Quando Tu and The Nuptial Creation:
St. Augustine’s Enduring Influence on Contemporary Ecclesiology
Mary C. Moorman, Ph.D. candidate, Southern Methodist University
Historians such as David Hunter have proposed that one of Augustine’s favorite popular metaphors for the Church, as we find in his sermons, is that of a virgin bride, contracted in marriage to her husband by the tabulae matrimoniales of ancient Roman jurisprudence.[1] Thus, although various scholars have held that Augustine’s concept of the Church must always be regarded rather tentatively, since his ecclesiology is constituted by a complex and dynamic nexus of interconnected distinctions, historian Peter Brown proposes that Augustine portrays the Church in the commonplace legal imagery of a legitimately contracted bride when it became most necessary to delineate a clear ecclesiology for his parishioners against the separatist movements of his day. Brown urges that “the atmosphere of a courtroom will follow Augustine into Church when he preached against the Donatists… with the same unnerving confidence as Monica (when displaying) her own marriage contract, Augustine would now produce the marriage contract of Christ and His Church.”[2]
Augustine’s “nuptial” ecclesiology may be summarized in three key elements. In the first place, Augustine teaches that the bridal Church was born from Christ’s suffering body:
(Just as) God sent a deep sleep upon Adam, in order to fashion a wife for him from his side…in Christ’s case, a bride was made for him as he slept on the cross, and made from his side. With a lance his side was struck as he hung there, and out flowed the sacraments of the Church.[3]
From various Ennarationes such as in Psalmos 30, Augustine continues that Christ speaks for the members of the ecclesial bridal body to which He has joined Himself, as its Head, because “by a great sacrament (the Incarnation) these two were united in one flesh…out of two people, one single person comes to be, the single person that is Head and body, Bridegroom and Bride.”[4]
Secondly, Augustine also holds that the bride of Christ is not merely born from Christ; she is also contracted to Christ in a mutual exchange of marital vows. In this regard, Augustine describes the bridegroom at the wedding feast of John 2 as a metaphor for Christ the bridegroom in Tractate 26 on the Gospel of John:
For (even virgins) together with the whole Church, attain to a marriage, a marriage in which Christ is the Bridegroom…For the bridegroom in that marriage, to whom it was said, “You have kept the good wine until now,” represented the person of the Lord.
Finally, the content of the nuptial vows exchanged between Christ and the Church stipulate their binding relationship to one another, as Augustine describes in an Easter octave sermon of AD 400:
The sacred reading of the Gospel, year after year, points out to us the true Christ and the true Church, to make sure that we are not mistaken in either of them, (as) by introducing the wrong bride to the holy bridegroom, or by presenting the holy bride with someone other than her true husband. So, to be sure we make no mistake about either of them, let us listen, as it were, to their marriage contract in the Gospel.[5]
On closer inspection, the content of Augustine’s metaphors relate in imaginative ways to key excerpts of modern ecclesiology. We note in particular that the procedural family law of the classical Julian age required extensive negotiations between the father of the bride and the prospective groom, which ultimately culminated in the body of the bride. While the social context on which Augustine drew for his metaphor excluded the bride from the negotiations in anticipation of her wedding, Roman law did require the expectant bride to signify her public and free consent to the contract arranged between her betrothed husband and her father. She showed her legal consent in multiple and recurring ways. She would have worn her betrothed’s bronze rings, symbolizing the durability and frugality of the empire that would be constituted in part by her future household. She would have clasped her betrothed’s hand publicly, face- to- face, in symbolic declaration of fidelity. Finally, following the ratification of the detailed deed of purchase by which she was bestowed upon her husband at his wedding, she had to pause one last time on the threshold of her husband’s home for her final and free public act of consent to his nuptial invitation, without which no legal marriage could take place. She said “Quando Tu, Ego”: “whenever and wherever you are, I am then and I am there; wherever you are, I am.”[6]
Against this context, the nuptial images from several of Augustine’s ecclesiological sermons might indicate that a key assumption in the grammar of Augustine’s ecclesiology is that the true bride and true groom, as true Church and true Christ, are identifiable from the content of their legal vows, with the groom being the one who offers, and the bride being the one who assents. In other words, against those who would supplant her, the true bride may be identified as the one who is already familiar with the terms of her betrothed’s marital contract, by which she had been purchased as a bride, and to which she has manifested her free and binding consent.
If we transition imaginatively from this paradigm for Augustine’s ecclesiology, we find that Hans Urs Von Balthazar’s chapter entitled “The Conquest of the Bride” in his Heart of the World of 1979 highlights an ecclesiological theme which strikingly resounds with Augustine’s implicit theme of the nuptial Quando Tu.[7] Here, as elsewhere, Von Balthasar unequivocally appropriates the Augustinian notion of the Church as sponsa Christi:
Our covenant – our blood-wedding, the red wedding of the Lamb – is already, here and now, the white bridal bed of divine love… You ought, in this way, to be my Bride and my Body, and it is my will to redeem the whole world in you…Be my handmaid. Renounce your will and nestle, like Ruth, at my feet. Become obedient even to death.[8]
From this understanding of a nuptial union between Christ and the Church that is characterized by obedience, Von Balthasar depicts Christ commissioning the Church in a sense which imitates the ancient nuptial formula: “Where I am, there you too are to be. What I do, that are you to do in me.”[9] Von Balthasar insists that it is the obedience of the Church which is constitutive of her nuptial identity and purpose:
You ought, in this way, to be my Bride and my Body, and it is my will to redeem the whole world in you, exclusively in you. Be my handmaid. Renounce your will and nestle, like Ruth, at my feet. Become obedient even to death… Be for the world my embodied obedience, shown forth visibly and sensibly throughout all ages. Be so obedient that to say “Church” will be to say “obedience”; for redemption is found in obedience, and whoever proclaims me must depict my obedience even to the death on the cross…So it is that I wish to teach you my obedience: a blind obedience leading you to abandon your every insight, your every love, your every faith, and through this obedience they will recognize who has my Spirit and who belongs to my Body. But this obedience will be but the pledge of my love for you and of your love for me.
Von Balthasar continues that this nuptial union is thus properly one that is publicly enacted and publicly ratified by acts of consenting faith:
My kingdom is invisible, but I want to establish you, my Bride, before the eyes of men so visibly that no one will be able to overlook you.”…I want to raise you up like the brazen serpent in the desert, like the rock against which hell itself is dashed to pieces… So there you stand, my Bride, truly a sign over the peoples at which fingers point, a widely known but little loved sign. Your failure redounds to me, since on your account my name, too, is blasphemed among the heathen…. in spite of everything, you will be my sign among the nations.
At this point we note that Augustine’s notion of the nuptial Church, as the corporation which performs public signs of faith to ratify her nuptial covenant, might also contextualize DeLubac’s contemporary description of the entire universe as a nuptial creature formed for the enjoyment of union with its creator. Citing Gregory of Nyssa’s references to o anthropos bios, DeLubac explains that “(the Fathers) seemed to witness (human nature’s) birth to see it live, grow, and develop, as a single being” both with regard to its origin, salvation, and eschatological end:
With the first sin it was this being, whole and entire, which fell away, which was driven out of Paradise and sentenced to a bitter exile until the time of its redemption. And when Christ at last appeared, coming as ‘one bridegroom’, his bride, once again, was the whole human race.[10]
In brief, DeLubac’s sense of a nuptial consummation which recapitulates the entire creation is affirmed by Von Balthasar’s description of the Church as the one who can “gather up all humanity in order to present it to (Christ) as the one fruit in the libation-cup of (her) prayer.”[11] For Von Balthasar, the Church can unify and embody the world for Christ in as much as she is joined to Christ, who is Himself “the whole…the Head of the Body and the soul which unifies it.”[12] Von Balthasar elaborates further on the purpose of the Church’s nuptial union- as the consummation of the entire creation- in a manner which accords with DeLubac:
I have died once, and only once does my Body, my Church, pass over from death to life. This is the one turning. Each of your members must make it a reality in union with me, each in his own place, in his own century, but in the unity of the one change, in the transubstantiation of this world into the other world…There is but one turning wherein earth becomes heaven, and this turning point is the Church…Here the old man is replaced by the new. Here the world dies and another world rises… To you, my Church, have I entrusted this fountainhead…You yourself are the holy heart of the nations, holy because of me, but unifying the world for me, making my Blood circulate throughout the body of history. In you my redemption ripens, I myself grow to my full stature, until I, two-in-one with you, and in the bond of the two-in-one flesh – you, my Bride and my Body – will place at the feet of the Father the Kingdom which we are. The bond of our love is the meaning of the world. In it all things reach fulfillment.[13]
Von Balthasar’s contemporary references to the nuptial bond of love between Christ and the creation, through the Church’s responsive obedience qua nuptial assent, returns us to the implications of Augustine’s ecclesiological imagination, wherein the Church responds, with faith and public signs of assent, to Christ’s offer to all of creation. On Augustine’s metaphor, the Church does so in the same way as a Roman bride would have complied with the rituals of nuptial law by signifying her assent through public acts of compliance with her bridegroom’s offer. In this way, the Church signifies on behalf of the world the nuptial assent and faithful obedience that is required for its consummation.
What might we make of Augustine’s nuptial ecclesiology and the modern appropriations which emphasize the Church as the assenting creature who seals her nuptial contract on behalf of the entire world by her obedience to Christ? I would suggest that the strain examined here might turn modern ecclesiology towards a renewed consideration of Mary of Nazareth and the tradition in which she, as mater ecclesiae, is honored as the definitive nuptial agent who utters the consenting, responsive Quando Tu, Ego for the redemption of the world. In the mind of the tradition, long before the Holy Spirit hovered over the Pentecost community to inaugurate the life of the Church, the same Holy Spirit had once hovered over the first fruit of the Father’s promises to the Son, when a timid teenage girl in Nazareth paused at the threshold of her spouse’s household, and, to conclude the long series of free acts of assent made by the symbolic gestures of her ancestors, gave consent to the terms established: may it be to me according to your word. Thus, if we trace a nuptial reading of ecclesiology back to the earliest tradition, we find that the nuptial covenant between God and humanity is somehow already completed in Mary’s joyful obedience at the Annunciation, such that it remains for the rest of humanity simply to echo her binding act of consent. Thus, with her own definitive “let it be to me according to your word, wherever you go, I will go,” we simply join in: “Amen.” It is in this way that Von Balthasar’s modern ecclesiology rejoices that in Mary, the archetype of the Church, the door to the Father’s household has already been opened, the nuptial covenant has been ratified, the word has been made flesh in the body of the bride, their marriage has been consummated on the cross, and its procreative purpose is already unfolding in the weary world as humanity is gathered, more and more, into Christ’s nuptial embrace of His Church. The only condition- that the Church accept her bridegroom’s proposal- has already been met by the Marian fiat, and the fruits of this union wait to be enjoyed by all who constitute the Church through their participation in Mary’s own obedience.
Notes
[1] David G. Hunter, “Augustine and the Making of Marriage in Roman North Africa,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 11.1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
[2] Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
[3] Augustine, Ennaratione in Psalmos 56.11.
[4] Augustine, Ennaratione in Psalmos 3, 4.
[5] Augustine, Sermon 238. The Works of St. Augustine. Sermons, Vol III.7 “On the Liturgical Seasons,” trans. Edmund Hill, O.P. (New Rochelle: New City Press, 1980). See also Augutine, Sermons 37 and 293, Ennarationes in Psalmos 45 and 72, Tractate 26 on the Gospel of John, and On Marriage and Desire I.11.
[6] Susan Treggiari, Roman Marriage: Iusti Coniuges from the Time of Cicero to the Time of Ulpian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
[7] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “The Conquest of the Bride,” from chapter 12 in Heart of the World (Ignatius Press, 1979).
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Henri de Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man (Ignatius Press, 1988) p. 27.
[11] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “The Conquest of the Bride,” from chapter 12 in Heart of the World (Ignatius Press, 1979).
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
