Joseph H.J. Leach
Department of Geomatics, University of Melbourne, Australia

Abstract

Much of the distinctive understanding that the Byzantine Church has of marriage is implicit in its rituals and practice and has not yet been fully expressed as explicit theology. An analysis of the traditional icon of the Marriage Feast at Cana gives us a window through which we can explore the particular understanding of the Byzantine Church and can lead us to an understanding of the role that marriage plays in the life of the Christian. Three themes emerge from an analysis of the icon: the relationship of marriage to the act of creation, the role of Mary and the Eucharistic dimension of marriage.

Introduction

In Your indescribable graciousness and great goodness You came to Cana in Galilee, and blessed the marriage which took place there. Thus You made it clear that it is Your will that there should be lawful marriage and from it the procreation of children…. [1]

In the early centuries of the church there was no distinct ritual for marriage [2] . A Christian couple would go and make the marriage agreement according to Roman civil law and then attend Eucharist together and could have asked for a blessing from the priest, although there is no evidence of a distinct marriage blessing prior to the fourth century. It was the first communion together as a couple which was considered to be the sacramental symbol of the marriage. It was only slowly that a distinct and definitive marriage ritual developed. As late as the ninth century, the Patriarch Photius wrote that: “Marriage is an alliance between husband and wife and their union for their entire life; it is accomplished by a blessing, or by a crowning, or by an agreement. [3] ” The point here is that there were still three different ways in which a Christian marriage could be conducted.

The Christian sacrament of marriage became increasingly involved with the Roman secular institution of marriage after Christianity was recognised by the Emperor Constantine. The development of the Christian marriage ritual was thus effected when the Roman Empire split into its Eastern and Western components. In the west, the break down of civil society meant that the church assumed much of the civil responsibility for marriage and could largely dictate its form. The western church preserved the blessing and first communion together as the nuptial ritual and simply incorporated the public promises which formed the Roman civil practice. In the east, the marriage ritual increasingly became a matter of imperial edict. As a result, the Byzantine Church separated the marriage ritual from the celebration of the Eucharist to preserve the sacredness of the Eucharistic celebration. The current form of Marriage ritual in the Byzantine Church, the crowning, seems to have come to the Church from Armenia and was first mandated by the Emperor Leo VI (+912) and then confirmed and made universal by the Emperor Alexis I Comnenos (1081 – 1118). This separate history has profoundly effected the understanding each church has of marriage.

The Wedding Feast at Cana

There is relatively little written about the theology of marriage in the Byzantine Church, especially if you compare it to the extensive literature in the Latin Church, and I think it is fair to say that this is an area where the distinctive understanding of the Byzantine Church, as opposed to the common understanding which she shares with the Latin Church, remains implicit in church practice rather than being fully expressed in explicit theology. This poses a problem for an outsider who wishes to have a deeper understanding than that which can be gained from descriptions of ritual practice. This is especially true when much of the discussion that there does exist is concerned with the differences in discipline concerning divorce and re-marriage.

Where written theology is absent, two keys remain to the faith of the Byzantine Church: the liturgy and the icon. The most important icon relating to marriage is that of the Wedding Feast at Cana which was where Christ blessed the human bonds of marriage and conferred on them a sacramental character. This incident at the beginning of Christ’s ministry [4] is seen as pivotal by both churches in any understanding of marriage.  Christ’s actions at Cana show that he approves and blesses the human bonds of marriage and more than that, fills them with His life and grace so that they become much more than they were before – “..you have saved the best wine till last.” The fact that John places this incident at the beginning of Christ’s ministry not only emphasizes the importance of marriage but makes it a kind of introduction to what is to follow. Christ’s mission on Earth is a call to all of humanity to the wedding feast of the Apocalyptic Lamb – a theme which recurs many times in the Gospels. A meditation on this icon will, hopefully, allow us to develop an appreciation of the Byzantine Church’s distinctive understanding of marriage.

The first thing to notice about the icon of the Wedding Feast at Cana is that it is literally a feast. The table occupies the central position in the icon and it is loaded with food and drink. On the table there is meat, poultry, fish, bread, fruit and vegetables. In short, all of the fruits of the Earth, all the good things of creation, are laid out before the bride. This clearly establishes the link between marriage and creation, between marriage and the abundance of creation - Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. The central position of this laden table indicates that this relationship between marriage and creation is fundamental to any proper understanding of marriage. Marriage is about celebrating all the good things in life which God, in His love, has given us. It is about the abundant love of God for all His creation:

 …bless this marriage, ……Keep their married life above reproach, and grant them to see their childrens' children; give them dew from heaven and the fruitfulness of the earth; provide them with an abundance of temporal good things, that they in turn may share their abundance with those in need. [5]

The Bride

At the head of this table of nature’s abundance, and occupying the central position of the icon, is the figure of the bride, crowned as per the Byzantine wedding ceremony. There is a startling similarity between the figure of the bride here at the start of Christ’s ministry and the figure of “old man Cosmos” in the icon of Pentecost, at the start of the mission of the Church. Old man Cosmos represented the world held in the bondage of sin. Here, the bride represents the other side of that coin, she is nature, good and graced by its creation by God and yet lacking something vital. The table is laden but they have no wine and the feast is turning sour, as the bowed head of the servant in the upper left of the icon shows. In modern, western terms we might consider the bride to represent “Mother Nature” but it would be more traditional, and more accurate, to consider the bride as a symbol of Sophia. Sophia is a concept which is largely unfamiliar to the west but which plays an important role in Eastern Theology. It was perhaps best described by the Russian philosopher and theologian Pavel Florensky. Florensky saw creation as “one living being praying to its creator and Father.” This one, living being he called Sophia – the divine wisdom. Sophia is in creation from its first being and yet is in the process of becoming. Sophia is the spiritual beauty of creation, the incorruptible, first-created beauty of creation and the glory of creation struggling to be born. Here Sophia as the bride connects human marriage with this great act of becoming, of giving birth. In marriage, humanity is opened to the full, awesome creativity of life.

Mary

Yet there is something lacking. They have no wine and Mary stands apart from the table, although she is clearly also a guest at the feast, and presents the need of the wedding party, the need of creation, to Christ. Here Mary is the embodiment of the church acting in a priestly role and she brings the needs of the world to God and asks for His mercy and compassion. In marriage it is the church which presents the couple, in their most intimate need and longing, to Christ and asks for the grace of his Spirit to bless them and to fill their need. It is then that the miraculous happens and the water is changed into wine. The same thing happens in Christian marriage. A couple’s love for each other is always contingent and flavoured with self-love in the natural order, as all things of this world are. However, when the church presents the couple to God, the natural love and relationship which the couple have had up until now, which was good in itself but limited, is transformed into some thing far greater. It is infused with the Spirit of God and transcends its natural human character to become an expression, a manifestation, of the divine love. The water of human eros becomes the wine of divine agape.

The role of the Church in marriage is to bring the couple before Christ who bestows this miraculous blessing upon them. Just as Mary is central to the story of the marriage feast at Cana, so the Church is central to each Christian marriage. Christian, sacramental marriage is a church affair. Indeed it is here that the Church is reborn with the new family forming a new Christian community which shares in all the qualities of the Church – “a community of grace and prayer, a school of human virtues and Christian charity” [6] . This is called the ‘little church’ in Orthodox Church literature [7] or the ‘domestic church’ in the literature of the Roman Catholic Church [8] . In this Christian community the parents play a priestly role, offering themselves and their children to Christ and instructing their children in the practice of the Christian faith.

The Place of the Eucharist

One other notable feature of the icon of the wedding feast of Cana is that the bride is the only one crowned. Although the male figure sitting to the left of her is presumably the groom, he wears no crown. This is to emphasis another relationship, that between Christ and his creation, symbolized in the bride. This is what Paul meant when he said in his letter to the Ephesians:

As the church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, …He who loves his wife loves himself. For no man ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. "For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh." This mystery is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. [9]

Every wedding is itself a symbol and foretaste of the great wedding feast where Christ will be joined to his bride, the Church and, through the Church, to all of the created order. The love of man and woman is itself a sacrament of the love of Christ and the Church. The two become one in a life of mutual love and mutual subjection to each other in Christ just as Christ gives himself to and for His Church and the Church bows down before Him. There is a sense in which at every wedding it is Christ who presides and Christ who is the bridegroom. Every wedding is a call to the eternal wedding feast of the Lamb.

Marriage thus has an intrinsically Eucharistic character. The couple offer themselves up to each other, give themselves to each other and are received and blessed by God in unity just as in the Eucharist the Church offers up all of creation, Christ gives himself totally and the Church enters into a blessed union with Christ in which she is brought into the love of the Father and the life of the Spirit. Marriage and the Eucharist have been joined in the understanding of the Church since the very earliest days.

In the Byzantine Church the actual marriage ceremony is now separated from the celebration of the Eucharist. This was done when the Church took over the imperial administration of marriage and was necessary to preserve the sacredness of the Eucharistic celebration from the intrusion of imperial processes, rights and edicts. This is a great pity since it obscures the connection between marriage and the Pascal feast of the Lamb. Even though some Orthodox theologians have claimed that the form of the ritual still maintains a Eucharistic connection [10] , others have called for the ritual to include a Eucharistic celebration so that this connection is made clear [11] .

Conclusion

Marriage is unique among the sacraments of the church in that it existed as a social institution in much the same form and with much the same function prior to the emergence of the Christian Church. All of the sacraments take pre-existing elements and sanctify them. However, while Baptism may take water and washing as its basis, it is not washing in the normal sense, and while the Eucharist may be thought of a sacred meal, one does not go to communion because of physical hunger. Yet marriage as a faithful, public bond between a man and a woman, to form a family and for the creation and protection of children, was known long before the Christian era. Even concepts such as monogamy and marital fidelity are very ancient. In marriage, the sacrament seems to have already existed, waiting for the incarnation of Christ to fill it with grace and transcendent meaning. This is why Paul considers that a pagan marriage remains valid even after one of the spouses has become a Christian. Indeed, the pagan marriage is seen not only to remain valid but now to be filled with the grace of Christ to such an extent that the pagan member of the marriage may be saved by the faith of the Christian member.

Most of the sacraments have their origins in the love and grace of God’s action of redemption. Marriage has its origins in the love and grace of God’s action of creation. Marriage is a part of what humanity was created to be: Then the LORD God said, "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him. [12] The other sacraments have their origins in the life and mission of Christ and can be seen as a continuation of that mission through the ministry of the Church. Marriage has its origins in creation itself and can be seen as a continuation of the charge given to humanity at the very beginning of their creation.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." [13]

Like all things, of course, marriage was damaged and corrupted by the fall and needed to be redeemed by the love and grace of God in Christ. However, marriage remains tied to creation in a particular way. The other sacraments were created by Christ in his mission and his church but marriage, like all of creation, already existed and was redeemed by Christ and filled with His grace. It is notable that when Jesus is called upon to discuss marriage [14] , He does not do so by referring to rabbinical law, nor to any of the stories of marriage in the Old Testament. Instead, He goes back to the very beginning and refers to a passage from Genesis. This passage is, therefore, essential to a proper understanding of marriage.

Then the man said, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man." Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed. [15]

This does not mean that Marriage is somehow separate from the story of salvation. Rather, it is deeply a part of it. The sacramentality of marriage shows that the salvation of Christ reaches to the very core of our being, to every corner of what it is to be human. This understanding that marriage is fundamental to human existence and society, this link between marriage and creation, and that Christian marriage is transformed by the Holy Spirit to a new and transcendent reality is the key to a deeper appreciation of a sacrament which is much abused in modern western society. It is also the key to a proper understanding of sex, which our modern society has turned into a commodity but which the Christian Church, both east and west, sees as a sacred sharing in the creative energy of God.