5 - Evidence from liturgy and law

Summary

Chapter 4 has shown that betrothal was central to the earliest theology of Christian marriage. In the present chapter the process of ‘retrieving’ betrothal continues apace. If betrothal really was central to the Christian experience of marriage, then one would expect evidence of it to be found in surviving liturgies. Such evidence exists, and is described in the first half of the chapter. When canon law began to develop at the turn of the second millennium, crucial questions about the meaning of marriage, and about how it was contracted, began to be debated. The answers given then remain profoundly influential, even today. Aquinas' forgotten reflections on betrothal are discussed, and the chapter closes with an examination of the work of the seventeenth-century English lawyer Henry Swinburne, A Treatise of Spousals or Matrimonial Contracts. This work closely follows Aquinas and is included here because it brings betrothal into the modern period and demonstrates a valuable continuity with pre-Reformation traditions of marriage. What happened to betrothal in the Reformation and modern periods must await chapter 6. While in the midst of the present historical section, it is appropriate to encourage ourselves by thinking of the rewards that may be won. Confronted with the widespread phenomenon of prenuptial cohabitation and the problem of responding appropriately to it from within the Christian faith and tradition, patient excavation is yielding a view of marriage and marriage formation that is strange and unlikely and which still has the power, when it comes fully into view, of aiding and helping to shape the Christian praxis of the future.