Lecture 9 — Against divorce

^5:31^ It has been said: whoever will put away his wife, let him give her a bill of divorce. [n. 512]

^5:32^ But I say to you, that whoever will put away his wife, except for the cause of fornication, makes her commit adultery: and he who will marry her who is put away, commits adultery. [n. 515]

512. It has been said: ‘whoever will put away his wife, let him give her a bill of divorce.’ After the Lord has fulfilled the prohibitive precepts of the law, now he fulfills the permissive precepts of the law.

And this part is divided into two parts:

first, he fulfills the law as to the permissive precepts which pertain to God;

second, as to the precepts that pertain to one’s neighbor, at **you have heard that it is said: ‘an eye for an eye’ **(Matt 5:38).

The first is in two parts: first, he fulfills the permissive precept concerning the bill of divorce;

second, concerning swearing, at **you have heard it said to them of old: ‘you shall not forswear yourself’ **(Matt 5:33).

513. As to the first he does two things:

first, he sets down the words of the law;

second, their fulfillment: but I say to you, that whoever will put away his wife.

514. Therefore he says it has been said: (Deut 24:1). A question. If ‘whoever will put away his wife, let him give her a bill of divorce’: this is commanded. But to put away one’s wife is a permission: for Moses permitted, he did not command.

But there are many kinds of permission, namely: a concession, when permitted things are conceded, as when a monk is allowed to leave the abbey to visit his father;

a dispensation, when things that are not permitted become permitted by dispensation, as when it is permitted dispensatively for a monk to eat meat when he is with others;

an indulgence, when something permissible, whose opposite is better, is allowed, like the Apostle’s permission for second marriages, even though the continence of the widowed is a better thing: and according to this you resolve what the Gloss says here, namely that the apostles commanded second marriages, i.e., they allowed them by way of indulgence, or it was commanded unless you were willing to remain continent: otherwise it would not oblige like a precept.

Then there is a forbearance, as when God permits certain evils to happen, although he always draws some good out of them; and a tolerance, when some evil is tolerated lest something worse happen, as here.

‘Whoever will put away his wife’. Is the indissolubility of marriage not from natural law? But it is in the law of Moses by dispensation that here ‘let him give her a bill of divorce’ in which the reasons for the divorce are recorded, according to Josephus. Or, according to Augustine: it was written down like this so that there would be an intervening delay, and on the advice of the scribes dissuading him, the man might cease his divorce proceedings. But according to Jerome on this subject, the reason for permitting the divorce of one’s wife was to avoid uxoricide.

515. But was the divorced wife allowed to marry? But I say to you . . . makes her commit adultery. But it is a question. Was it not permitted for a husband to put away his wife on account of fornication? And it seems that evil should not be rendered for evil. It must be said that the Lord conceded divorcing one’s wife for fornication as a penalty to the one who broke faith. But is he bound to this by the precept? It must be said that putting away one’s fornicating wife was introduced for the correction of the wife’s crime. But can someone put her away by his own judgment? He who will marry her who is put away, commits adultery, for the man is intruding on an existing marriage.