I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist
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Not at all. Sunspots for example are in fact not black…they too are very bright in their own right and can also damage the naked eye.
Indeed I do no dismissing of this historically influential text on marriage.
What I referred to as “rarely ever quoted” is the verse you left out about not being able to return to her (lets call her Fabiola) husband.
It is my repeated experience that those protagonists who argue for the rigorism of Jerome as representative of the Church Universal on these matters as a rule do not also quote the verse I noted - and you are no exception.
I may indeed have some ignorance on the finer points of Jerome’s personal teaching on marriage as I am not a specialist re his writings. But given the teaching and practice of remarriage and divorce in the first 1000 years of the Church is highly complex and far from monolithic, argued about on some important points not only by the leaders of the times themselves but also by scholars and theologians specialising in same … then I suggest we all need to tread as carefully here as do the angels - rather than make comparisions over who swings the most lead
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What a strange and inconsequential detail you pick up on. I simply observe that however long the new cohabitation (ie 2nd “marriage”) was it makes no difference according to the principles Jerome pronounces on. What is your beef with that exactly?
By what stretch of the imagination do you assume Fabiola cheated on her husband before leaving? It is quite clear the writer of the letter to Jerome gave no such suggestion or hint whatsoever in the brief details supplied. It is the somewhat misogynist Jerome who thinks this by suddenly introducing that example from the OT - and you yourself have unquestioningly gone along with that and attempted to turn it into a fact against Fabiola!
It is my understanding that Amandus, who wrote to Jerome on this case, simply asked " 'Can a woman (Fabiola) who has divorced her first husband on account of his vices and who has during his lifetime under compulsion married again, communicate with the Church without first doing penance?"
Jerome seems to have no more factual details than this. If I am mistaken I would be interested to see what extra details you can quote for me that support your as yet unsupportable comparision to the OT case Jerome “near enough is good enough” seems to use for his advice?
It strikes me as a very long bow indeed that you are trying to draw here.
Are you really suggesting that Fabiola’s sodomite husband (or Fabiola herself) had their marriage declared null and void - so they were both in fact free to marry again? And this on the basis of a “writ of divorce” that Amandus never mentioned, and which in fact again comes from Jerome’s OT example…which clearly was not by any means close to what we would regard as an annulment today. May as well call a sundial an atomic clock
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Perhaps you can reference a few scholars who posit that Fabiola here received an annulment from her sodomite husband by means of his personal “bill of divorce” (rather than an ecclesiastical judge) as you state.
Perhaps you could advise which partner wrote the “annulment” and what the grounds were for putting Fabiola away. You suggest it was Fabiola’s husband who wrote the bill, but what were the grounds? It couldn’t be cheating because it seems Fabiola didn’t cheat, that was the OT story. Perhaps Fabiola’s husband granted the annulment to himself for his own sodomy and adultery against her?
I have never ever come across such a strange reading of Jerome’s 55th Letter to Amandus from Patristic scholars other than yourself but I may indeed be ignorant as you suggest as this is not my area of specialisation.
It is really somewhat impossible to discuss the rest of your post with these unusual interpretations of yours still in play.
But then I may be missing some of the facts of this incident.
). I think the concern for moral relativism is more theoretical that practical. We seldom sin because we do not know right from wrong. We usually know right from wrong. Doing what is right is the hard thing.