https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/04/08/the-catholic-church-didnt-even-consider-marriage-a-sacrament-for-centuries/
In the Latin West, with the exception of a few cases such as the serial monogamy of Charlemagne, the various Latin churches did not concern themselves with marriage. People usually married according to local custom, and then after maybe the first night or so would show up at the doorstep of the local church. The priest might give a few blessings and that was it. Until the 12th and 13th century, this whole indissoluble and sacrament business was largely left undiscussed to say the least. No one really knows why the Latin West started to intervene in marriage so much during the so-called Twelfth Century Renaissance. In some ways it was good because it made forced marriages for political reasons harder, but I think the cons are obvious today. In short, the rigid regulation of marriage that we know of in the Catholic Church today is nothing more than a High Medieval invention.TheTrisagion said:
If you take the liturgical practices, rites, and prayers of the recordings of the Early Church seriously (and the Catholics do), it's pretty clear and unambiguous marriage was seen as a sacrament in the East & West and was always assumed to be so (mystery is the same word for sacrament). The author of that article may not see that as good criteria though for whatever reason. I think even Nestorians, Assyrians, Arians, and other early Christian schisms all agree with this fact. It was in place, it may just not be the kind of evidence the author accepts.TheTrisagion said:
All Sacraments (including Baptism, which as with all Sacraments including marriage, was celebrated during Liturgy) were completed in the Eucharist. So it says a lot when a couple did there normal civil marriage and then had that consecrated with he Eucharist. Western Catholics got it a bit confused when they looked at marriage in terms of Roman legalism and thought of a priest as a "minister" of the Sacrament and marriage as a "contract" dissolved by death. But Rome never lost her liturgical Tradition, unlike much of the West, which is perhaps why she is the main focal point on any conversation, attack, or defense of marraige to this day in the West.minasoliman said:
Where can we read these?minasoliman said:
Yes, there were groups that made sexual continence a prerequisite for Baptism. And in the early Syriac Churches, qadisha ("holy") was used as a virtual synonym for "sexually continent," even among Orthodox believers.Minnesotan said:
http://www.pravmir.com/article_249.htmlbiro said:
Thank you.minasoliman said:
To be quite honest, I only started learning about this a couple of months ago. We were all brought up with the typical "7 sacraments, marriage is one of them, Orthodoxy is never change" spiel that we don't realize these nuances.NicholasMyra said:
I think part of that may have been an overreaction against Protestant polemics. Protestants claimed that the church had changed and that this represented a "falling away" from the faith. Some people (notably the Roman Catholic, Cardinal Newman) acknowledged that changes had occurred, but defended these changes as "development of doctrine". But others in both Rome and Orthodoxy took the Old Believer route and reacted by denying there had ever been changes of any kind in the past. (Cardinal Newman was, and might still be, hated by a lot of trad Catholics both because of his Anglican background and because of his idea of doctrinal development, which was seen as modernist or at least proto-modernist).minasoliman said:
What would you recommend?NicholasMyra said:
Dunno. Something that takes better account of sacramental activity as an activity of the Church, with respect to what the Church is as the Israel of God and the communion of God. This would necessarily make reference to the reality of the coming age where the sacraments are "from."Mor Ephrem said:
