Conjugal and Nuptial Symbolism in Medieval Christian Thought

Abstract

Medieval scholars, clerics, and religious perceived important resemblances between marriage and the relationship between God or Christ and the Church or its individual members. They construed the divine–human relationship as a mystical marriage, but they also used such analogies to explain the laws and morality of human marriage and as the basis of the doctrine of marriage as one of the sacraments. This chapter explores the diversity of such comparisons. Having noted the limitations of symbolism as our overarching category, Reynolds proposes that the implicit common denominator within medieval thought was a notion of representation, that is, a resemblance posited between corresponding items on two hierarchically ordered planes, respectively spiritual or divine and corporeal or created. Lower things, construed as signs or figures, provided cognitive and rhetorical access to analogous higher things, whereas higher things could function analogically as exemplars that lower things were required to emulate. But these two vectors of comparison were not always coincident.