The Mystery of Crowning

Orthodox marriage is the “crowning”: the bride and groom are crowned with crowns of joy and glory, and those crowns are at once crowns of the Kingdom and crowns of martyrdom, for marriage is a path of self-sacrificing love. This file reads the mystery through Ephesians 5, where marriage is called a “great mystery” referring to Christ and the Church, treats the theology of the crowns, and shows why Orthodox marriage is a vocation to the Kingdom and not merely a blessing on a natural union.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Great Mystery: Christ and the Church

The charter text of Christian marriage is Ephesians 5. Paul sets the mutual love of husband and wife within the love of Christ for the Church: “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it” (Ephesians 5:25); and, quoting the primal word of Genesis that the two shall be “one flesh” (Genesis 2:24), he adds, “This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:31–32). It is from this verse — mysterion mega, rendered in the Latin Vulgate sacramentum magnum — that marriage is numbered among the mysteries at all (see Sacramental Theology, on mysterion and sacramentum). The point is not merely that marriage is blessed but that it is an icon: the union of husband and wife images and participates in the union of Christ and His Church, and draws its meaning and its grace from that greater union (Meyendorff, Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective, SVS Press, 2000, on Ephesians 5 as the foundation; Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 1993, Part II).

This transfigures the natural reality of marriage without denying it. Marriage as a natural bond — the joining of a man and a woman, the begetting and rearing of children, the building of a common life — is a good of creation, blessed by God “in the beginning” (Genesis 1:27–28, 2:18–24). But in Christ this natural good is taken up into the mystery of salvation and made a way of the Kingdom. Fr. John Meyendorff stresses that Christian marriage is not simply the sanctioning of a contract for the sake of children and social order — as marriage was largely understood in the Roman world — but an eternal union, grounded in the resurrection, meant to endure into the Kingdom of God, where “they neither marry, nor are given in marriage” (Matthew 22:30) precisely because the reality marriage foreshadows will then be fully present (Meyendorff, Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective, on marriage as an eternal, eschatological bond). The love of the spouses is a school and a sacrament of the love that is the life of the Kingdom.

The Rite of Crowning

The Orthodox marriage service is, in fact, two rites that were once distinct: the Betrothal, at which the rings are blessed and exchanged, and the Crowning (the marriage proper), from which the whole mystery takes its name. Notably, the Orthodox rite contains no exchange of vows in the Western sense: the ministers of the mystery are, in one sense, the couple who give themselves to each other, but the celebrant of the mystery is the Church through the priest, who crowns them and invokes God’s blessing — marriage is received as a gift from God, not primarily contracted by a promise between the parties (Meyendorff, Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective, on the absence of vows and the priestly blessing; Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II). This is why, in the Orthodox understanding, it is the priestly blessing and crowning — not the consent alone — that constitutes the sacramental marriage.

At the center of the rite the priest sets crowns upon the heads of the bride and groom, praying, “O Lord our God, crown them with glory and honour” — a phrase drawn from Psalm 8:5 (“thou… hast crowned him with glory and honour”). The couple, crowned, are led three times in procession around the table while the Church sings, and they drink together from a common cup, the sign of the one life they will now share. The crowns are the interpretive heart of the mystery, and the tradition reads them in three inseparable senses (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II, on the crowns; Meyendorff, Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective).

The Three Meanings of the Crowns

Crowns of joy and honour. First and simply, the crowns are the wedding crowns of festal joy — the garlands of the marriage feast, the glory and honour with which God adorns the new union. Marriage is a feast, a participation in the joy of the wedding at Cana that Christ blessed with His presence and His first sign (John 2:1–11, read at Orthodox weddings), and the crowns proclaim that gladness (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II).

Crowns of the Kingdom. The crowns are royal: the couple are made king and queen of a new domestic church, a little kingdom over which they are to reign in love and by which they are to serve the Kingdom of God. As the crowns are removed at the end of the rite the priest prays that God receive their crowns “into Thy Kingdom” — for the marriage is oriented from the first toward the Kingdom that is its true home, and the crowning is a foretaste of the glory prepared for those who love God (Meyendorff, Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective, on the eschatological meaning of the crowns; Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II).

Crowns of martyrdom. And the crowns are the crowns of martyrs. The Orthodox tradition explicitly joins marriage to martyrdom, for the martys is the “witness” who dies to self out of love, and marriage is a lifelong dying to self-will for the sake of the beloved and of Christ. The troparia sung during the procession invoke the holy martyrs — “O holy martyrs, who fought the good fight and received your crowns” — binding the couple’s crowns to theirs. To be crowned in marriage is to be crowned for a martyrdom of daily, faithful, self-emptying love, in which each spouse lays down his life for the other as Christ laid down His for the Church (Ephesians 5:25; Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II, on the martyr-crowns; Paul Evdokimov’s The Sacrament of Love develops this theme). The three meanings are one: the joy of the feast, the glory of the Kingdom, and the crown of martyrdom are the single reality of a love that, dying to itself, is raised into the life of God.

A Vocation, Not a Concession

This theology sets the Orthodox understanding of marriage apart from any view that treats it as a mere concession to weakness or a lower path than celibacy. Marriage and monasticism are, in the Orthodox tradition, two parallel ways to the one Kingdom, each a form of the self-emptying love that is the whole Gospel — the monk renouncing marriage for the sake of undivided prayer, the married renouncing self for the sake of the beloved, both crowned for martyrdom (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Part II, on marriage and monasticism as parallel vocations; see Orthodoxy: Monasticism). The home is called a “little church,” and the sanctification of the spouses through their common life — through fidelity, forbearance, the bearing and raising of children, the daily practice of love — is a genuine path to deification, no less than the ascetic path of the desert (Meyendorff, Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective; see The Mysteries and Theosis). It is because marriage is so high a vocation — an icon of Christ and the Church, a martyrdom crowned for the Kingdom — that the Church holds its ideal so firmly, and it is against that height that the pastoral question of failed marriages and remarriage, treated in the companion file, must be understood.

See Also

References

  • Meyendorff, John. Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective. 3rd ed. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2000.
  • Ware, Kallistos. The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993, Part II.
  • Evdokimov, Paul. The Sacrament of Love: The Nuptial Mystery in the Light of the Orthodox Tradition. Trans. Anthony Gythiel. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1985.
  • Scripture: Genesis 1:27–28, 2:18–24; Psalm 8:5; Matthew 22:30; John 2:1–11; Ephesians 5:25–32.