Marriage, love, and divorce: what Kardec says about "God hath joined"

"What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder." The line, from Matthew 19, was for centuries the main religious argument against divorce. In the Gospel, Jesus speaks it in response to a question about the law of Moses, and that is where the history of marital separation enters theology. Chapter 22 of The Gospel According to Spiritism examines the same passage from another angle and asks when it is, in fact, God who unites two people.

Allan Kardec, the French educator who systematized Spiritist doctrine in the nineteenth century, published the book in 1864. The chapter's claims belong to Spiritist doctrine and fall within the realm of religious belief. They do not represent the teaching of every Christian church. Kardec's argument is thus of interest as one side of a debate that remains open.

Two laws, two marriages

Kardec begins with a distinction. Marriage as a natural union would be divine law, aimed at the continuity of the species and the moral improvement of people. Marriage as a social institution is something else: human law, which regulates civil rights and duties and varies by culture and era. What comes from God is unchanging, the chapter sums up; what comes from men changes over time.

Marital union, according to him, would only be legitimate when it rests on love, moral affinity, and mutual respect. If it is born of material interest, vanity, or social convenience, it becomes artificial and heads toward unhappiness.

Love as foundation

The chapter describes what God would have wanted for spouses: that they be united by their souls, not only by the body, that they raise their children together and grow together in spirit. In practice, Kardec states, most marriages ignore the affinity of feeling. Financial calculations, conventions, and status weigh more heavily.

The consequences, the text says, are well known. Forced unions produce unhappiness and, sometimes, crimes, and none of this would happen if the law of love were not lost from view — the only law that, for him, sanctifies marriage.

What Moses allowed

On separation, Kardec recalls what Jesus himself says in the Gospel: Moses allowed a man to put away his wife because of the hardness of hearts. That tolerance, in this reading, answered to a people's moral immaturity. In the beginning, when mutual love sustained the union, there would have been no need for repudiation.

The conclusion is that divorce is a human law. It merely legalizes a separation that has already taken place in fact, and does not violate God's law, because it does not undo a true spiritual union. It corrects a human error. Where sincere love reigns, one of the chapter's lines says, there is no adultery; where love has ended, only appearance remains.

The Church and indissolubility

The text recalls that, even in traditions that condemn divorce, there were religious leaders who imposed separations, generally for material or political interest. For Kardec, this shows that a rule of absolute indissolubility does not hold up in real life. A union kept together by force and without love would be a moral prison, not a sacrament. This historical claim is the author's own, and the chapter does not document it with cases.

What moral progress should change

Kardec wagers that enlightened societies will recognize emotional freedom and that moral progress will put an end to the prejudices that keep marriages together in name only. He predicts that, one day, the question will be a different one: is it more moral to force two people to live together without love, or to allow each to seek peace and dignity along another path?

The conclusion brings Jesus's saying back to its starting point. Man should not separate what God has joined, but God only joins when there is true love, spiritual affinity, and respect. Where that is lacking, Kardec maintains, there was human convention, not divine union. Spiritism, in this view, does not destroy marriage: it tries to give it back its moral meaning.