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70 Chapter 1
Again, if marriage had been evil, the Lord would have taught that it is
evil, nor would he have honoured it with his presence, nor eaten there, nor
adorned it with so solemn a miracle, nor permitted his most holy mother
to be present. Therefore in honouring a marriage with all these things, he
showed that it was good.
Again, the canon says, and this is self-evident, that the error which is not
resisted is approved, nor is a man who abandons the e·ort to resist a public
wrong immune from suspicion of being secretly involved. Therefore, if
marriage were evil, since the Lord was present at it, and did not resist that
evil when it would have been possible for him to do so, and did confute it
when he was the teacher of truth, in failing to obstruct evil, he approves it.
But this is utterly impossible. Therefore so is the first point, namely, that
marriage is evil. (Servasanto da Faenza: Document 1. 11. 12–13)
The miracle at Cana
Christ’s endorsement of marriage is also demonstrated by the miracle
worked at the wedding feast.
Against the background of all these topoi, one or two preachers
stand out for their more original or sophisticated apologias for
marriage. Aldobrandino da Toscanella is unusual for his time in
asserting that it confers grace. Until some point in the thirteenth
century there was no consensus that marriage actually did confer
grace: many thought that it was the one sacrament that did not.
By the second half of the thirteenth century the conviction that
Christian marriage conferred grace had more or less won the day.
However, it should not surprise us that preaching lagged behind
theological development. Aldobrandinoda Toscanella, though, had
apparently been keeping up with academic theology. He puts it
like this:
Again . . . in marriage grace is conferred. In so far as it is contracted in
the faith of Christ, it has the power to confer the grace which helps with
doing those works which are required in marriage. And we see an example
of this in the field of natural philosophy, for whenever the power of doing
something is given to anything, helps are also provided by means of which
D’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons: Hugues de Saint-Cher, para. 1; Pierre
de Saint-Beno^§t, para. 1; Guibert de Tournai, para. 1; Jean Halgrin: Document 1.
9. 1; Konrad Holtnicker: Document 1. 10. 6; Servasanto da Faenza: Document 1.
11. 12.
D’Avray, ‘The Gospel of the Marriage Feast of Cana and Marriage Preaching
in France’, 149, citing D. Burr, The Persecution of Peter Olivi (Transactions of the
American Philosophical Society, ns 66, pt. 5; Philadelphia, 1976), 45–6.