However, the Church managed to preserve in the basic principle the essential distinction between the first and subsequent marriages: a special service was developed for remarriages – the wedding was separated from the Eucharist and the entire rite was given a penitential character. Thanks to this, it became clear that second and third marriages are not the norm and as such have a sacramental flaw. The greatest difference between the Byzantine theology of marriage and its medieval Latin counterpart is that the Byzantines strongly emphasized the uniqueness of Christian marriage and the eternity of the marital bond; It did not occur to the Byzantines that marriage was a legal contract that automatically ceased to be valid after the death of one of the contracting parties. In Byzantium, the marriage of a widower or widow was tolerated, as well as marriage after divorce. But this "tolerance" does not equate to approval. It implied repentance, and remarriage was allowed only to those men and women whose previous marriages could be regarded as practically non-existent (various codes of imperial law listed possible variants of this situation). Meanwhile, the Latin West did not tolerate legal divorce, but recognized, without restriction, the right to any number of remarriages for a widower or widower. Guided in its practice by the legal concept of a contract that is indissoluble as long as both parties to the contract are alive, the West does not seem to have taken into account the consideration that marriage, if it is a sacrament of the Church, is projected, as an eternal bond, into the Kingdom of God; And, like all other sacraments, marriage presupposes a free response and the possibility that a person will reject marriage or make a mistake in it, and that, after such a sinful refusal to marry or a mistake, there is always the possibility of repenting and starting from the beginning. Such were the theological foundations of the early Christian Church's tolerance of divorce, and they remained so in Byzantium.

5. Healing and Death

Often combined into a single sacrament with repentance, the performance of "unction" never developed, except for a number of areas in the Christian East where it occurred after the sixteenth century – into the sacrament of the "last anointing", performed only on the dying. In Byzantium, the sacrament of Extreme Unction was a rite of priests (usually seven, according to James 5:14, which was considered the biblical basis of this sacrament). It consisted of the reading of passages from the Scriptures and the offering of prayers for healing, the texts of which decidedly did not allow magical interpretations of the rite. Healing was sought only within the framework of repentance and spiritual salvation, and was not considered an end in itself. Whatever the outcome of the illness, the anointing itself signified divine forgiveness and liberation from the vicious circle of sin, suffering, and death in which fallen humanity is trapped. Sympathizing with the sufferings of man, the Church, through the mouths of her elders, asks for relief, forgiveness, and eternal freedom for her suffering member. This is the meaning of the holy anointing of the body.

The funeral service, which was also considered by some Byzantine authors to be a "sacrament," had no other meaning. Likewise, in death, the Christian remains a member of the Living and Resurrected Body of Christ, in which he was included through Baptism and the Eucharist. The Church gathers for the funeral service in order to bear witness to this truth, visible only with the eyes of faith, but already experienced by every Christian who has a reverent fear of the coming Kingdom.

16. THE EUCHARIST

Thermal conservatism was one of the main features of Byzantine civilization, extending to both the secular and sacred aspects of life, and especially manifesting itself in the forms of the Liturgy. But if the intention to leave everything as it is was openly declared, if the structure of the Eucharist has not changed since the first centuries of Christianity and even today retains the form that developed in the ninth century, then the interpretation of words and gestures has undergone significant changes and development. Thus, Byzantine ritual conservatism was a tool for preserving the original Christian lex orandi, interpreted in the context of Platonic or moralized symbolism, which, however, sometimes happened. At the same time, this conservatism made it possible, when appropriate – the examples of Nicholas Cabasilas and the hesychastic theologians of the fourteenth century – to rigorously reaffirm the primordial sacramental realism in liturgical theology.

1. Symbols, images, reality