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178 Chapter 4
long run the Church rejected the exclusion of unfreed slaves from
marriage.
To return to the text. It shows that priests and deacons had
daughters and were presumably still married. The discipline of the
Western Church at this date was that a a man in holy orders should
live chastely with his wife. One may guess at the following pattern.
A man becomes a ‘cleric’ and embarks on the road to becoming a
priest, relatively young. He marries and has children. On one of the
ritual stages on the way to becoming a priest, the diaconate or the
subdiaconate, he supposedly stops having sex with his wife.
What does the sentence about the sacramentum of Christ and the
Church mean? Leo implies that a bodily union is not itself enough to
make a marriage. A true marriage is a mirror of the union of Christ
and the Church. The signs that such a marriage has taken place are
that the couple are free (freed if necessary), that the woman has a
dowry (which she could not have if she were a slave and ineligible
for matrimony), and a public ceremony. Sexual partnership is not
enough to symbolize the mystery of Christ and the Church.
Hincmar of Reims to Gratian
In the ninth century Hincmar, the powerful archbishop of Reims,
modified the Latin and the sense of Leo’s text to produce a completely
di·erent meaning: namely, that until the couple have sexual
intercourse, marriage does not properly symbolize the union of
Christ and the Church. He developed this new reading in the context
of a real problem, a case touched on briefly in Chapter 2. A
nobleman called Stephen of Auvergne had been through a marriage
ceremony with a woman when he had slept with a close relative of
hers. By the rules of the time, this made it a sin to sleep with his
wife. Hincmar was called in to decide what should be done. He said
that the marriage could be ended. It could not be consummated
morally. Until it was consummated it did not mirror the union of
Christ and the Church, so it could be dissolved.
Concilia aevi Karolini, ed. A. Wermingho· (2 vols.; Monumenta Germaniae
Historica, Legum Sectio III, Concilia, 2. 1–2; Hanover etc., 1906–8), no. 30,
i/1. 279.
We may leave aside here the question of whether or when the rule about chastity
was applied to subdeacons (the subdiaconate being the antepenultimate rung on the
ladder of priestly orders). The requirement seems to have included deacons as well
as priests more or less from its introduction.
Gaudemet, ‘Recherche sur les origines historiques’, 315–18.