Oikonomia remains one of the great mysteries of the Eastern Christian legal tradition. There is no exact equivalent to it in Roman law or in any of the Western legal traditions, and its nature was elusive even as attempts to come up with a systematic definition of oikonomia during the preparatory phase for the Holy and Great Synod of 2016 floundered and were eventually abandoned because of a lack of consensus among the Orthodox Churches themselves. Father Kevin Schembri, a Latin Catholic priest of the Archdiocese of Malta, manages to give a thorough, comprehensive and above all intelligible and readable presentation on the Orthodox understanding of marriage, the nature of oikonomia and the intersection of the two. This is an act of considerable boldness, although, I hope, not of foolhardiness.

The task does not start well, when Schembri defines oikonomia as ‘the application of the law in a non-legalistic manner’ – what, exactly, constitutes ‘legalism’, or ‘non-legalism’ for that matter? His repeated quotation of the comments to reporters on a plane trip back from Brazil in 2013 by Pope Francis, a bishop not well known for his precision of language, does not help: ‘The Orthodox have a different practice. They follow the theology of what they call oikonomia, and they give a second chance, they allow it.’ Is oikonomia simply giving someone a ‘second chance’?

The author recovers well from this start by systematically identifying both the aims of oikonomia and the situations in which it can be applied. The aim of oikonomia, a word associated with the stewardship of household goods, is both the welfare and unity of the church as well as the good and salvation of the human person. But oikonomia can only be applied by competent ecclesiastical authorities (in imitation of divine oikonomia) in line with dogma but in a prayerful and open spirit, in specific and extreme situations and on an individual and temporary basis. There follows a fascinating catalogue of the historical uses of oikonomia: internal, ecumenical and sacramental. Of particular interest was the use of oikonomia in an ecumenical context: in the First Council of Nicaea (325), oikonomia was invoked in the restoration of clergy returning from the Novatian schism, and, somewhat surprisingly, ‘it was out of oikonomia that the East tolerated the filioque in the Latin Creed until the Schism of 1054’ (p 120). Although Schembri does not explicitly refer to it, this ecumenical application rather closely parallels the use of sanation for ordinations by the Roman Church after the Union of Brest (1596), or the conditional ordination of former Anglicans to the priesthood in Roman Catholic Church within the last half-century. While the recognition – or, perhaps more accurately, the ‘regularisation’ – of orders is not the same as the application of oikonomia in the context of the indissolubility of marriage, it noteworthy that this occurred not in an Orthodox Church but in what some have called the most ‘legalistic’ of all Western Churches.

The work concludes with a review of the procedures for the application of oikonomia in Eastern Orthodox Churches, and observations from a Catholic perspective. Schembri calls for strict attention to and caution regarding the Orthodox practice because of its lack of clarity, the wide divergence of practice and abuses, the involvement of civil authorities, and the conflict between the practice and the Scriptures. There is a very full and complete bibliography, and a particularly admirable listing of the classical civil and canonical sources.

It is in the conflict in perspective that the gulf between the Eastern and Roman Catholic approaches to matrimonial break-up and remarriage seems the most glaring. Painting in very broad strokes, it sometimes appears as if the Orthodox use of oikonomia amounts to saying that, while marriage is indissoluble in principle (akribeia), that principle is not to be applied in this individual instance for stated reasons (oikonomia). This leads, of course, to the question of how many exceptions to the rule can be tolerated until the principle itself no longer holds. On the other hand, the Roman Catholic Church's frequent resort to declarations of nullity appears to preserve the sanctity of marriage by saying that in an individual case something that was necessary for a valid, sacramental marriage, as this Church understands it, was missing at the time of the exchange of consent, and thus it was never a marriage at all. This leads, of course, to the issue of whether a valid marriage can ‘fail’ – and the conflict between the principle and observable reality, so that Pope Francis can muse whether most marriages may be invalid. It may be that each tradition can learn from the other.