Marriage as Sacrament

Marriage was not considered a sacrament in the strict sense by the earliest church fathers or in medieval era. This is partly because there was no “sacrament” in the strict sense; the word was used loosely for “sacred signs.” Augustine described marriage as a “sacrament,” but he didn’t mean by that what others meant.

John Witte, Jr., says that the Gregorian revolution was the context for the explicit sacramentalization of marriage, and can be seen as part of the effort to establish the church as a corporation and institution independent of the state. By the thirteenth century, canon lawyers and theologians generally viewed marriage from three perspectives. First, it was a natural institution, subject to laws of nature.

Second, it was a consensual contract, subject to laws of contract. Hugh of St Victor said that in marriage each “obligates” to the other by “mutual consent.” Peter Lombard said that what makes marriage is not merely consent to cohabit but “consent to conjugal society,” and Scotus claimed that marriage is contract that involves “mutual exchange by a man and wife of their bodies for perpetual use in the procreation and nurture of children.” The notion that marriage was contractual had two implications. It meant that marriage must be free and not coerced, and second that consensual agreements, even without ceremonies, were legally binding. Church ceremony was not of the essence of marriage.

Finally, medieval theologians and canon lawyers regarded marriage as sacrament, subject to laws of the church. Like other sacraments, marriage is a visible sign of the church’s invisible union with Christ; both the spiritual and physical union of man and wife signified the union of church with Christ. Unlike other sacraments, however, it required no clergy or formalities, and the parties themselves were considered “ministers of the sacrament.” It was also a sacrament in being an instrument of sanctification. Christian marriage transformed the couple. As baptism remade the person baptized by cleansing sin and incorporating into Christ and the church, so marriage remade the couple, removing the sin of sexual intercourse, promising God’s help, welcoming the married couple into a status in the hierarchy of the church.

According to Gratian, the sacramental aspect was intercourse itself, since this is the great transformative act of marriage because it changes what would be lust into spiritual reality that expressed the deepest reality of redemption. This view was often rejected. Theologians recognized that sexual sin still persists in marriage, and some had real marriages without sex. According to Scotus, the blessing of priest made the marriage sacramental. By the 13 ^th century, the exchange of wills, the mutual consent to be married, constituted it a sacrament.

The sacramental nature of marriage elevated the contractual and natural and gave it spiritual significance. It transformed the natural into an instrument of grace, and transfigured the contractual into an indissoluble bond.

Yet, the sacramentality of marriage remained controversial until late in the middle ages. James Brundage notes that heretical movements that denied the goodness of marriage gave urgency to the debate in the 13 ^th and 14 ^th centuries. He cites the views of Peter Olivi, who was tried for heresy in 1279, as an example of the controversy. Olivi’s opponents “seized upon his doubt about the sacramentality of marriage. In an effort to escape condemnation Olivi defended his views by evading the issue. He retracted, without formally admitting, earlier statements that marriage was not a sacrament. But he then tried to distinguish marriage as less perfect and less virtuous than the other sacraments. Further Olivi seemed to believe that matrimony, unlike the other sacraments, did not confer grace. Pressed to clarify what he meant by this, Olivi distinguished: marriage conferred grace, he conceded, but not in the same manner as the other sacraments. Therefore, he claimed, the Church merely tolerates marriage, but does not advocate it, because although marriage is a sacrament, it is contaminated by worldly considerations – desire for property, for family alliances, for enhancement of social standing or political interest – as well as by sexual attraction. To bolster his position, Olivi further declared that marriage differs from the other sacraments because it does not imprint a ‘character’ on the soul, as do baptism and holy orders, and hence could lawfully be received many times.”

Albert the Great “maintained that marriage was a sacrament” but “distinguished between it and the others. Albert held that while marriage did confer grace, it did so only in the limited sense that the power of the sacrament helped married persons to achieve the goals of marriage, such as raising children and getting on with one’s spouse.” For Thomas, marriage was a sacrament and “the exchange of consent itself conferred grace in the same way that other sacraments did.” This view, Brundage says, was adopted as dogma at the Council of Florence, and reaffirmed with attached anathemas by Trent.

Scotus distinguished between sacramental marriage and contractual marriage: “not every marriage was sacramental. A couple could enter into marriage by mutual consent, and this created a perfectly legitimate and binding, but not sacramental union. The couple received the sacrament of marriage only when their contract was ratified by the Church. For Scotus, then, the sacrament of marriage was conferred by the nuptial blessing, not by the mere fact of the marriage contract.”