HistoricalChristian.Faith

Was Tertullian’s ban on second marriage a severe reading of Paul, or a false doctrine?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: contested — on the interpretation weighed here, Tertullian’s late prohibition of remarriage after a spouse’s death — calling the second marriage “a species of fornication” — is not a private aberration to be filed as false doctrine but the extreme pole of a real and early Christian deprecation of second marriage: Scripture itself rates widowhood the “happier” state and bars the twice-married from office (1 Cor. 7:40; 1 Tim. 3:2, 5:9), Athenagoras had already branded remarriage a “specious adultery” a generation before the New Prophecy, and the church went on barring digamists from the clergy everywhere and penancing them in the East — so that Tertullian’s error looks, on this reading, like one of degree, an over-strict discipline rather than a corruption of the creed. That frame carries real weight for the church’s deprecation of remarriage. But its load-bearing conclusion — that the outright ban is merely a hard reading of Paul — overreaches: Tertullian forbids what the apostle expressly permits (Rom. 7:2–3; 1 Cor. 7:39; 1 Tim. 5:14), re-labels a lawful union “fornication” against Paul’s own word that the remarried widow is “no adulteress,” and rests the prohibition not on exegesis but on a fresh revelation of the Paraclete abrogating what Paul had allowed — which makes it a question of authority, not of stringency. Jerome, who quarried Tertullian’s On Monogamy and pressed a similar denigration of marriage, was accused of the same overreach, saw the book suppressed by his friends, and had to walk it back. Strong as a matter of ascetic discipline, weak as exegesis, and disputed exactly where discipline ends and doctrine begins.

Related arguments: the fairness of the verdict — see also Did Tertullian ever formally leave the catholic church? · Was the New Prophecy heretical in doctrine, or only in discipline and church order? · Was his denial of church forgiveness for adultery and apostasy a defensible reading of early discipline, or a Montanist novelty? · Was Tertullian right that flight in persecution is forbidden?

This is the count on which Augustine actually hung the heresy. When he came to catalogue Tertullian in the “Was Tertullian a Heretic?” timeline, he expressly declined to found it on the corporealism of soul and God and rested it instead on three disciplinary counts — the turn to the Cataphrygians, a final schism, and, between them, that Tertullian “began also to condemn second marriages, against apostolic teaching, as though they were fornication.” The companion arguments ask whether Tertullian ever separated from the church and what, in general, he was faulted for; this one takes up the specific charge Augustine names and asks whether the ban on remarriage was a false doctrine or a severe but genuine reading of a real early Christian preference for the single marriage.¹

The claim

If we look deeply into his meanings, and interpret them, second marriage will have to be termed no other than a species of fornication.

— Tertullian, On Exhortation to Chastity 9, ANF vol. 4.² The position sharpened in stages. In the earlier To His Wife (c. 203), written to his own wife against the day of his death, Tertullian urges her to remain a widow but concedes that second marriage is “permitted” by the apostle, a lawful thing only depreciated; by On Exhortation to Chastity and On Monogamy (c. 208–212) the counsel has hardened into a prohibition, and the remarriage of a widow or widower is classed outright as stuprum, a species of fornication. The interpretation weighed here does not defend that verdict as the church’s settled mind — plainly it was not — but as a severe but genuine reading of a scriptural and patristic current that really did rate the single marriage higher and the second a grudging concession: on this view Tertullian pushes a widely shared deprecation to its furthest pole, and his fault is an over-strict discipline, a difference of degree, rather than a false doctrine touching God, Christ, or the rule of faith.³

Who advances it

The reading is advanced, first, by Tertullian himself, who frames the ban throughout as a matter of discipline carried to perfection by the Paraclete rather than a new article of belief, and who insists the New Prophecy overturns “no particular rule of faith or hope” but only “plainly teach[es] more frequent fasting than marrying.” It is taken up, second, by those modern readers — in the revisionist line that runs from Barnes and Powell — who read his rigorism as an intramural severity rather than a heresy, and by historians of early asceticism who set his monogamism within a broad second- and third-century preference for the once-married that the church never wholly disowned. What the interpretation rests on, and what is not in dispute, is that the deprecation of remarriage was early, wide, and partly scriptural, so that Tertullian stands at the extreme end of a real spectrum — the “permission-with-deprecation” traced across the deprecation-of-digamy timeline, where he is the one dissenter the church rejected — rather than off the map altogether.⁴

The evidence for

Scripture itself rates the single marriage higher and bars the twice-married from office. Tertullian does not read his preference off the Phrygian prophets alone. Paul tells the widows “it is good for them if they abide even as I,” permitting remarriage only as a remedy against burning, and adds of the widow free to remarry that “she is happier if she so abide”; and the Pastorals require that a bishop be “the husband of one wife” and admit to the order of widows only her who has been “the wife of one man.” The apostle plainly reckons the second marriage the lesser state and shuts the twice-married out of office and the widows’ roll — the very texts Tertullian builds on. His deprecation of remarriage is thus scriptural before it is Montanist, and to that extent belongs to the church’s own mind.⁵

The “adultery” language predates the New Prophecy. The sharp word Tertullian uses is not his coinage either. Athenagoras of Athens, an unimpeachably catholic apologist writing about 177 — before Tertullian wrote a line, and quite apart from Montanus — had already taught that a man should “either remain as he was born, or 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.” The idea that remarriage after a spouse’s death borders on adultery was thus a live one in the mainstream church a generation early. Tertullian gives it its harshest disciplinary edge, but he did not invent the category.⁶

The church institutionalized the deprecation — digamists barred from the clergy, penanced in the East. The preference was not mere sentiment; it hardened into canon law, and in a form that survived long after Tertullian. The Council of Neocaesarea (c. 315) ruled that “a presbyter shall not be a guest at the nuptials of persons contracting a second marriage; for, since the digamist is worthy of penance, what kind of a presbyter shall he be, who, by being present at the feast, sanctioned the marriage?” and set a term of penance for those who married repeatedly; Basil’s canons likewise penanced the digamist a year and the trigamist longer. The Eastern church penanced second marriages for centuries and the whole church barred the twice-married from ordination — so the underlying judgment that remarriage is a defect, though not a crime, was the church’s own, formalized and enduring. Tertullian’s rigour is the same impulse without the church’s moderation.⁷

Tertullian and his catholic critics alike treat it as discipline, not creed. The charge is filed, by everyone, under conduct rather than belief. Tertullian himself locates the whole quarrel in discipline: the Paraclete’s office is to carry discipline “to perfection,” not to add articles of faith, and monogamy is one of its harder rules. And Augustine, cataloguing him among the heresies, states the doctrinal charge (that soul and God are bodies) only to set it aside — “yet he is not on this account said to have been made a heretic” — and rests the heresy instead on the turn to the Cataphrygians, the ban on second marriage “against apostolic teaching,” and the final schism. Even the fiercest catholic verdict, that is, treats the remarriage ban as a moral and disciplinary excess against apostolic teaching, not as a false doctrine of God or Christ. On the interpretation weighed here, that is exactly the right register for it.⁸

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The deprecation of remarriage really is early, wide, and partly scriptural. Paul does prefer the widow to remain single and does bar the twice-married from office; Athenagoras did call remarriage a “specious adultery” before Montanism; the church did bar digamists from the clergy everywhere and penance them in the East for centuries; and Tertullian’s critics did file the charge under discipline, not creed. To that extent the interpretation is right and valuable: the ban is the extreme pole of a real Christian ascetic current, not a doctrine invented from nothing, and it is a mistake to read Tertullian’s monogamism as though he had denied the Trinity. The church’s own lasting suspicion of the second marriage is the measure of how far inside the tradition his starting-point lay.

But he forbids what the apostle expressly permits — which is more than a difference of degree. The whole force of the “error of degree” plea depends on collapsing two different things: deprecating remarriage as the lesser state, which the church did, and prohibiting it as sin, which Tertullian did. Paul does not merely rank the second marriage lower; he licenses it in so many words. Of the widow he writes that “if her husband be dead, she is at liberty to be married to whom she will; only in the Lord”; of the woman whose husband has died, that “she is free from that law; so that she is no adulteress, though she be married to another man”; and he positively wills that “the younger women marry, bear children, guide the house.” To forbid outright what the apostle grants, and to command against what he commands, is not to read Paul strictly; it is to overrule him. A rigour that stops at “better not” is a difference of degree; a rule that says “you may not” where Paul says “you may” is a difference of kind.⁹

He calls fornication what Paul calls no sin at all. The label is not a stern synonym for “inferior”; it is a false predication. Where Tertullian brands the remarried widow’s union “a species of fornication,” Paul had said in as many words that such a woman, though remarried, “is no adulteress.” Athenagoras’s “specious adultery” is a rhetorical flourish about a concededly lawful act; Tertullian turns the flourish into a verdict and denies the lawfulness. To reclassify a union Scripture calls guiltless as stuprum is not to weigh the same act more heavily — it is to name a different act, and to contradict the apostle on the point where he is most explicit. This is the precise overreach Augustine fastened on: condemning second marriages “against apostolic teaching, as though they were fornication.”¹⁰

The ground of the ban is fresh revelation, not exegesis — so it is a question of authority. When Tertullian has to reckon with Paul’s plain permission, he does not out-argue it; he overrides it by a higher warrant. On Monogamy concedes the difficulty openly and answers it from the Paraclete: “why may not the Paraclete, too, have abrogated an indulgence which Paul granted — because second marriage withal ‘was not from the beginning’”? The New Prophecy is made the restitutor of a stricter original rule and licensed to cancel an apostolic concession; and where that will not serve, Tertullian resorts to the text itself, claiming that the Greek of 1 Cor. 7:39 has been corrupted “through the either crafty or simple alteration of two syllables” so as to restrict Paul’s permission to women already widowed at their conversion. A prohibition that has to abrogate the apostle by new revelation, and to emend his text to get the reading it needs, is not a severe reading of Paul at all; it is a claim that a later Spirit may bind the whole church beyond and against what Paul allowed — which is why this count bleeds straight into the doctrine-or-discipline question. The stringency is the visible part; the authority-claim underneath it is the real difficulty.¹¹

Tertullian changed his own mind — and the church settled it against him. The ban is not the received rule Tertullian inherited but a position he moved to. His own earlier To His Wife had granted that the apostle “permits marrying,” that marriage is “permitted, yet singly,” and had confined the disability of the twice-married to the clergy and the widows’ order — exactly the church’s line. Only later does the concession become a crime. And the church that formed its mind on the question decided against the crime: it kept the clergy bar and the penitential discipline for digamists but never forbade the laity to remarry or called their marriages fornication. The most telling witness is Jerome, the age’s fiercest Latin champion of virginity, who quarried Tertullian’s monogamist works — noting that “Tertullian, while still a young man, gave himself full play with this subject” — and pressed the denigration of marriage so hard in Against Jovinian that he was charged with condemning marriage outright, his friends withdrawing the book from circulation until he defended it. In the very apology Jerome drew the line Tertullian had crossed: “I do not condemn second, nor third, nor, pardon the expression, eighth marriages.” When even Jerome recoils, the ban is not the church’s severity but a step past it.¹²

Assessment

contested. The interpretation is soundest for the church’s deprecation of remarriage and strains for Tertullian’s ban. That the single marriage was rated higher, that Paul preferred the widow to abide, that the twice-married were shut out of office, that a catholic apologist called remarriage a “specious adultery” before Montanus, and that the church penanced digamists for centuries — all this holds, and it makes the popular verdict (“Tertullian simply went mad with rigour”) too quick: his starting-point lay well inside the tradition, and his critics rightly filed the charge under discipline rather than the creed. To that extent the “error of degree, not doctrine” reading has real force. But the further move — from “an extreme of a real deprecation” to “merely a hard reading of Paul” — goes beyond what the evidence carries. Tertullian forbids what the apostle expressly permits (1 Cor. 7:39; Rom. 7:2–3; 1 Tim. 5:14), re-labels as “fornication” a union Paul calls guiltless, and grounds the prohibition on the Paraclete’s abrogation of an apostolic concession rather than on exegesis — even emending the text to secure it — so that the count turns, at its root, into a question of authority. He conceded he had changed his own earlier view; the church settled the question the other way; and Jerome, who followed him furthest, drew back at exactly this line. Strong as ascetic discipline, weak as exegesis, and disputed precisely where discipline ends and doctrine begins. Contested.

Sources