DO NOT SEPARATE WHAT GOD HAS JOINED.

Indissolubility of marriage.

— Divorce.

Indissolubility of marriage.

The Pharisees also came to him to tempt him, and said to him: Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for any cause whatsoever? — He answered: Have you not read that he who created man from the beginning created them male and female, and said: — For this reason, the man shall leave his father and his mother and shall cleave to his wife, and the two shall be but one flesh? — Thus, they shall no longer be two, but one flesh. Let not man, therefore, separate what God has joined. But why then, they retorted, did Moses command that the husband give his wife a writ of separation and put her away?

— Jesus answered: It was because of the hardness of your heart that Moses permitted you to put away your wives; but in the beginning it was not so.

— Therefore I declare to you that whoever puts away his wife, except in a case of adultery, and marries another, commits adultery; and that he who marries the woman whom another has put away also commits adultery. (Saint Matthew, chapter XIX, vv. 3 to 9.)

Immutable is only that which comes from God. All that is the work of men is subject to change.

The laws of Nature are the same in all times and in all countries. Human laws change according to the times, the places, and the progress of intelligence.

In marriage, what is of divine order is the union of the sexes, so that the replacement of the beings who die may take place; but the conditions that regulate that union are so far human that there are not, in the whole world, not even in Christendom, two countries where they are absolutely identical, and none where they have not, with time, undergone changes; 4 from this it results that, in the eyes of the civil law, what is legitimate in one country and in a given epoch is adultery in another country and in another epoch, and this for the reason that the civil law has for its aim to regulate the interests of families, interests that vary according to local customs and needs; 5 thus it is, for example, that in certain countries the religious marriage is the only legitimate one; in others the civil marriage is necessary in addition to it; in others, finally, this latter marriage alone suffices.

But in the union of the sexes, alongside the material divine law, common to all living beings, there is another divine law, immutable like all the laws of God, exclusively moral: the law of love.

God willed that beings should unite not only by the bonds of the flesh, but also by those of the soul, in order that the mutual affection of the spouses might be transmitted to their children, and that there might be two, and not one alone, to love them, to care for them, and to make them progress.

In the ordinary conditions of marriage, is the law of love taken into consideration? In no way. No account is taken of the affection of two beings who, by reciprocal sentiments, are drawn toward each other, since, most of the time, that affection is broken; 4 what is considered is not the satisfaction of the heart, but that of pride, of vanity, of cupidity, in a word: of all the material interests. When everything goes for the best in accordance with those interests, it is said that the marriage is one of convenience, and when the purses are well endowed, it is said that the spouses are likewise so, and that they must be very happy.

Neither the civil law, however, nor the commitments it causes to be contracted can supply the law of love, if this does not preside over the union, 6 the result being, frequently, that those who were joined by force separate of themselves; 7 the oath made at the foot of the altar becomes a perjury, if pronounced as a banal formula.

Hence the unhappy unions, which end by becoming criminal, a double misfortune that would be avoided if, in establishing the conditions of matrimony, one did not leave aside the only one that sanctions it in the eyes of God: the law of love.

When God said: “You shall be but one flesh,” and when Jesus said: “Do not separate what God has joined,” these words are to be understood with reference to the union according to the immutable law of God and not according to the mutable law of men.

Will the civil law then be superfluous, and must one return to marriages according to Nature? No, certainly not. The civil law has for its aim to regulate the social relations and the interests of families, in accordance with the requirements of civilization; for this reason it is useful, necessary, but variable; 2 it must be provident, because civilized man cannot live like a savage; nothing, however, absolutely nothing opposes its being a corollary of the law of God; 3 the obstacles to the fulfillment of the divine law proceed from prejudices and not from the civil law. These prejudices, though still vivacious, have already lost much of their predominance in the midst of enlightened peoples; they will disappear with the moral progress which, in the end, will open men's eyes to the countless evils, the faults, even the crimes that arise from unions contracted with a view solely to material interests; 4 one day it will be asked which is more humane, more charitable, more moral:

to chain one to another two beings who cannot live together, or to restore to them liberty; whether the prospect of an indissoluble chain does not increase the number of irregular unions. [See in The Spirits' Book, questions 940, 697 and 876.]

Divorce.

Divorce is a human law that has for its object to separate legally what is already, in fact, separated; 2 it is not contrary to the law of God, since it only reforms what men have done and is applicable only in the cases in which the divine law was not taken into account; 3 if it were contrary to that law, the Church itself would be obliged to consider as prevaricators those of its leaders who, by their own authority and in the name of religion, have imposed divorce on more than one occasion. And the prevarication would there be double, because, in those cases, divorce has had in view solely material interests and not the satisfaction of the law of love.

But not even Jesus consecrated the absolute indissolubility of marriage. Did he not say: “It was because of the hardness of your hearts that Moses permitted you to put away your wives?” This means that, already in the time of Moses, mutual affection not being the sole determinant of marriage, separation could become necessary.

He adds, however: “in the beginning it was not so,” that is, at the origin of Humanity, when men were not yet perverted by egoism and by pride and lived according to the law of God, unions, deriving from sympathy and not from vanity or ambition, gave no occasion for repudiation.

He goes further: he specifies the case in which repudiation may take place, that of adultery; now, there is no adultery where sincere reciprocal affection reigns.

It is true that he forbids a man to marry the repudiated woman; but one must keep in view the customs and the character of the men of that epoch. The Mosaic law, in this case, prescribed stoning.

Wishing to abolish a barbarous usage, he needed a penalty to replace it, and he found it in the opprobrium that would result from the prohibition of a second marriage. It was, in a certain way, a civil law replaced by another civil law, but which, like all laws of that nature, had to pass through the test of time.