The two conferences hosted by the Norwegian Institute in Rome during the summers of 2014 and 2016 provided a welcome opportunity to reflect on the character of marriage as a symbol and its functions in late antique and early medieval Christianity. As participants, we were invited to consider the relationship between construing marriage as a symbol of a divine/human union (e.g. Christ and the Church) and the impact of this symbolization on the developing notion of marriage as ‘sacrament’. In my contribution, which is presented here, I suggest that these two developments – the use of marriage as a symbol and the increased recognition of marriage as some kind of sacred union – were connected to a third factor, namely the emergence of a ‘priestly’ identity for the Western Christian clergy.

Restrictions on the sexual and marital lives of the Christian clergy emerged only very gradually in both East and West. Permanent sexual abstinence for the higher clergy (bishops, presbyters, and deacons) became a canonical requirement in the West in the late fourth century, and by the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries a complete separation of clergy and marriage had become central to the agenda of the Gregorian Reform. But prior to these developments, an earlier tradition of restricting ordination to men who had been married only once existed in both the Eastern and the Western Churches.