4. Marriage in the Primitive Church

The ancient church spread these views and customs into larger circles. Marriage received a greater sanctity in so far as it was transformed from a private and civil act into a religious and public ceremony. It took place under the sanction of the Church with the accompaniments of bestowal of eucharistic oblations, congregational intercession, and priestly blessing. After the time of Augustine it was regarded as a sacrament, i.e., a sign of invisible gifts, namely, union of Christ with the congregation, which furnishes a further reason for its indissolubility, even in cases of unfaithfulness and lack of children. The communion of faith, of religious exercises, of works of charity on a footing of equality—and the marriage tie was to be consummated only between Christians—brought about a closer union between husband and wife (Tertullian, Ad uxorem, ii. 9). Notwithstanding, a proper appreciation of the ethical significance of marriage for the Christian failed to develop. While the systematic condemnation of marriage by the Gnostics as contamination was refuted on the basis of faith in God as the creator, there reigned a sentiment that the communion of the sexes actually contaminated because it involved sensual appetite. Augustine saw in this appetite a consequence of sin. Thus abstinence appeared to take higher rank. Conjugal intercourse, according to him, was not sin if its purpose was the generation of children; it was deadly sin if its purpose was concupiscence. A second marriage was regarded as a sign of excess of sensuality. The reason for regarding matrimony as simply a protection against unchastity is to be found both in the ascetic ideal and in the fact that the expectation of the imminent end of the world hampered the appreciation of a positive ethical ideal. Tertullian considered it absurd for a Christian to desire children; for why should a man desire heirs or rejoice in possession of them if he must wish their speedy removal from this dangerous world? According to Augustine the truly pious desires only spiritual children. Whoever enters the state of matrimony must, of course, look for children who are to be born again (generare regenerandos) and upon educating them accordingly. With a general abstinence humanity would die out, but the coming of the kingdom of God would be only hastened. In the course of time such arguments became merely a dialectic means for the defense of the ascetic ideal which praised abstinence as the anticipation of angelic life, as the spiritual and therefore superior counterpart of marriage, and as communion in love of God and of Christ, explicit expression of which matrimony also tries to discover.

5. Medieval Estimate of Marriage

This conception, which is intelligible from the condition of primitive Christianity, persisted after the Church had learned to endure the prospect of a long future upon earth and of the task of educating other peoples in the Christian religion, but it was used by Christianity in order to gain among the representatives of a higher perfection fit instruments for the accomplishment of its world dominion. Thus the estimate of matrimony in comparison with the sanctity of the monastical and priestly states remained low. The unchastity of many monastics and celibates and a low valuation of marriage induced in the laity a moral degeneracy which was intensified toward the end of the Middle Ages by the coarseness which literature took on, by habitual slander of woman, and by the humanistic renascence of pagan lasciviousness and contempt of matrimony.