The Incarnation as a Marriage: Augustine’s Nuptial Christology and Its Latin Patristic Sources
Abstract
Throughout his writings, Augustine compares the union of Christ’s human and divine natures to a marriage. For Augustine, the divine Word is the bridegroom not only of the church but also of the human flesh that he joins to himself in the Incarnation. There has been only modest commentary on Augustine’s use of this metaphor and almost no inquiry into its sources. This paper demonstrates the Latin Christian roots of this nuptial metaphor for the Incarnation and brings to light the importance of Augustine’s nuptial Christology to his ecclesiology. The paper concludes by clarifying Augustine’s understanding of the relationship between the Word-flesh and Christ-church nuptial unions.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
- Authors
- Juge, J.-P. M., & Philosophy Documentation Center
- Corresponding author
- Juge, Jean-Paul M.
- ORCID
- Juge, Jean-Paul M.
- Venue
- Augustinian Studies
- Publisher
- Philosophy Documentation Center
- Published
- 2026
- Volume
- 57
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 87-103
- ISSN
- 0094-5323 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W7165683313
- Cited by
- 0
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 0.00
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Augustinian Studies (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Augustinian Studies and Theology
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Medieval Philosophy and Theology
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Karl Barth and Christian Theology
- Keywords
- Augustine of Hippo, incarnation, marriage, Christology, ecclesiology, divine word, human flesh
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
