Many confusions and misunderstandings concerning marriage in our contemporary Orthodox practice would be easily eliminated if the original connection between marriage and the Eucharist were restored. Theoretically, Orthodox sacramental theology, even in its scholastic, textbook form, has preserved this connection in affirming, in opposition to Roman Catholicism, that the priest is the ‘minister’ of marriage. Western medieval theology, on the contrary, has created a series of confusions by adopting, as in so many other points Roman legalism as the basis of sacramental theology: marriage, being a ‘contract’, is concluded by the husband and wife themselves, who are therefore the ‘ministers’ of the sacrament, the priest being only a witness. As a legal contract, marriage is dissolved by the death of one of the partners, but it is indissoluble as long as both are alive. Actually, indissolubility i.e., a legal concept taken as an absolute is the main, if not the only, contribution of Christianity to the Roman Catholic concept of marriage. Broken by death, assimilated with a human agreement, marriage, in the prevailing Western view, is only an earthly affair, concerned with the body, unworthy of entering the Kingdom of God. One can even wonder whether marriage, so understood, can still be called a sacrament. But, by affirming that the priest is the minister of the marriage, as he is also the minister of the Eucharist, the Orthodox Church implicitly integrates marriage in the eternal Mystery, where the boundaries between heaven and earth are broken and where human decision and action acquire an eternal dimension.
Orthodox Christians commonly accuse the West of a legalistic understanding of marriage, claiming it is purely consent based and has no real ecclesial function in its essence, and that it does s not carry any eschatological significance.
However, an erudite reply from Dominican Br. (now Fr.) Peter Totleben put up a response that really delves into the history and sacramental theology of marriage for the Western Church, one which explains the sacerdotal relevance to the sacrament, and a fantastic brief but dense exegesis of the famous passage from Matthew where Christ answers the Saducee's question on marriage and the resurrection.
It highly impressed me, enough to the point where I thought it warranted its own blog post. So I offer you the same erudition he offered me and all of Gabe's readers. I hope it benefits the overall dialogue on this issue.
"A typical pattern that you see in the works of Meyendorff (especially when he is critical of Western practices) is that he takes a term, a tag, or a catch-phrase that strikes him as odd, gives it his own meaning, and then criticizes it in terms of the meaning he has given it. So he can be a bit hard to engage.
There are also some problems with Meyendorff’s historical work. He’s usually invested in a particular “side” in the historical events that he investigates. And he doesn’t really take the positions of other sides seriously. He usually is too trusting of his own party’s evaluations of its opponents, and he uncritically repeats them as if they were objective summaries of the state of affairs. And he never really consults what the opponents of his side have to say.
So, reading Meyendorff can sometimes be like letting Rush Limbaugh explain democrats to you. . .
That’s pretty much what is happening in this quote. Meyendorff treats “contract” and “indissolubility” as if his understanding of these two terms exhausts the understanding of marriage of the Latin Church. Then he concludes that there is nothing particularly Christian about any of it. But of course, a more integral reading of the Latin tradition (or even a slightly less superficial treatment of it) would show that this is nonsense on stilts.
Really, what’s going on here is that the Latin Church makes a clearer distinction between natural and sacramental marriage. Natural marriage is elevated to the dignity of a sacrament. It’s just an observation of the evident fact that non-Christians fall in love, get married and have children. It’s “the one blessing not lost by the fall.” And it is good. You don’t need grace to make nature good.
And, in fact, every sacrament presupposes some good natural action. Baptism presupposes washing with water; confirmation presupposes anointing with oil; the Eucharist presupposes offering a sacrifice and eating; penance presupposes the actions of confession, contrition, and satisfaction on the part of the penitent. Likewise, marriage as a sacrament presupposes the committed procreative love of the spouses–i.e. natural marriage. It is this which gets elevated and changed into a sign and instrument of grace. (And the sign has a composite signification with reference to the past, present and future, so the marriage has an inherently eschatological dimension).
If marriage is an institution of nature, then it is reasonable to suppose that it began with the consent of the two spouses. This is the basis behind the Latin view that consent makes the marriage. But this is without prejudice to either the intercession of the Church or God’s causality.
In the Latin Church, the priest is not simply a witness to the contractual exchange of consent, and this is evident from the liturgy of Marriage. In the traditional rite, the priest even says, “I join you in matrimony, in the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Then, the ritual instructs him, “If the nuptial blessing is to take place [ie. if both parties are Catholic], the Pastor celebrates the Mass pro Sponso et Sponsa.” This is because the nuptial blessing (uniquely) is given between the anaphora and communion (where the bride and groom share in the Eucharist). What is really puzzling is that Meyendorff is criticizing Catholics for separating the meaning of marriage from the meaning Eucharist, while the Orthodox have maintained it, when it is the Catholics who have so carefully maintained the connection between the celebration of marriage and the celebration of the Eucharist. It is a bit odd to explain to an Orthodox theologian that the liturgy is supposed to be an important source for theology, but there you go.
(Actually, this whole dispute over who is the minister of marriage is overblown. In the Byzantine period, the Orthodox Church was responsible for the administration of civil marriage, and they witnessed the consent of the couple as a matter of course, and then blessed them. The Catholic Church would at times admit the validity, but not the liceity of clandestine marriage. However, marriage before a priest was the norm. And for centuries now, the liturgical rite of marriage has been required even for a valid marriage)
Nor does the doctrine that consent makes the marriage neglect God’s causality.
Meyendorff highlights how the couples are the ministers of the sacrament of marriage. What Meyendorff doesn’t tell you is that the minister of the sacrament is always an instrumental cause. In the administration of the sacraments; there is a synergy between God and the human minister, with the human minister subordinated to God’s causal action. No one ever supposed that two baptized people simply ratify a contract, and that is all that marriage is. It is also a bit odd that one has to remind an Orthodox theologian about the doctrine of God’s synergy with human actions, but again, there you go.)
Seen from this light, the Latin Church is not assimilating marriage to a human contract, but is saying that God enters into a synergy with the couple, deifying their human love to make it a sign and instrument of — or, if you like, an eschatological participation in — his heavenly kingdom. It is simply absurd to assert that the Latin church makes of marriage “only an earthly reality.”
But that doesn’t mean that marriage carries over into heaven. On a natural level, marriage is for the procreation and upbringing of children. This type of family organization will not obtain in heaven. On a sacramental level, marriage is an eschatological sign and instrument of God’s covenant love for his people, as this is shown in Christ’s love for his Church. Sacraments are for this world. Precisely by calling them sacraments (or mysteries in St. Paul’s sense) and by giving them an eschatological dimension, you are conceding that they are for this world. (You don’t need a sacrament of the kingdom once the reality of the kingdom is consummated.)
Think about the Eucharist. We will not celebrate the Eucharist in heaven, because we will not need a sacramental liturgy in heaven. In heaven, sacramental worship gives way to a worship of a more un-mediated sort. Priests remain priests in heaven, of course (they are still marked by their character), but they do not exercise their sacramental functions. The hierarchy of sacramental ministers gives way to the hierarchy of charity which is the flourishing of the baptismal priesthood. (Monks remain monks because consecrated life is a more intense participation). Marriage, however, is a type of relationship that is radically characterized by its procreative dimension–that’s why marriage itself, even in its sacramental form passes away at death.
This is really crass, supine, or affected ignorance on the part of Meyendorff. Instead of paying attention to the discipline, liturgy, theology, or magisterial teaching of the Latin Church, he gives a misleading account of its doctrine so that he can engage in an act of petty point-scoring. How does that help anyone?
But I wonder if all of this doesn’t highlight another problem. A lot of the Orthodox thinking on marriage in the 20th century makes it seem like the procreative dimension of marriage is somehow not constitutive of marriage, especially when this is seen as a sacrament. The fundamentally procreative nature of marriage is at the heart of Latin thinking about the sacrament. This is true whether it is a discussion of the “ends of marriage” the “goods of marriage” or the “unitive and procreative dimensions of marriage.” The Catholic Church has been pretty consistent in arguing that these cannot be separated.
The Church’s position is often misunderstood. People often think of the unitive and procreative ends of marriage as two really distinct things, and then wonder which is primary. (It’s like the old SNL commercial parody: “It’s a floor wax and a dessert topping.”) But that’s not really the right way to think about it. What a thing is is specified by its end, and so a thing can’t have two ends. Actually the procreative and unitive “ends” of marriage aren’t really distinct. Marriage isn’t a friends-with-exclusive-benefits sort of arrangement. Natural marriage has only one end: a procreative end. It’s not just any sort of union, and the sexual act is not accidental to the sort of union that it is. A husband and a wife literally fit their bodies together so that they become one agent, one cause in the creation of a new life.
And it is important to get fleshy like that when talking about marriage, because that is what makes marriage different from any other kind of union or friendship. When you read modern Orthodox writing about the sacrament of marriage, it seems to sacramentalize the unitive aspects of marriage, while factoring out the procreative nature of that union. But the reason why marriage is a sacrament and other kinds of friendship aren’t is precisely because of the special kind of friendship (i.e. a procreative one) that marriage is.
And, of course, if marriage is fundamentally about turning procreative union into a sacrament of the kingdom, then marriage does not continue into heaven. In Matthew 22, Jesus did not say that the woman would not have sex with any of her seven husbands in heaven. He said that none of the seven would be her husband–even though she had sex with all of them on earth.
Nor is it an argument against this position that we will continue to love our families in heaven. Of course we will. But from this it does not follow that we are still married.
Like so much of what is found in 20th Century Orthodox writers, I’m not sure how well-grounded it actually is in the texts of the Greek Fathers. At any rate, when reading the Fathers, we need to recall that they were living in a culture that took the procreative nature of marriage for granted, and a culture that had a strong pagan background where the unitive implications of marriage needed to be emphasized.
Actually, I think that a lot of modern Orthodox writers are explicitly trying to appeal to the post-Cartesian sensibilities of their readers. And, as is unfortunately so often the case with 20th century Orthodox writers, “ancient faith” and “light from the East” really just means thinly-veiled modernism.
It is actually this modern, “de-fleshified” concept of marriage that is behind many of the deviations from traditional Christian morality that some Orthodox writers are trying to promote. Once marriage is no longer fundamentally procreative, there is no reason why you can’t use contraception. Once marriage is no longer essentially characterized by the meaning of the sexual act (the way that the husband and wife become the one cause of their child and are responsible for raising it), there’s no reason the husband and wife can’t move on.
It’s not that Catholics make marriage only an earthly affair, it’s that Orthodox make it only a heavenly one."
