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Mass Communication 31
gine that this would substantially a·ect the shape of our imaginary
graph charting the prominence of marriage as metaphor.
Marriage symbolism in early ‘marriage feast of Cana’ homilies: some
exceptional examples
A few surviving homiliaries do have sermons on the marriage feast
of Cana pericope containing some marriage symbolism. Two of
them are transcribed below, as Documents 1. 2 and 1. 3. There
are some good passages of marriage symbolism, which are short
enough to be quoted. We may begin with the following from the
‘Bavarian Homiliary’ (Document 1. 1)—not, however, from the
pericope of the marriage feast of Cana, which would be the usual
venue for marriage doctrine and symbolism in sermons of the last
three medieval centuries. It is especially interesting for the way
it combines commentary on marriage in the literal sense with the
symbolic meaning of marriage:
Therefore, although a virgin is ranked at one hundred, and a married
woman at thirty, nevertheless a chaste [married] woman is better than a
proud virgin. For that chaste woman, serving her husband, has a rank of
thirty: for the proud virgin no rank at all will be left. In her is fulfilled the
words of the Psalmist (Ps. 17: 28): ‘You will save the humble people, and
you will bring down the eyes of the proud.’ And since St Paul calls the
whole catholic Church a virgin, seeing in her not only the virgins in body,
but [also] wanting the minds of all to be free from corruption: when he
says this: ‘I have prepared you for one husband, to present you as a chaste
virgin’, the souls not only of holy nuns, but also of all men and women,
if they have had the will to keep, with chastity of body, virginity in those
aforesaid five senses, should not doubt that they are brides of Christ. For
Christ is to be understood as the bridegroom not of bodies but of souls.
And therefore, dearest brethren: both men and women, both boys and
girls, if they keep their virginity until they are married, and do not corrupt
their souls through these five senses, that is, sight, hearing, taste, smell, or
touch, while they use them well, on the day of judgement, when the gates
are opened, will be worthy to enter into the eternal marriage chamber of the
bridegroom. But those who both corrupt their bodies before marriage by
some adulterous union, and afterwards do not cease to wound their souls
homil‹etique du Ms. Wolfenb•uttel 4096’, Studi medievali, 3rd ser., 14 (1973), 259–86
at 276 no. 41, and Amos, ‘The Origin and Nature of the Carolingian Sermon’, 214
at nn. 71–2.
Cf.Mark4:20.
prepared] espoused in Vulgate, but it may not be a scribal error