Why are Priests Not Allowed to Marry After Ordination in the Eastern Orthodox Tradition?

A Historical Photo of the Family of a Married Russian Orthodox Priest

Bp. Joseph (Ancient Church of the West)  

“A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach; Not given to wine, no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre; but patient, not a brawler, not covetous; One that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity; (For if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God?) Not a novice, lest being lifted up with pride he fall into the condemnation of the devil. Moreover he must have a good report of them which are without; lest he fall into reproach and the snare of the devil. Likewise must the deacons be grave, not doubletongued, not given to much wine, not greedy of filthy lucre; Holding the mystery of the faith in a pure conscience. And let these also first be proved; then let them use the office of a deacon, being found blameless. Even so must their wives be grave, not slanderers, sober, faithful in all things. Let the deacons be the husbands of one wife, ruling their children and their own houses well.” 

1 Timothy 3:2-12 KJV

There are two reasons that priests are not allowed to marry after ordination: the first is that many Fathers argued for “anteriority” of ordination, because it fixes a person’s status in the community, and sacramentally, it binds one to the highest absolutes. For someone who is priest or bishop to choose a wife from the congregation of the Faithful gives him ultimate advantage in the social context and also easily leads to scandal in the congregation, instead of serving their ultimate master, the Lord Jesus Christ. The problem of “scandal” in the Church would ultimately lead to some local Churches banning clerical marriage all together. 

The second is the “Eskenosis” view of blood covenants. Where God’s grace is bound to, literally “indwelling”, the person who undertakes a blood covenant. The bond between a husband and wife is a blood covenant, but the enaction of the Holy Eucharist is also a blood covenant. So, if the priest is first bound to his wife and “one”, then the blessing of ordination flows on both the husband and the wife. But, if the wife comes in after the highest form of covenantal bond is already established, there is concern that the wife does not receive the same grace and is outside the bonds of the covenantal work of the priesthood. 

This mystical theory became very popular in the 6th through the 12th centuries in the East. It was never really developed in the West, since the issues around marriage were assumed to be clean/unclean, not bound/unbound. It is still hard to defend in modern theology, and many Byzantine scholars act as if it is not a formative principle in canon law, because it relegates the baptized to an inferior sacramental ranking to the priesthood, which is pictured in this theory as having “more grace” than what is available to the rest of the Church. Instead of being an order “within” the Church, it is an order above and “beyond” the synaxis of the Faithful. It is also this thinking that led to the assumption that monks were more holy, and therefore, more worthy, of the priesthood. 

So, while these are the two common Patristic problems with marriage after ordination, this is not an unbroken law. There were times in history when priests remarried after widowhood much easier than they do now, and when this economia was given to priests whose wives abandoned them. There are even early examples of bishops marrying after consecration in the pre-6th century literature. These categories became much more hard and fast as time went on and the Faithful came to expect certain things of clergy. Living up to these cultural expectations and avoiding unnecessary scandal became guiding canonical principles for maintaining good order within the Church. Recently, with synodal permission, both Antioch and the Ecumenical Patriarchate have allowed the remarriage of widowed priests.  

The prohibitions on marriage were one of the ways that the clerical class dealt with social envy about their relative privilege. Not being free to marry or have concubines was seen as a sacrifice, and it helped the people justify why their priests held so much power of society and resources. Eventually, this thinking extended to the Codex Justinianus and the exclusion of married bishops, so that their children could not inherit their fathers’ wealth and rival the princely class of the Eastern Roman Empire. This Codex, also known as the Codex Juris Civilis, was then appended to Church Law through the machinations of the Council of Trullo, and entered the canonical tradition claiming the authority of both Fifth and Sixth Ecumenical Councils, even though it was convened for the sole reason of placing the Church under Justinian’s Civil Code. The problem of reckoning civil law as a part of the Tradition of the Church has recently been brought to light by many Orthodox scholars, with Fr. Dr. John Erickson’s excellent book, “The Challenge of Our Past: Studies in Orthodox Canon Law and Church History” and Fr. Dr. Joseph Allen’s challenging work “Vested in Grace: Marriage and Priesthood in the Christian East” being excellent examples of attempts to reassess this complicated and compromised relationship.