In Mixed Marriages: An Orthodox History, Anthony Roeber has produced a volume characterized by first-rate historical scholarship, sound theological analysis, and an accessible and engaging style of composition. Drawing upon an impressively broad array of sources, he interprets the history and current state of the theological and pastoral challenges posed by religiously mixed marriages in Eastern Christian tradition. The practice of blessing marriages with a spouse outside the Eucharistic Communion of the Orthodox Church highlights points of tension between sacramental and juridical understandings of matrimony. Such marriages are the only time in which a non-Orthodox Christian may participate in the church's holy mysteries. The book examines what this unique practice entails for construing marriage, the sacraments, and the church.
Influential contemporary interpretations of marriage in Eastern Orthodoxy often draw on what Roeber describes as “emotional/liturgical memory” to claim that marriage rites always occurred in the early centuries during the celebration of the Eucharistic liturgy (81). Historical evidence suggests, however, that this was not universally the case. He describes well the historical complexity of Orthodox views of marriage, noting that a view of matrimony as part of the natural order gave way to a focus on the purity of the church in the fourth and fifth centuries. Marriage increasingly came to be viewed in sacramental terms during this time, which posed challenges for allowing a union with a heterodox spouse. While the Council in Trullo in 692 forbade religiously mixed marriages, such unions continued to occur outside of Byzantium in locations such as Georgia and Syria. From the Photian schism to the thirteenth century, marriages between Latin and Greek Christians continued, with such marital unions for aristocrats persisting for a few more centuries (137).
The Slavic churches prohibited mixed marriages canonically, but at times allowed unions with Catholics as acts of oikonomia. In Russia, peasant marriages with folk customs, the religious diversity of the expanding empire, and growing interactions with Protestants and Catholics pressed further the tension between natural and sacramental views of matrimony. Under the Ottoman millet system, awareness of the sacramental nature of marriage declined due to low educational standards for the clergy and the influence of Islamic law and folk practices. The Ecumenical Patriarchate approved recognition of religiously mixed marriages in 1887 as an expression of oikonomia, and debates commenced on the possible remarriage of widowed deacons and priests (172).
Roeber states that “the lived reality of marriage” by the late nineteenth century had become so diverse and so different from “the ideals reflected in the canons and summarized and commented upon by Balsamon and Blastares as to be barely recognizable” (170). Developments within the Catholic Church's understanding of marriage led in 1970 to a papal decree recognizing the sacramental nature of Orthodox matrimony and prohibiting “a second, Catholic celebration” in the case of mixed unions (178). Points of tension remain, nonetheless, between Western and Eastern understandings of marriage, including the East's lack of consensus about the reality of sacramental acts beyond the boundaries of the Orthodox Church.
Roeber outlines several important doctrinal and pastoral questions that must be addressed in order to provide a satisfying account of what it means to affirm religiously mixed marriages on “the frontiers of the Orthodox Church” (187). These range from the eternal and ontological import of marriage to how contemporary Eucharistic theology should inform consideration of whether the celebration of a marriage between a Catholic and an Orthodox might legitimately include reception of Communion by both spouses. He notes that the Greek and Syrian Patriarchates of Alexandria in 1991 agreed to recognize marriages in either church and to grant spouses in mixed marriages “access to all the Mysteries in either tradition.” This agreement reflects a conclusion that the historical disagreements between Eastern and Oriental Orthodox traditions “about Christology are not evident in the piety and behavior of marriages between Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian Christians” (202).
In a key passage, Roeber comments that “where the Eastern Orthodox possessed sufficient confidence and faith in their Tradition, they accepted degrees of proximity to Eucharistic ecclesiology as the pastoral measure by which to deal with the reality of mixed marriages” (190). The Council of Crete in 2016 did not, however, place the challenges presented by mixed marriages in such a context, as it relied on juridical notions of strictness and pastoral accommodation without engaging the reality of marriage as “an on-going journey whose proximity to the goal of communion with God depends upon the will and understanding of the respective spouses” (194).
Orthodox sensibilities about ecclesiology, Eucharist, matrimony, and personhood are so closely intertwined that the blessing of mixed marriages as an act of oikonomia should reflect particular “‘degrees’ of both obligation and privilege with regard to marriage, and its relationship to the other Mysteries of the Church” (228). Roeber thinks that, without ignoring points of tension with other traditions, Orthodoxy has the resources to interpret the lived experience of religiously mixed marriages in a way that sheds light on the challenges presented by matrimony on the frontiers of the church. Doing so will help Orthodoxy clarify its theology of marriage in a way that strengthens its ability to engage in discussions about matrimony and sexuality in the larger culture.
With its broadness of scope, solid historical research, and penetrating theological analysis, Roeber's volume stands alone as a contemporary treatment of mixed marriage within Orthodoxy. It should be influential in discussions of matrimony in Eastern Christianity and read widely by an ecumenical audience of scholars, students, and clergy.
