A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

During the eleventh and twelfth centuries it did its best to gain more control over the most intimate part of human existence, sexual relationships and marriage; increasingly Church councils convened as part of the Peace movement began making orders which had nothing directly to do with peace, but regulated people’s private lives.9 The Church successfully fought to have marriage regarded as a sacrament: Augustine of Hippo had thus described it, in what was then a rather vague use of the word ‘sacrament’, but now precision was brought to the idea. Marriage became seen as one of seven sacraments which had been instituted by Christ himself, all marked with a sacred ceremony in church. A ‘church wedding’ had certainly not been known in the first few centuries of Church life; the laity were much slower (by several centuries) to accept this idea as the norm, and the efforts of some extremist theologians completely failed to impose the doctrine that the priest performed the marriage, rather than witnessing a contract between two people.