ideal is unambiguous: marriage is one, lifelong, and unbreakable, because it images the one and unbreakable union of Christ and His Church (Ephesians 5:31–32; see The Mystery of Crowning). The Lord Himself set the standard against the Mosaic permission of divorce: “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matthew 19:6), recalling marriage to its origin “from the beginning” (Matthew 19:8). The tradition regards a second marriage even after the death of a spouse as, strictly, a falling-short of the ideal of one marriage — which is why the rite of second marriage is penitential and why the Church has always honored those widowed who do not remarry (Meyendorff, Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective, SVS Press, 2000, on the ideal of monogamy and the tradition’s reserve toward remarriage; Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 1993, Part II). Ideally, the tradition even holds, the bond reaches beyond death: the deep Orthodox intuition is that a marriage truly made in Christ is eternal, so that the widowed spouse who remains unmarried witnesses to the marriage’s endurance into the Kingdom (Meyendorff, Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective, on the eternity of the marriage bond).

The Exception: Divorce and Remarriage by Oikonomia

Against this high ideal stands the fact of human failure, and here the Orthodox tradition takes a path that differs markedly from both the Roman Catholic and the classical Protestant. Rome, holding the sacramental bond of a consummated marriage absolutely indissoluble, denies the possibility of divorce and remarriage while a spouse lives and instead examines whether a valid marriage ever existed (annulment). The Orthodox Church, by contrast, does not grant annulments in that sense but does, with sorrow and by economy (oikonomia), recognize that a marriage can die — through adultery, abandonment, or other grave causes — and permit the innocent, and even, penitentially, the guilty, party to enter a second marriage (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II, on the Orthodox toleration of divorce and remarriage by economy; Meyendorff, Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective, on the difference from annulment). The Scriptural warrant most often cited is the Lord’s own “exception clause”: “whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery” (Matthew 19:9; cf. 5:32) — read by the Orthodox tradition as acknowledging that unfaithfulness can rupture the one-flesh union (Meyendorff, Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective, on the Matthaean exception).

The rite of second marriage bears the marks of this compassion mingled with sorrow. Where a strict second marriage is celebrated (rather than a first marriage blessed for a widowed or previously-married person joined to one never married, where the festal rite may be used), the service is penitential: it omits or subdues the joyful elements of the crowning and includes prayers of repentance, asking God’s forgiveness for the failure to keep the first union and His mercy on those who, unable to “contain,” seek the lawful remedy of marriage (1 Corinthians 7:9). The prayers of the rite of second marriage speak the language of penitence, not of festal crowning (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II, on the penitential character of the second-marriage rite; Meyendorff, Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective).

The Limit: Three Marriages

The Church’s economy is not unlimited. A firm canonical rule, hardened in the Byzantine Church through a famous crisis, restricts remarriage to a maximum of three: a third marriage is tolerated only reluctantly, as the tradition says, as a remedy against worse evils, and a fourth marriage is absolutely forbidden. This limit was fixed in the aftermath of the tetragamy (four-marriage) controversy of Emperor Leo VI “the Wise,” whose fourth marriage provoked a major dispute and was condemned by the Tomos of Union issued at Constantinople in 920, which permitted a third marriage only under strict conditions of age and childlessness and prohibited a fourth outright (the Tomos of Union, 920, resolving the tetragamy affair; see Meyendorff, Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective, and the standard Byzantine church histories). St. Basil had already treated third marriages with severe reserve, calling them “moderated fornication” tolerated only to avoid worse, and prescribing penance for them (Basil, Canonical Epistles, canon 4 and 50, on second and third marriages; in NPNF, Second Series, vol. 8). The graduated discipline — first marriage honored, second penitentially permitted, third barely tolerated with penance, fourth forbidden — is the concrete shape of an economy that bends toward human weakness without ever abandoning the ideal.

The Theology of Oikonomia

[Disputed: how the Church's toleration of divorce and remarriage is rightly to be understood theologically, and how far the economy properly extends. This is a genuine and long-standing tension within the tradition, not a settled doctrine. (a) One emphasis — closer to the letter of the Lord's word "let not man put asunder" and to the ideal of the eternal bond — stresses that divorce is always a tragedy and a sin, that remarriage is a falling-short tolerated only as a lesser evil by *oikonomia*, and warns that a lax practice of granting ecclesiastical divorces (which in some periods and places has become very common) betrays the mystery and empties the ideal (Meyendorff, *Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective*, criticizing the erosion of the marriage discipline and the routinization of ecclesiastical divorce). (b) Another emphasis — closer to the pastoral logic of economy — stresses that the Church is a hospital and not a tribunal, that a marriage can genuinely die and that binding a person forever to a dead union serves no one, and that the Church's authority to loose (Matthew 18:18) extends to releasing spouses from a bond that no longer exists in truth (Ware, *The Orthodox Church*, Part II, presenting economy as authentic pastoral compassion). Both agree on the ideal of one lifelong marriage and on the limit of three; both agree that remarriage is by economy and not by right; they differ on where the balance between rigor and compassion should fall and on how far the modern proliferation of ecclesiastical divorces can be defended. This collection reports the ideal, the exception, and this internal tension, and does not adjudicate where the line should be drawn.]

The concept of oikonomia — literally “household management,” the prudent administration of the mysteries and canons for the salvation of souls — is the key to the whole matter, and it must not be misread. Economy is not a loophole or a laxity that treats the ideal as negotiable; it is the Church’s authority, given for the healing of persons, to apply the law of the Kingdom with the flexibility of a physician rather than the rigidity of a court, precisely because the goal is not the vindication of a rule but the salvation of the sinner (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II, on oikonomia; Meyendorff, Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective). The ideal remains the ideal — one marriage, eternal, an icon of Christ and the Church — and the economy that permits a second or third does so with penitence and sorrow, never pretending that the exception is the norm. To hold both without collapsing either — the unbending height of the mystery and the tender condescension of the pastor — is the difficult and characteristically Orthodox achievement of this part of the tradition.

References

Meyendorff, John. Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective. 3rd ed. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2000.
Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993, Part II.
Basil the Great. Canonical Epistles (canons on second and third marriages). In NPNF, Second Series, vol. 8, and the Rudder (Pedalion), trans. Cummings.
The Tomos of Union (Constantinople, 920) — resolving the tetragamy controversy of Leo VI and fixing the limit of three marriages.
Scripture: Matthew 5:32, 19:6–9; 1 Corinthians 7:9; Ephesians 5:31–32.