Italy is in uproar because the left-wing parties in Romano Prodi’s coalition government have promised to give some kind of recognition to couples who are not married. The pope has said that granting legal recognition to unwed couples is a threat to traditional marriage. There’s a problem with that kind of reasoning. What is marriage if not the recognition by the State of a sexual union between two people? This is not the religious rite we are talking about, for even the outcome of the religious marriage rite has to be recognised by the State for it to be valid in the eyes of the law. Ultimately, it is only the State recognition of a marriage that counts for the all-important secular purposes like inheritance, property rights, the position of children, income tax, social benefits and so on. The value of the religious rite is purely spiritual, and means nothing if you can’t be bothered with religion.

If the State recognises the union between “unwed” couples, this means that, effectively, the two are wed. They may not go down to the registry office and sign the marital contract, but they are bound nonetheless, by whatever means the State may have decided (living together for more than five years, the presence of children, and so on). The intention is a good one, and not immoral, as religious speakers tend to make out it is, because it aims to ensure that one half of the couple – usually the woman – is not left in the lurch without property rights or child support if the man decides to abscond. It is a way of teaching people that marital rights and duties devolve from the decision to live together, form a household and have children, and not from the simple act of taking a vow at the altar or signing a contract in front of a representative of the public registrar.

People have responsibilities towards the person with whom they live, and with whom they have children, whether they are married or not. The mentality has developed – especially among men – that you can run out on someone with whom you have shared a home and even a family, without too much of a twinge of conscience, because after all, “you weren’t married”. This is a spectacular way of taking advantage, and whenever priests and popes go on about the meaning of marriage and the meaningless of cohabitation, they encourage this kind of bad behaviour. A man’s union with a woman, possibly the mother of his children, is not meaningless or less meaningful because he failed to marry her.

That the State recognition of cohabitation is a threat to traditional marriage is a view that fails to take in the perspective of history. By giving recognition to “unwed” couples, the State will be going back to the origins of marriage, which were entirely secular and not in the least bit religious. As recently as the 15th century, priests and the church played no part at all in Christian marriages. The presence of clergy at marriage ceremonies only began to be standard around the 16th century. Their role was not to join the couple in “holy matrimony”, but to ensure that there were no impediments to the marriage, and that both parties consented to it. The priest’s role was closer to that of a witness rather than an active participant, and the wedding did not have to take place in church. In fact, the few weddings that did were those of the privileged.

That marriage was appropriated by the Christian church so very late in its history is due to the fact that all the purposes of marriage are civil and secular, and not religious. The conversion of marriage into a holy sacrament was late, tortuous, complicated and confusing. Reasons had to be found why it should be considered as more than a social and civil contract between two people, entered into for social and civil reasons. For the bulk of the population, there was no contract proper, because there was no property involved. Marriage was simply the agreement to shack up together – to put it crudely – and to keep house and breed children. Finding reasons why these arrangements should be considered a holy sacrament was very difficult indeed. Plainly speaking, marriage was about property, children and sex, and not about God.

This is not the place to delve into the history of Christian marriage. Suffice it to say that the marriage rite we know today and consider as old as Christianity itself is really a very recent development in historical terms. For the first 1,500 years of Christianity, European culture recognised more than one form of binding union. Even concubinage had its rules and its obligations. The main difference between concubinage and marriage seems to have been the social status of the woman in relation to the man. If she was of his social standing, then by living together they were considered married. If she was beneath him, then living together was concubinage, which would give the children he had with her no rights of inheritance.

The chief reason for marriage among the higher social orders was the creation of heirs through a social and economic contract between two families rather than two people. Love and sexual attraction did not come into it. The public display that surrounded such marriages had nothing to do with God or the holiness of matrimony, and everything to do with ostentation and the need to demonstrate that a dynastic agreement had been struck. Even when the church began to play a role in the marriage rite, church weddings were largely the preserve of important people. The poor and the insignificant just moved in together and began to have children, and that constituted a marriage.

This is pretty much what the proposed laws in several European States are returning to: the acknowledgement that, once two people move in together and begin to have children, they are de facto married. Even if it is not called marriage, all the duties, rights and obligations should be present, because there is no real difference between the situation of this couple and the situation of a couple that has moved in together and begun to have children after signing a marriage contract. The underlying argument is that you cannot shrug off your obligations and duties, or be deprived of your rights,

simply because your union is not recorded at the public registry.

For those first 1,500 years of Christianity, marriages in northern Europe involved simply the declaration of consent – not necessarily with witnesses present, and certainly not with a priest or in a church – and sexual intercourse, followed by the couple living together. Roman law also specified the couple’s consent with no formal ceremony. It is this aspect of Roman law that underpins modern civil marriage, and even plays a part in the modern Christian marriage rite.

As recently as the 15th century, there was no formal Christian marriage rite. There wasn’t even such a thing as Christian marriage. It was just marriage – a social thing, and not a religious one. It was only necessary for the man and woman to say to each other “I marry you”, and to then have sexual intercourse, for the marriage to become binding. The words “I will marry you” meant that the two were betrothed, but if they then had sexual intercourse while betrothed, they entered into a state of marriage. One of my favourite paintings, Jan Van Eyck’s portrait of Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini and his wife, painted in 1434 (it hangs in the National Gallery in London) is thought to depict just such a moment in the lives of two people. The notable art historian Erwin Panofsky first put forward the suggestion in an article published in the Burlington Magazine in 1934. The debate about it hasn’t stopped since.

What is incontestable, however, is the fact that the religious marriage rite we use today is a recent invention. This means that any harping on about the threat posed to “traditional” marriage by the State recognition of cohabiting couples does not make a great deal of sense. Traditional marriage – the tradition of 1,600 years or so, that is, as opposed to the tradition of the last 400 years – is cohabitation between a man and a woman of equal social standing for the purpose of raising a family and forming a household. For the past few hundred years, the church has waged an almighty battle to change this and to give marriage divine significance, in which it succeeded temporarily with the assistance of the secular powers. But people have since rapidly reverted to type. The demise of marriage is not really a demise at all, but a reversion to the secular forms of marriage that pertained for 1,600 years before God entered the equation.

It’s a case of going back to basics.