D
dvdjs
Guest
In answer to your request: no; it contains implicit arguments from silence. There are two major problems with it that make it unreasonable…
First, while there may be no ecclesiastical canons regarding practices that have never been done, there also may be no canons about practices that have always been possible in principle, even if they are rare - even negligibly rare in practice.
Second, surely you know that your request for evidence raises a bar that is far too high? What access do I have to records of divorces granted in Orthodoxy? To prove that the situation in question has never occurred would require access to all records. (Or the production of a canon - universal in Orthodoxy - that forbids it. I think that your post carries the suggestion that there is no such canon.)
Consider the logic and the reasonable burden of proof in an analogous, but obviously absurd, situation.Suppose someones says that given the canons in the RCC someone could enter into thousands of church marriages in their lifetime, I could respond that, in practice this possibility is remote to the point of essential impossibility. I could say that it is a polemical remark, far more prejudicial than probative. But, in honesty, I have no basis for claiming the inference to be wrong. Moreover, a response that says: give actual evidence for this, or (worse) provide a canon that says that this is possible, would not be a reasonable response, for the same two reasons I provided above.
What has been suggested by gh1 is a logical inference from the canons that are in evidence. (So too would be the more obviously absurd inference from the RCC canons.)
It is fair to say - in both cases - that the likelihood of such a situation is remote. But in the absence of a canon forbidding it, the inference cannot be said to be incorrect.
Why do you want to go beyond this statement, and make generalization that you cannot prove, or at least have not proved? Why do we have, on these threads, such a wealth of misinformation - contradicted by EO priests, and information on official websites - about no divorces being granted in the EOC, or the difficulty in obtaining a divorce, or the penitential nature of second marriages? IMO rather than making unfounded general statements, or offending logic with unreasonable requests, it would be better to stick to the actual facts. In this discussion, that fact is that while seemingly possible from the canons, the situation described unknown, and highly unlikely given the low rate of divorce among practicing Orthodox.
