Another argument on the interpretation of Matthew 5:32 and 19:9

Mark (10:11-12) and Luke (16:18) have rather simple and straightforward statements on divorce and remarriage: if you divorce and remarry, you’re in adultery. A standard interpretation is the Strict View:

• (SV) Divorce does not actually remove the marriage, and so if you remarry, you’re still married to the previous party, and hence are committing adultery.

It’s usual in the Christian tradition to restrict this to consummated Christian marriage, and I will take that for granted.

However, Matthew has a more complex set of prohibitions:

• Matthew 5:32: Anyone who divorces his wife, except on account of porneia, makes her commit adultery, and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

• Matthew 19:9: Anyone who divorces his wife, except due to porneia, and marries another commits adultery.

There are several puzzles here. First, unlike in Mark and Luke, we have exceptions for porneia, a generic term for sexual immorality. There are two main interpretations of this exception:

1. Except when the wife has committed sexual immorality (most commonly, adultery).

2. Except when the “marriage” constitutes sexual immorality.

Reading (1) supports the Less Strict View:

• (LSV) Except when your spouse has committed adultery, divorce does not actually remove the marriage, and so if you remarry, you’re still married to the previous party, and hence are committing adultery.

Reading (2) is based on the observation that not every legal marriage is genuinely a marriage: the Romans, for instance, might have allowed a couple to marry despite their being too closely related from the Christian point of view. In such a case, their “marriage” is not a real marriage but incest, a form of sexual immorality, and divorce is not only permissible, but a very good idea. Note that on reading (2), we can but need not suppose that Jesus verbally included the exception—the inspired author might have added it for clarification because the issue came up for converts, much as we put things in square brackets within a quote to clarify the author’s meaning (there were no brackets in Greek, of course).

Reading (2) has the advantage that it explains how all three Gospels can be inspired, even though Mark and Luke have unqualified statements of SV, since on reading (2) it is true that divorcing one’s wife and remarrying is never permitted, but it is permissible, of course, to divorce one’s partner in an immoral sexual relationship that non-Christian society may call “marriage”. Note that the Greek for “his wife” can literally just mean “his woman”, which makes the disambiguation especially appropriate.

But I want to turn towards a different and more complex argument for SV. Notice that in Matthew 5:32, instead of us being told that the man who divorces his wife (or woman) commits adultery, we are oddly told that he makes her commit adultery. But being a betrayed spouse does not constitute adultery! What’s going on? Well, the good interpretations that I’ve seen note that the social context is a society where it is very difficult to be a woman without a husband. There will thus be significant social pressure to marry or become a concubine, either of which would constitute adultery against the first husband. The realities of the day were such that very likely she would succumb to the pressure, and the first husband would have caused her to commit adultery, and thereby he would have earned himself something worse than a millstone about the neck (Matthew 18:6). This reading also nicely explains why Matthew 5:32, unlike the three other texts, does not mention the man marrying another. For the woman is going to be exposed to the social pressure to join herself to another man whether or not her (first) husband marries another.

Note that this reading of “makes her commit adultery” prima facie works on both readings of the porneia exception. On the reading where the porneia is the wife’s adultery against her husband, obviously if she is already committing adultery, by divorcing her he isn’t making her commit adultery. On the reading where the porneia is constituted by the immorality of the first “marriage”, because the woman wasn’t really married to the man, if she goes and marries another, she isn’t committing adultery.

Nonetheless, there is a serious problem for this reading of “makes her commit adultery” on the Less Strict View and reading (1). While Matthew 5:32 does not talk of the man marrying another, often the man will marry another. So now imagine this story. There is a valid marriage between Alice and Bob with no adultery, but Bob divorces Alice, and marries Charlene. At this point, Bob is committing adultery against Alice on both SV and LSV. Thus, if LSV is correct, then Alice is entitled to divorce Bob and marry another, say Dave. But if she avails herself of this, she isn’t committing adultery. In other words, if LSV is correct, in many cases the first wife will be able to avoid committing adultery without going against social pressures: she need only wait for her first husband to marry, and then the “except on account of porneia” clause on interpretation (1) frees her (and since he’s already legally divorced her, she doesn’t need to do any legal paperwork). (Of course, there will still be less common cases where she is stuck, namely when the man fails to remarry. But such a case wouldn’t be the rule, and Matthew 5:32 implies that leading the woman to adultery is the rule rather than an exception.)

On SV, the problem for the reading of “makes her commit adultery” entirely disappears. Whether or not the man remarries, there is social pressure for the divorced wife to marry, and in doing so, she would be committing adultery against the man.

Interestingly, there is a historically represented view that avoids the Strict View, allows our interpretation of “makes her commit adultery” and avoids the above interpretative problem, namely the quite awful Asymmetric View:

• (AV) A woman is not permitted to remarry after a divorce, whether or not the first husband committed adultery against her, but a man is permitted to remarry after a divorce if, and only if, the first wife committed adultery against him.

Additionally, AV also explains why neither of the texts in Matthew has an exception for porneia in the “anyone who marries a divorced woman” clause, a minor weak point for LSV. (On SV and reading (2) of porneia, we just note that one need not repeat a parenthetical clarification every time.)

In fact, while there was controversy in the early centuries of Christianity over remarriage and divorce following adultery, I understand that it was mainly a controversy between advocates of SV and AV, not between advocates of SV and LSV. However, AV was rightly lambasted by St. Jerome for being sexist, and I assume almost nobody wants to defend it now.

Thus to sum up my argument for SV:

1. One of SV, AV and LSV is true, as they are the historically plausible Christian views on marriage.

2. The right interpretation of “makes her commit adultery” is the social pressure interpretation.

3. This interpretation is incompatible with LSV.

4. AV is false.

5. Therefore, SV is true.

Divorce, remarriage and communion

I've been thinking a bit about one of the key issues of the recent Synod on the Family, whether Catholics who have divorced and attempted remarriage without an annulment should be allowed to receive communion. As I understand the disagreement (I found this quite helpful), it's not really about the nature of marriage.

The basic case to think about is this:

Jack believes himself to be married to Jill, and publicly lives with her as husband and wife. But the Church knows, although Jack does not, that Jack is either unmarried or married to Suzy.

Should Jack be allowed to receive communion? After all, Jack is committing adultery (if he is actually married to Suzy) or fornication (if he's not actually married to Suzy) with Jill, and that's public wrongdoing. However, Jack is deluded into thinking that he's actually married to Jill. So Jack isn't aware that he's committing adultery or fornication. Jack may or may not be innocent in his delusion. If he is innocent in his delusion, then he is not culpably sinning ("formally sinning", as we Catholics say) in his adultery or fornication.

This is a hard question. On the one hand, given the spiritual benefits of the Eucharist, the Church should strive to avoid denying communion to an innocent person, and Jack might be innocent. On the other hand, letting Jack receive communion reinforces his delusion of being married to Jill, making him think that all is well with this aspect of his life, and committing adultery and fornication is good neither for Jack nor for Jill, even if they are ignorant of the fact that their relationship is adulterous or fornicatory.

One thing should be clear: this is not a clear case. There really are serious considerations in both directions, considerations fully faithful to the teaching of Scripture and Tradition that adultery and fornication are gravely wrong and that one should not receive communion when one is guilty of grave wrong.

One may think that the above way of spinning the case is not a fair reflection of real-world divorce and remarriage cases. What I said above makes it sound like Jack has hallucinated a wedding with Jill and may have amnesia about a wedding with Suzy. And indeed it is a difficult and far from clear pastoral question what to do with congregants who are suffering from hallucinations and amnesia. But in the real-life cases under debate, Jack really does remember exchanging vows with Suzy, and yet he has later exchanged other vows, in a non-Catholic ceremony, with Jill. Moreover, Jack knows that the Church teaches things that imply that he isn't really married to Jill. Does this make the basic case clear?

Well, to fill out the case, we also need to add the further information that the culture, at both the popular and elite levels, is telling Jack that he is married to Jill. And Jack thinks that the Church is wrong and the culture is right. I doubt we can draw a bright line between cases of mental aberration and those of being misled by the opinions of others. We are social animals, after all. (If "everyone" were to tell me that I never had a PhD thesis defense, I would start doubting my memories.)

At the same time, the cultural point plays in two opposite ways. On the one hand, it makes it more likely that Jack's ignorance is not culpable. On the other hand, it makes it imperative--not just for Jack and Jill's sake, but now also that of many others--not to act in ways that reinforce the ignorance and delusion. Moreover, the issue for Jack's spiritual health isn't just about his relationship with Jill. If Jack puts more weight in the culture than in Catholic teaching, Jack has other problems, and may need a serious jolt. But even that's not clear: that jolt might push him even further away from where he should be.

So I don't really know what the Church should do, and I hope the Holy Spirit will guide Pope Francis to act wisely.

In any case, I think my point stands that this isn't really about the nature of marriage. One can have complete agreement that adultery and fornication are wrong and that Jack isn't married to Jill, without it being clear what to do.

Divorce

A marriage forges the couple into something analogous to a new person. Divorce is intended to be destructive of that something analogous to a new person. Thus divorce is at least presumptively wrong.

Objection: What if a marriage fails to forge that something analogous to a new person?

Response: I think we should see persons as through and through normative beings. What makes the married couple be something analogous to a new person is not that they actually make decisions together, become aligned to one another's needs and so on, but that such joint decision-making, this kind of alignment to one another's needs and so on are normative for them—are what they should strive for. A ceremony that fails to make this normative reality come into existence is not a marriage. We have something analogous to a new person even in a bad marriage.

Reasons of marriage

Suppose we take seriously the idea that when a couple marries, an entity with moral standing—the married couple—comes into existence. Then there might be cases where an action is good for the spouses but bad for the married couple, and the fact that it is bad for the married couple could provide a strong moral reason to refrain from an action even if the action is good for the spouses.

That said, I don't accept an ontology on which a new entity comes into existence when a couple marries. But something similar to the above could still be the case. There are two kinds of wellbeing: one may call them narrow and extended wellbeing. Extended wellbeing is flourishing you have in virtue things outside of you going right for you. For instance, when someone you love has a success, your extended wellbeing increases even before you find out about it. Likewise, our reputation is a matter of our extended wellbeing, though it also tends to instrumentally affect our narrow wellbeing.

It can be quite rational to engage in some actions that sacrifice narrow wellbeing for extended wellbeing (just as sometimes the opposite makes sense). Now, even if a new entity doesn't come into existence when a couple marries, the members of the couple acquire a new mode of extended wellbeing, a mode where they are well insofar as the marriage goes well and poorly insofar as the marriage goes poorly.

But this means that it could happen that it would be rational for the spouses to sacrifice the narrow wellbeing of both persons for the sake of the external wellbeing they have in virtue of their marriage. It could well be that destroying the marriage is on balance a harm to the spouses even if they no longer care about the marriage and its destruction makes them feel better, just as an action that destroys one's reputation may be a harm to one even if one no longer cares about one's reputation and enjoys ruining it.

Cohabitation, marital quality and resistance to reason

Some background

Progressive folk in the second half of the twentieth century thought that cohabitation would improve the prospects for marriage, and eventually significant segments of the public have come to agree (e.g., in 1984, 77% of Canadians were accepting of cohabitation for those couples that "want to make sure that their future marriage will last"). Practice makes perfect, after all, and through cohabitation a couple might find that they are not "a good fit", so such cohabitation, they thought, would be a good thing for marital quality and duration. (Of course these arguments have defeaters: practice at cohabitation is not the same thing as practice at marriage, and close proximity might blind one to whether someone is a good fit.)

Then in 1988, Booth and Johnson published a study showing a strong correlation between premarital cohabitation and divorce--over the three-year course of their study 5% of those who had not cohabited divorced while 9% of those who had cohabited divorced. Moreover, while controlling for demographic factors decreased the disparity, it did not remove the disparity. Since then, a stream of sociological publications confirmed the correlation between cohabitation and subsequent divorce, as well as between cohabitation and poorer marital interaction style (lest one think that this is all an artifact of the fact that duration is a poor measure of marital quality).

There is no controversy that correlation is a fact. But correlation does not show causation. Although there are some studies that suggest causation (e.g., apparently the strength of belief in the permanence of marriage decreases with the length of cohabitation), and although several mechanisms have been proposed (e.g., the mechanism of drifting into a marriage with people whom one would not have married had one not cohabitated with them), we are not in a position to say that cohabitation causes poorer marital interaction or divorce.

However, we are in a position to see that there is no reason to believe the view that cohabitation in general improves marital prospects. That is just not what the data show.

My students

In my Philosophy of Love and Sex class at Georgetown, I would have my students read some of the sociological papers on the correlation between cohabitation and marital problems. Now, here is something interesting. Even after we have read and discussed all of that research, I would still hear a student saying that they couldn't marry someone they hadn't lived with, because it would be too risky.

Now, I could understand not being convinced by the case for cohabitation causing these problems (I am not completely convinced myself). But that one would continue to think that cohabitation helps with marriage after having seen the data is rather disappointing.

I think one thing this shows is just how resilient deeply ingrained social beliefs, especially ones supported by plausible-seeming arguments (the practice and test-for-fit arguments), are in even quite intelligent people (my students were generally very smart). No surprise there.

Another potential mechanism could be a dismissal of the idea that statistical data on behavioral patterns has a bearing on one's own decisions. We have free will, after all, so we might think that the fact that the statistics do or do not show something about patterns of behavior is irrelevant--we can, with our own free will, choose to be exceptions to the statistics. Now, I believe in incompatibilistic free will, but I also accept the indubitable fact that our behavior is influenced by all kinds of factors, some of them amenable to statistical study--the free-will argument just isn't very good here. Moreover, the free-will argument would equally undercut the idea of cohabiting for the sake of improving future marital success--for if our behavior is all really up to us, with no external influence, then whether the couple cohabits or not, marital success is in the hands of the couple.