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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
The traditional understanding of the sacramentality of marriage, introduced by Augustine, systematized by the medieval scholastics, and still central to Catholic institutional thought, has in recent years been criticized as being internally incoherent and externally counterfactual. These difficulties may be perceived within the frame of reference provided by Thomas Kuhn to be anomalies such as those that can be expected to appear during a transition from normal science to a new paradigm for explaining the data once satisfactorily accounted for by that science. A new paradigm or conceptual frame of reference is proposed for the sacramentality of marriage, and evidence is presented that this new paradigm is in fact emerging in the theological literature on marriage. The reader is cautioned, however, that the emerging paradigm of marriage's sacrmentality is not what it is usually thought to be.
1 For a detailed analysis of statistics, see Priester, Stephen, “Marriage, Divorce and Remarriage in the United States,” New Catholic World 229 (1986): 9–19.Google Scholar
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3 Ryan, Seamus, “Indissolubility of Marriage: Survey of Articles,” Furrow 24 (1973):150–59, 214–24, 272–84, 365–74, 523–39Google Scholar, reviews the literature of the late 1960s and early 1970s which was beginning to examine every aspect of the Catholic teaching on marriage: scriptural sources, patristic writings, the Eastern tradition, marriage as contract or covenant, papal dissolution of marriages, the indissolubility of consummated sacramental marriages, remarriage after divorce, and pastoral concerns. Doyle, Thomas, “The Theology of Marriage: Where We Are Today,” Studia Canonica 19/1 (1985): 81–98Google Scholar, similarly notes contemporary trends and contrasts them with the official teaching of the church.
4 Abstracted in “Can the Church Dissolve Sacramental Marriages?” Theology Digest 21/1 (Spring 1973): 32.Google Scholar
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9 Cuenin, Walter, “Questions: Faith, Sacrament and Law: Marriage and Baptized Non-Believers,” Origins 8/21 (11 9, 1978): 321–28Google Scholar, reviews the development of the problematic in France, where the situation achieved acuteness earlier than it did in the United States. See also O'Callaghan, Denis, “Faith and the Sacrament of Marriage,” Irish Theological Quarterly 52/3 (1986): 161–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
10 Quoted in “Faith, Sacrament, Contract, and Christian Marriage: Disputed Questions,” Theological Studies 43/3 (09 1982): 392.Google Scholar Note the Commission's apparent unwillingness to use the term, “non-sacramental marriage.”
11 Ibid., 391.
12 Wood, Susan, “The Marriage of Baptized Non-Believers: Faith, Contract, and Sacrament,” Theological Studies 48/2 (06 1987): 279–301.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
13 Lawler, Michael, “Faith, Contract, and Sacrament in Christian Marriage: A Theological Approach,” Theological Studies 52/4 (12 1991): 712–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also his article, “The Mutal Love and Personal Faith of the Spouses as the Matrix of the Sacramental Marriage,” Worship 65/4 (07 1991): 339–61Google Scholar, which presents the same thesis without the running argument against Wood.
14 Baudot, Denis, L'inséparabilité entre le contrat et le sacrément de manage: La discussion après le Concile Vatican II (Rome: Editrice Pontificia Universita Gregoriana, 1987).Google Scholar
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23 Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), esp. chaps. 1 and 9.Google Scholar
24 This analysis is presented in greater detail with application to the Catholic sacramental system by Martos, Joseph, “The Copernican Revolution in Sacramental Theology” in Hegy, Pierre, ed., The Church in the Nineties: Its Legacy, Its Future (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1993), 104–16.Google Scholar
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26 The concept of phlogiston was introduced around 1700 by scientists who wanted to explain why some materials burned while others did not. According to the phlogiston theory of combustion, materials such as wood contained large amounts of phlogiston, and hence were able to be burned. The ashes left after burning were thought to be the components of wood that were not phlogiston. On the other hand, materials such as iron contained little phlogiston and hence were not easily able to be burned. The concept of phlogiston was eventually abandoned when the experimental data concerning combustion were shown to be more adequately accounted for by a theory which explained burning as rapid oxidation, or the combining of oxygen with other elements to form gases and release energy in the form of light and heat. For greater detail, see Taton, René, ed., The Beginnings of Modern Science (New York: Basic Books, 1964), 329–32.Google Scholar
27 Similarly, variations in personality and temperament were explained since the time of the ancient Greeks as due to the dominance in different individuals of one of four basic humors or body fluids: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. The theory that there is a connection between body fluids and human temperament was not abandoned until the eighteenth century. See Hunt, Morton, The Story of Psychology (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1993), 18.Google Scholar
28 The more customary way of expressing this belief is to assume that the theoretical is identical with the factual, much as those who, before Columbus, adhered to the concept of a flat earth assumed that the earth was flat.
29 See Mackin, , The Marital Sacrament, 518.Google Scholar
30 This is the philosophical implication of Gödel's theorem which was first grasped and exploited by Hegel in The Phenomenology of Mind and which Lonergan in Insight uses to argue that the ultimate context of all thought cannot be a conceptual system such as Hegel's dialectic but must be the dynamic functioning of human intelligence itself. See Lonergan, , Insight, xxv–xxviii, 564–68.Google Scholar
31 For a fuller account, see Berger, Peter and Luckmann, Thomas, The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966);Google Scholar also John, and Busch, Gladys, Sociocybernetics (Jeffersonville, IN: Social Systems Press, 1992).Google Scholar
32 The majority of recent books and articles written by and for Catholics about marriage can be understood as falling within this category. As examples, see Challon, and Roberts, William, Partners in Intimacy: Living Christian Marriage Today (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1988);Google ScholarDenise, and Carmody, John, Becoming One Flesh: Growth in Christian Marriage (Nashville: Upper Room, 1984);Google ScholarHart, Thomas and Fischer, Kathleen, The First Two Years of Marriage (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1983);Google ScholarDominian, Jack, Marriage, Faith and Love (New York: Crossroad, 1982);Google Scholar and Anzia, Joan and Durkin, Mary, Marital Intimacy: A Catholic Perspective (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1980).Google Scholar
33 See Mackin, Theodore, What Is Marriage? (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1982)Google Scholar for the major developments through twenty centuries of European cultures. The variety of marriage customs and arrangements increases even further if one examines non-European cultures, of which Catholic theology and canon law have taken no cognizance from their beginning to the present.
34 For an example of how this was done in one African society with the assistance of a culturally aware missionary, see Donovan, Vincent, Christianity Rediscovered (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1987).Google Scholar
35 See Mackin's, critique on these points in The Marital Sacrament, 664–65.Google Scholar