Frithjof Schuon Archive

Divergences in traditional morals may result from outward conditions of life combined with profound differences of temperament; they may also come about because of differing levels of application and differences of perspective. The discrepancy between the Law of Moses and that of Christ offers an obvious example.
In speaking of divorce Christ points out that Moses—but a Moses commissioned by God—permitted divorce because of “the hardness of your heart”, and he adds, “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.” The question that arises here has to do with knowing whether the human reality that determined the prescription of Moses ceased to exist at the time of Christ; to say the least, there is no reason for supposing it did; we therefore have the right to conclude that in promulgating his ban on divorce Christ is concerned with a different human fact from the one considered by Moses, namely, a particular and not a general fact, one created in a sense by the Christic Message itself. If Islam returns to the Mosaic Law, it is because it refers to the same human facts as that law; it does not presuppose a climate of sacrificial bhakti but the psychological and social possibilities common to all men. From the Judeo-Islamic point of view, divorce is certainly not good in itself—a hadīth terms it “hateful”—but it is acceptable according to circumstances, and it
then becomes something neutral; this proves that these legislations take account of conditions that are independent of “hardness of heart” while admitting that not every matrimonial union is the work of God, the sole condition that would render it indissoluble. If one wishes to claim a quasi-direct divine will for marriage, one must exclude every economical and political motivation and all petty bargaining; in any case the fact that marriage is indissoluble in principle, since it refers metaphysically to the paradisiacal prototype or to an ecclesiastical symbolism, does not mean it is something absolute from the standpoint of human facts or contingencies—a standpoint that unquestionably has a right to existence, for otherwise the Sinaitic and Koranic prescriptions would not exist.