HistoricalChristian.Faith

Did the early church permit remarriage? (the deprecation of digamy)

May a Christian whose husband or wife has died marry again? The early church answered, almost with one voice, in a single divided breath: yes — but the single life is better. Remarriage after a spouse’s death (“digamy”) was held lawful and no sin, yet everywhere deprecated as the lesser state; the twice-married were barred from the clergy and, in the East, penanced before readmission to communion. This page traces that “permission-with-deprecation” across time, earliest witness first — from Paul’s two-sided rule, through its mainstream restatement in Hermas, Clement, and Origen, its hard pole in Athenagoras and its outright prohibition in Tertullian, the canon law of Neocaesarea, Laodicea, and Basil, the settled Latin verdict of Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine, to the East’s final crystallization at the Council in Trullo. The one figure who broke the consensus — forbidding what Paul permitted and calling the second marriage “fornication” — is Tertullian, and the church rejected him on exactly that point.

Related doctrines: Marriage, celibacy, and the single life — see also divorce and remarriage — what did Jesus permit? · the divorce readings scored as competing scenarios

Closely bound to this belief is the deprecation of marriage that fed the perpetual virginity of Mary and the wider exaltation of the single life; and the sharpest test of where deprecation ends and false doctrine begins is weighed on the remarriage-as-fornication argument — the central count on which Augustine hung Tertullian’s heresy.

Timeline

Paul the Apostle (c. 55)

Paul sets the terms the whole tradition inherits. He permits the widowed to remarry — a widow “is at liberty to be married to whom she will; only in the Lord,” and is “no adulteress” if she does — and positively wills that “the younger women marry, bear children, guide the house.”¹ Yet he rates the single state the “happier” one, calls remarriage a concession to those who “cannot contain,” and bars the twice-married from church office and the widows’ roll.² Permission with a preference: the tension every later witness leans one way or the other upon.

The Shepherd of Hermas (c. 140)

The earliest post-apostolic answer reproduces Paul’s balance in one sentence. Asked whether a widow or widower who remarries sins, the angelic Shepherd replies: “There is no sin in marrying again… but if they remain unmarried, they gain greater honour and glory with the Lord.”³ No hint that the second marriage is shameful, let alone fornication — the mainstream mean from which Tertullian later departs.

Athenagoras of Athens (c. 177)

Athenagoras is the hard pole before Montanism. An unimpeachably catholic apologist, he tells the emperors that a man should “be content with one marriage; for a second marriage is only a specious adultery,” and that “he who deprives himself of his first wife, even though she be dead, is a cloaked adulterer.”⁴ The adultery-language is a rhetorical intensifier applied to a concededly lawful act — but it shows the severe reading was current, and catholic, a generation before the New Prophecy, not a Montanist coinage; whether it was actually mainstream, or the lone severe pole against Hermas and Clement, is weighed in the Arguments below.

Clement of Alexandria (c. 200)

Clement holds the balanced middle against two errors at once. In Stromateis III he answers the Gnostic encratites, who forbade all marriage as evil, and the libertines, who thought conduct indifferent — keeping second marriage lawful as “the apostle allows… from sympathy” to those who “burn,” while preferring continence and the widow who “remains as she is.”⁵ Toleration and preference together — and the prohibition of marriage flatly labelled an encratite heresy.

Tertullian (c. 210) — the dissenter

Tertullian alone turns the deprecation into a ban. His early To His Wife still grants that the apostle “permits marrying” and urges (not commands) widowhood; but in the later, openly Montanist On Exhortation to Chastity and On Monogamy the counsel hardens into a prohibition, and the remarriage of a widow or widower is classed as “a species of fornication.”⁶ Forced to reckon with Paul’s plain permission, he does not out-argue it but overrides it — the Paraclete has “abrogated an indulgence which Paul granted” — and even claims the Greek of 1 Cor. 7:39 was corrupted to widen the license (a charge weighed, and found unsupported, in the Arguments).⁷ Whether this is a severe reading of a real deprecation or a false doctrine against apostolic teaching is weighed in the Arguments below.

Origen of Alexandria (c. 245)

Origen keeps Clement’s mean and reasons out its sharpest tension. Remarriage after widowhood is “no reproach” and lawful; yet the twice-married are shut out of church office — a bar Origen frankly finds hard to justify against a chaste digamist, since “some who have been married twice may be much better than those who have been married once,” and files, with Paul’s other indulgences, among the “laws given by concession to human weakness.”⁸ The marriage is allowed; it simply belongs to the weaker, not the perfect, Christian.

The Council of Neocaesarea (c. 315)

The deprecation now hardens into canon law — but in a form that proves the point. A presbyter may not even attend a digamist’s wedding-feast, “for, since the digamist is worthy of penance, what kind of a presbyter shall he be, who… sanctioned the marriage?” — yet the digamist is a penitent, not a fornicator, and his marriage stands, the church “never” reputing second marriages “illicit.”⁹

The Council of Laodicea (c. 364)

Laodicea softens the penance and, in doing so, states the rule as plainly as any canon: communion is restored “to those who have freely and lawfully joined in second marriages… after a short space… in prayer and fasting.”¹⁰ The word “lawfully” is decisive — the deprecation preserved, the prohibition refused.

Basil of Caesarea (c. 375)

Basil fixes the eastern discipline in numbers: a year’s penance for a second marriage, three or four for a third. Only the third and further unions draw the sharp word — “no longer… marriage at all, but… polygamy; nay rather… limited fornication” — and even those penitents are received back.¹¹ Where Tertullian denied the name “marriage” to the second union, Basil withholds it only from the third.

Ambrose of Milan (c. 377)

Ambrose is the careful Latin mean. In Concerning Widows he presses the honour of perpetual widowhood as hard as anyone, yet draws the line Tertullian crossed: “I do not forbid second marriages, only I do not advise them,” for the second marriage is one “which the precepts of the Apostle certainly do not condemn.”¹² Lawful, but not expedient — the distinction Tertullian collapsed, kept firmly apart.

Jerome (c. 393)

Jerome is the test case. The age’s fiercest champion of virginity, he quarried Tertullian’s monogamist works and pressed the denigration of marriage so hard in Against Jovinianus that friends withdrew the book from circulation — yet at the decisive point he refuses to cross where Tertullian crossed: “I do not condemn second, nor third, nor, pardon the expression, eighth marriages.”¹³ When even Jerome, who followed Tertullian furthest, draws back at calling remarriage sin, the ban is shown to be a step past the church’s severity, not its expression.

Augustine of Hippo (c. 414)

Augustine states the settled Latin verdict and names the man who overstepped it. In On the Good of Widowhood he refuses to condemn any lawful marriage — “I dare neither to condemn any marriage” — and faults “Tertullian… whilst with railing tooth he attacks second marriages, as though unlawful, which the Apostle with sober mind allows to be altogether lawful.”¹⁴ The single life is the greater good honoured by the submission of a real good — “despise, not condemn” — not a good purchased by branding the other evil.

The Council in Trullo (692)

Trullo crystallizes the East’s discipline and names its principle: a blend of Roman “exact perfection” and Constantinopolitan “kindness and consideration,” so “that neither gentleness fall into licence, nor severity into harshness,” renewing the bar on the twice-married from the clergy.¹⁵ Over the next two centuries the rule fixed into its final Eastern form — first marriage the norm, second a penanced concession, third tolerated under limits, a fourth absolutely forbidden — tested and settled by the tetragamy of the emperor Leo VI and the Tomos of Union (920).¹⁶

Arguments

Was Tertullian’s ban on second marriage a severe reading of Paul, or a false doctrine? (assessment: contested)

Was Tertullian’s ban on second marriage a severe reading of Paul, or a false doctrine? — the one place a Christian teacher forbade what this whole timeline holds lawful. The interpretation is soundest for the church’s deprecation of remarriage (early, wide, partly scriptural) and strains for Tertullian’s ban: he forbids what Paul expressly permits, re-labels “fornication” a union Paul calls guiltless, and grounds the prohibition on the Paraclete’s abrogation of an apostolic concession rather than on exegesis — so the count turns, at its root, into a question of authority. Weighed on Augustine’s own central charge against him; assessment contested.¹⁷

Was the Greek of 1 Cor. 7:39 corrupted to widen the remarriage license? (assessment: unsupported)

Was the Greek of 1 Cor. 7:39 corrupted to widen the remarriage license? — Tertullian’s last line of defence, when Paul’s permission would not yield to argument: the claim that “the alteration of two syllables” had turned a narrow, convert-only concession into an open-ended one, so that the “authentic Greek” never granted what the received text grants. The charge has no basis in the manuscripts — the Greek of the verse is uniform, the apparatus records no variant touching the tense or scope of the permission, and Tertullian’s own words locate the difference in a Latin rendering, not a corrupted Greek exemplar. A rigorist impugning the apostle’s text at the one point it thwarts him; assessment unsupported.¹⁸

Was the severe “second marriage is adultery” reading mainstream before Montanism? (assessment: plausible)

Was the severe “second marriage is adultery” reading a mainstream position before Montanism? — the claim, flagged at Athenagoras above, that the harsh equation of remarriage with adultery predates the New Prophecy and so is no Montanist coinage. The claim splits: that the language is pre-Montanist and catholic is sound — Athenagoras reaches for “specious adultery” about 177, wholly outside Montanism — but that it was therefore mainstream overreaches, since he is a lone, heightened voice whose nearer contemporaries Hermas and Clement keep remarriage plainly sinless, and his “adultery” is hyperbole about a lawful act, not a ruling of unlawfulness. Genuine pedigree, overstated reach; assessment plausible.¹⁹

Sources