Between God and Man

Sermon 3. On the First Anniversary

  ON THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY Behind the altar, in the apse of the old Basilica of St. Peter was a mosaic portraying Innocent III as the bridegroom of the Roman church.This stylized picture placed that marriage at the center of salvation history. In the forefront of the picture is Christ, the Lamb of God as described in Revelation :. On one side of Christ, Innocent III, barefoot and wearing a crown, stands facing his bride, the church, who is portrayed as a beautiful woman. At the edges of the picture are the two cities, Bethlehem and Jerusalem, scenes of Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection. Above these the figures of St. Peter and St. Paul preside, while the four rivers of Paradise pour down around the Lamb. Over all is the hand of God the Father, while in a corner Adam and Eve symbolize death coming into the world.1 This representation illustrates the message of Innocent’s sermon for the first anniversary of his coronation. From the very early days of his pontificate Innocent III had faced a thorny administrative and constitutional problem: the controversy surrounding the transferral of bishops from one diocese to another. Serious at any time, this issue could not but be exacerbated in the climate of reform being produced by the policies of Innocent’s pontificate . Almost contemporaneously with this sermon Innocent issued on January , , the decretal Inter corporalia, which dealt with this issue.There he addressed the problem by discussing in terms of “spiritual marriage” the indissoluble bonds he believed to exist between bishops and their dioceses.2 The decretal is a well reasoned legal argument, concisely laying out in chancery style the premises upon which the Pope, as the judge  of major cases, is making a ruling in a specific situation.When he transposes that argument to the sermon genre, Innocent invests the marriage figure with a new energy, calling upon each bishop and electus to understand his union with a diocese not only as a canonical procedure, but also as a bond built upon the more radical structure of loyalty, watchfulness, loving support, and indissolubility, that is, on the structure of the ideal marital bond. It follows for Innocent that any violation of that indissoluble bond was as serious and to be as rarely permitted as any violation of the bonds of matrimony. If bishops are indissolubly united with their sees as husbands are with their wives, then just as the marriage bonds can be dissolved only by God, so the bishops’ bonds with their sees can, in Innocent’s view, be dissolved only by God’sVicar, the Pope. Pennington has pointed out that “juristically Innocent involved himself in a morass of contradictions ” by this explanation, yet he and Imkamp have nonetheless shown that it is central to Innocent’s ecclesiology.3 As Innocent prepares his argument within the sermon, he refers to his treatise on marriage, De quadripartita specie nuptiarum.4 There he had described four kinds of nuptials: between husband and wife, between Christ and the church, between the individual soul and God, and between God and mankind in the Incarnation. De quad. follows each marriage from the initial betrothal of human spouses through to the wedding banquet, where is sung the “Wedding Song in Praise of the Sponsus and Sponsa,” Psalm , which Innocent explicates as especially praising the nuptials of the church of Christ. It is a fifth kind of “marriage,” that of a church with its bishop, including, of course, that of the Church of Rome and its bishop, the Pope, that is the central topic of this sermon. The figure of a spiritual marriage between a church and its bishop had already held a certain validity for almost a thousand years. As early as the time of St. Cyprian (d. ) there existed a tradition that churches allegorically “married” their bishops, so that once consecrated for a see, a bishop was to remain there for the rest of his life.5 One benefit of this custom was that bishops could not be expelled from their sees or transferred without their consent. Practicality would sometimes override this ideal, of course, and bishops did in fact transfer, but such a practice was problematic.      As Innocent uses the term, “marriage” is a metaphor of relationships , focusing first on the bride who is choosing her groom, and then on the groom, the one who says “yes” to her choice.This mutuality...