this subject, some excuse for his wild charges may perhaps be found in
his small practical experience, prior to his apostasy, of Christian
life in the world. His poverty had forced him, even in childhood,
into irregular ways; he had been deprived of the blessings of a truly
Christian family-life. His solitary studies had left him a stranger to
the active life of good Catholics engaged in secular callings; the fact
of his being a monk banished him alike from the society of the bad and
impious and from that of the good and virtuous. Thus in many respects
he was out of touch with the stimulating influence of the world; the
versatility which results from experience was still lacking, when, in
his early years at Wittenberg, he began to think out his new theories
on God and sin, Grace and the Fall.
“Whoever wishes to please God let him stick to the order [state] in
which God has placed him.” These words of Gross, the Carthusian, quoted
above, remind us of a comparison instituted by Herolt the Dominican
between religious Orders and the “Order” of matrimony. Commending the
secular calling of matrimony, he says here, that it was instituted by
God Himself, whereas the religious Orders had been founded by men: “We
must know that God first honoured matrimony by Himself instituting it.
In this wise the Order of matrimony excels all other Orders (‘_ordo
matrimonialis præcellit olios ordines_’); for just as St. Benedict
founded the Black Monks, St. Francis the Order of Friars Minor and St.
Dominic the Order of Friars Preacher, so God founded matrimony.”[400]
True Christian perfection, according to the ancient teaching of the
Church, is not bound up with any particular state, but may be attained
by all, no matter their profession, even by the married.
Luther, and many after him, even down to the present day, have
represented, that, according to the Catholic view, perfection was
incapable of attainment save in the religious life, this alone being
termed the “state of perfection.” In his work “On Monkish Vows”
he declares: “The monks have divided Christian life into a state
of perfection and one of imperfection. To the great majority they
have assigned the state of imperfection, to themselves, that of
perfection.”[401]
As a matter of fact the “state of perfection” only means, that,
religious, by taking upon themselves, publicly and before the Church,
the three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, bind themselves to
strive after perfection along this path as one leading most surely
to the goal; it doesn’t imply that they are already in possession of
perfection, still less that they alone possess it. By undertaking
to follow all their life a Rule approved by the Church, under the
guidance of Superiors appointed by the Church, they form a “state” or
corporation of which perfection is the aim, and, in this sense alone,
are said to belong to the “state of perfection.” In addition, it was
always believed that equal, in fact the highest, perfection might
be attained to in any state of life. Though the difficulties to be
encountered in the worldly state were regarded as greater, yet the
conquest they involved was looked upon as the fruit of an even greater
love of God, the victory as more splendid, and the degree of perfection
attained as so much the more exalted.
It is the love of God which, according to the constant teaching of the
Church, constitutes the essence of perfection.
The most perfect Christian is he who fulfils the law of charity
most perfectly, and this--notwithstanding whatever Luther may
say--according to what has ever been the teaching of the Church, the
ordinary Christian may quite well do in his everyday calling, and
in the married as much as in the religious state. Even should the
religious follow the severest of Rules, yet if he does not make use
of the more abundant means of perfection at his command but lives in
tepidity, then the ordinary Christian approaches more closely than he
to the ideal standard of life if only he fulfils his duties in the home
with greater love of God.
The Bavarian Franciscan, Caspar Schatzgeyer, Luther’s contemporary, is
right when he says in his work “_Scrutinium divinæ scripturæ_”: “We
do not set up a twofold standard of perfection, one for people in the
world and another for the religious. For all Christians there is but
one order, one mode of worshipping God, one evangelical perfection....
But we do say this, that in cloistral life the attainment of perfection
is easier, though a Christian living in the world may excel all
religious in perfection.”[402] For--such is the ground he gives in a
German work--“it may well happen that in the ordinary Christian state a
man runs so hotly and eagerly towards God as to outstrip all religious
in all the essentials of Christian perfection, just as a sculptor
may with a blunt chisel produce a masterpiece far superior to that
carved by an unskilful apprentice even with the best and sharpest of
tools.”[403]
This may suffice to elucidate the question of the Catholic ideal of
life in respect of Luther’s statements, a question much debated in
recent controversies but not always set in as clear a light as it
deserved.
The preceding remarks on Luther’s misrepresentations of the Church’s
teaching concerning worldly callings lead us to consider his utterances
on the Church’s depreciation of the female sex and of matrimony.
5. Was Luther the Liberator of Womankind from “Mediæval Degradation”?
Luther maintained that he had raised the dignity of woman from the
depths to which it had fallen in previous ages and had revived due
respect for married life. What the Church had defined on this subject
in the past he regarded as all rubbish. Indeed, “not one of the
Fathers,” he says, “ever wrote anything notable or particularly good
concerning the married state.”[404] But, as in the case of the secular
authority and the preaching office, so God, before the coming of the
Judgment Day, by His special Grace and through His Word, i.e. through
the new Evangel, had restored married life to its rightful dignity,
“as He had at first instituted and ordained it.” Marriage, so Luther
asserts, had been regarded as “a usage and practice rather than as a
thing ordained by God. In the same way the secular authorities did not
know that they were serving God, but were all tied up in ceremonies.
The preaching office, too, was nothing but a sham consisting of cowls,
tonsures, oilings,” etc.[405]
In short, by his teaching on marriage he had ennobled woman, whereas
the Catholics had represented matrimony as an “unchristian” state, only
permitted out of necessity, even though they called it a Sacrament.[406]
_Conspectus of Luther’s Distortion of the Catholic View of Marriage._
Luther based his charges chiefly on the canonical enforcement of
clerical celibacy and on the favour shown by the Church to the vow
of chastity and the monastic life. How this proved his contention it
is not easy to see. Further, he will have it, that the Church taught
that true service of God was to be found only in the monastic state,
and that vows were a sure warrant of salvation--though, as a matter
of fact, neither Church nor theologians had ever said anything of the
sort.[407]
In his remarks on this subject in 1527 he openly accused the Papists
of saying that “whoever is desirous of having to do with God and
spiritual matters must, whether man or woman, remain unmarried,” and
“thus,” so he says, “they have scared the young from matrimony, so
that now they are sunk in fornication.”[408]
At first Luther only ventured on the charge, that matrimony had been
“_de facto_” forbidden, though it had not actually been declared
sinful, by the Pope;[409] by forbidding the monks to marry he had
fulfilled the prophecy in 1 Timothy iv. 1 ff., concerning the
latter times, when many would fall away from the faith and forbid
people to marry. “The Pope forbids marriage under the semblance of
spirituality.”[410] “Squire Pope has forbidden marriage, because one
had to come who would prohibit marriage. The Pope has made man to be
no longer man, and woman to be no longer woman.”[411]
As years passed Luther went further; forgetful of his admission that
the Pope had not made matrimony sinful, he exclaimed: To him and to
his followers marriage is a sin. The Church had hitherto treated
marriage as something “non-Christian”;[412] the married state she had
“handed over to the devil”;[413] her theologians look down on it as a
“low, immoral sort of life,”[414] and her religious can only renounce
it on the ground that it is a kind of legalised “incontinence.”[415]
In reality, however, religious, when taking their vow, merely acted
on the Christian principle which St. Augustine expresses as follows:
Although “all chastity, conjugal as well as virginal, has its
merit in God’s sight,” yet, “the latter is higher, the former less
exalted.”[416] They merely renounced a less perfect state for one more
perfect; they could, moreover, appeal not only to 1 Cor. vii. 33,
where the Apostle speaks in praise of the greater freedom for serving
God which the celibate state affords, but even to Luther himself who,
in 1523, had interpreted this very passage in the same sense, and that
with no little warmth.[417]
His later and still more extravagant statements concerning the
Catholic view of marriage can hardly be taken seriously; his
perversion of the truth is altogether too great.
He says, that married people had not been aware that God “had
ordained” that state, until at last God, by His special Grace, and
before the Judgment Day, had restored the dignity of matrimony no less
than that of the secular authority and the preaching office, “through
His Word [i.e. through Luther’s preaching].” The blame for this state
of things went back very far, for the Fathers, like Jerome, “had seen
in matrimony mere sensuality,” and for this reason had disparaged
it.[418]
The Prophet Daniel had foreseen the degradation of marriage under the
Papacy: It is of the Papal Antichrist “that Daniel says [xi. 37], that
he will wallow in the unnatural vice which is the recompense due to
contemners of God (Rom. i. [27]), in what we call Italian weddings and
silent sin. For matrimony and a right love and use of women he shall
not know. Such are the horrible abominations prevailing under Pope
and Turk.”[419] “The same prophet,” he writes elsewhere, “says that
Antichrist shall stand on two pillars, viz.: idolatry and celibacy.
The idol he calls Mausim, thus using the very letters which form the
word Mass.” The Pope had deluded people, on the one hand by the Mass,
and, on the other, “by celibacy, or the unmarried state, fooling the
whole world with a semblance of sanctity. These are the two pillars on
which the Papacy rests, like the house of the Philistines in Samson’s
time. If God chose to make Luther play the part of Samson, lay hold
on the pillars and shake them, so that the house fall on the whole
multitude, who could take it ill? He is God and wonderful are His
ways.”[420]
Luther appeals expressly to the Pope’s “books” in which marriage is
spoken of as a “sinful state.”[421] The Papists, when they termed
marriage a sacrament, were only speaking “out of a false heart,”
and trying to conceal the fact that they really looked on it as
“fornication.”[422] “They have turned all the words and acts of
married people into mortal sins, and I myself, when I was a monk,
shared the same opinion, viz. that the married state was a damnable
state.”[423]
This alone was wanting to fill up the measure of his falsehoods. One
wonders whether Luther, when putting forward statements so incredible,
never foresaw that his own earlier writings might be examined and
his later statements challenged in their light? Certainly the
contradiction between the two is patent. We have only to glance at
his explanation of the fourth and sixth Commandments in his work on
the Ten Commandments, published in 1518, to learn from Luther himself
what Catholics really thought of marriage, and to be convinced that it
was anything but despised; there, as in other of his early writings,
Luther indeed esteems virginity above marriage, but to term the latter
sinful and damnable never occurred to him.
The olden Church had painted an ideal picture of the virgin. By this,
though not alone by this, she voiced her respect for woman, from that
Christian standpoint which differs so much from that of the world.
From the earliest times she, like the Gospel and the Apostle of the
Gentiles, set up voluntary virginity as a praiseworthy state of life.
Hereby she awakened in the female sex a noble emulation for virtue,
in particular for seclusion, purity and morality--woman’s finest
ornaments--and amongst men a high respect for woman, upon whom, even in
the wedded state, the ideal of chastity cast a radiance which subdued
the impulse of passion. Virgin and mother alike were recommended by
the Church to see their model and their guide in the Virgin Mother of
our Saviour. Where true devotion to Mary flourished the female sex
possessed a guarantee of its dignity, from both the religious and the
human point of view, a pledge of enduring respect and honour.
How the Church of olden days continued to prize matrimony and
to view it in the light of a true Sacrament is evident from the
whole literature of the Middle Ages. Such being its teaching it is
incomprehensible how a well-known Protestant encyclopædia, as late as
1898, could still venture to say: “As against the contempt for marriage
displayed in both religious and secular circles, and to counteract the
immorality to which this had given rise, Luther vindicated the honour
of matrimony and placed it in an entirely new light.”
In those days Postils enjoyed a wider circulation than any other
popular works. The Postils, however, do not teach “contempt of
marriage,” but quite the contrary. “The Mirror of Human Conduct,”
published at Augsburg in 1476, indeed gives the first place to
virginity, but declares: “Marriage is good and holy,” and must not be
either despised or rejected; those who “are mated in matrimony” must
not imagine that the maids (virgins) alone are God’s elect; “Christ
praises marriage, for it is a holy state of life in which many a man
becomes holy, for marriage was instituted by our Lord in Paradise”;
from Christ’s presence at the marriage at Cana we may infer that “the
married life is a holy life.”
Other works containing the same teaching are the “Evangelibuch,”
e.g. in the Augsburg edition of 1487, the “Postils on the Four
Gospels throughout the year,” by Geiler of Kaysersberg († 1510),
issued by Heinrich Wessmer at Strasburg in 1522, and the important
Basle “Plenarium” of 1514, in which the author, a monk, writes: “The
conjugal state is to be held in high respect on account of the honour
done to it by God”; he also appends some excellent instructions on the
duties of married people, concluding with a reference to the story
of Tobias “which you will find in the Bible” (which, accordingly, he
assumed was open to his readers).
The “Marriage-booklets” of the close of the Middle Ages form a
literary group apart. One of the best is “Ein nützlich Lehre und
Predigt, wie sich zwei Menschen in dem Sacrament der Ehe halten
sollen,” which was in existence in MS. as early as 1456. “God Himself
instituted marriage,” it tells us, “when He said, ‘Be fruitful and
multiply!’ The Orders, however, were founded by Bernard, Augustine,
Benedict and Dominic; thus the command of God is greater than that of
the teacher,” i.e. the Sacrament excels all Rules made by men, even by
Saints. It also gives a touching account of how marriage is founded on
love and sustained by it.[424]
Another matrimonial handbook, composed by Albert von Eyb, a Franconian
cleric, and printed at Augsburg in 1472, lavishes praise on “holy,
divine matrimony” without, however, neglecting to award still higher
encomium to the state of virginity. Erhard Gross, the Nuremberg
Carthusian, about the middle of the 15th century, wrote a “Novel”
containing good advice for married people.[425] The hero, who was
at first desirous of remaining unmarried, declares: “You must not
think that I condemn matrimony, for it is holy and was established by
God.”[426]
Among the unprinted matrimonial handbooks dating from the period
before Luther’s time, and containing a like favourable teaching on
marriage, are the “Booklet on the Rule of Holy Matrimony,”[427] “On
the Sacrament of Matrimony,”[428] and the excellent “Mirror of the
Matrimonial Order,” by the Dominican Marcus von Weida.[429] Fr. A.
Ebert, the Protestant bibliographer, remarks of the latter’s writings:
“They effectually traverse the charges with which self-complacent
ignorance loves to overwhelm the ages previous to the Saxon
Reformation,” and what he says applies particularly to the teaching on
marriage.[430]
To come now to the preachers. We must first mention Johann Herolt,
concerning whose influence a recent Protestant writer aptly remarks,
that his “wisdom had been listened to by thousands.”[431] The
passage already given, in which he describes marriage as an Order
instituted by Christ (p. 129 f.), is but one instance of his many
apt and beautiful sayings. In the very next sermon Herolt treats
of the preparation which so great a Sacrament demands. In the same
way that people prepare themselves for their Easter Communion, so
they, bride and bridegroom, must prepare themselves for matrimony by
contrition and confession; for “marriage is as much a Sacrament as the
Eucharist.”
A similar view prevailed throughout Christendom.
One of the most popular of Italian preachers was Gabriel Barletta,
who died shortly after 1480. Amongst his writings there is a Lenten
sermon entitled: “_De amore conjugali vel de laudibus mulierum_.” In
this he speaks of the “cordial love” which unites the married couple.
He points out that marriage was instituted in Paradise and confirmed
anew by Christ. Explaining the meaning of the ring, he finds that it
signifies four things, all of which tend to render Christian marriage
praiseworthy. He declares that a good wife may prove an inestimable
treasure. If he dwells rather too much on woman’s physical and mental
inferiority, this does not prevent him from extolling the strength of
the woman who is upheld by Christian virtue, and who often succeeds in
procuring the amendment of a godless husband.[432]
Barletta, in his sermons, frequently follows the example of his
brother friar, the English Dominican preacher, Robert Holkot († 1349),
whose works were much in request at the close of the Middle Ages.[433]
Holkot had such respect for Christian matrimony, that he applies to
it the words of the Bible: “O how beautiful is the chaste generation
with glory; for the memory thereof is immortal.” Since the “_actus
matrimonialis_” was willed by God, it must be assumed, he says,
that it can be accomplished virtuously and with merit.[434] If the
intention of the married couple is the begetting of children for the
glory of God, they perform an act of the virtue of religion; they also
exercise the virtue of justice if they have the intention of mutually
fulfilling the conjugal duties to which they have pledged themselves.
According to him, mutual love is the principal duty of the married
couple.[435] Franz Falk has dwelt in detail on the testimony borne by
the Late Middle Ages to the dignity of marriage.[436]
Commencing with the prayers of the marriage-service and the blessing
of the ring, the prayers for those with child and in child-bed, and
for the churching of women, he goes on to deal with the civil rights
pertaining to the married state and with the Church’s opinion as
witnessed to in the matrimonial handbooks and books of instruction and
edification. With the respect for the Sacrament and the dignity of
the married woman there found expressed, Falk compares the sentiments
likewise found in the prose “novels” and so-called “Volksbücher,”
and, still more practically expressed, in the numerous endowments
and donations for the provision of bridal outfits. “It is quite
incomprehensible,” such is the author’s conclusion, “how non-Catholic
writers even to the present time can have ventured to reproach the
Church with want of regard for the married state.”[437] Of the
information concerning bridal outfits, he says, for instance: “The
above collection of facts, a real ‘_nubes testium_,’ will sufficiently
demonstrate what a task the Church of the Middle Ages here fulfilled
towards her servants and children.... Many other such foundations may,
moreover, have escaped our notice owing to absence of the deeds which
have either not been printed or have perished. From the 16th century
onwards records of such foundations become scarce.”[438]
In the “Internationale Wochenschrift” Heinrich Finke pointed out that
he had examined hundreds of Late-mediæval sermons on the position of
women, with the result, that “it is impossible to discover in them any
contempt for woman.”[439] The fact is, that “there exist countless
statements of the sanctity of marriage and its sacramental character
... statements drawn from theologians of the highest standing,
Fathers, Saints and Doctors of the Church. Indeed, towards the close
of the Middle Ages, they grow still more numerous. The most popular of
the monks, whether Franciscans or Dominicans, have left us matrimonial
handbooks which imply the existence of that simple, happy family
life they depict and encourage.”[440] Finke recalls the 15th-century
theologian, Raymond of Sabunde, who points out how union with God
in love may be reproduced in marriage. Countless theologians are at
one with him here, and follow Scripture in representing the union
of Christ with the Church as an exalted figure of the marriage-bond
between man and wife (Eph. v. 25, 32). Of the respect which the
ancient Church exhibited towards women Finke declares: “Never has
the praise of women been sung more loudly than in the sermons of the
Fathers and in the theological tractates of the Schoolmen.” Here “one
picture follows another, each more dazzling than the last.”[441]
Certainly we must admit, as he does, that it is for the most part the
ideal of virginity which inspires them, and that it is the good,
chaste, virtuous wife and widow whom they extol, rather than woman
_qua_ woman, as a noble part of God’s creation. Their vocation as
spiritual teachers naturally explains this; and if, for the same
cause, they seem to be very severe in their strictures on feminine
faults, or to strike harsh notes in their warnings on the spiritual
dangers of too free intercourse with the female sex, this must not
be looked upon as “hatred of women,” as has been done erroneously on
the strength of some such passages in the case of St. Antoninus of
Florence and Cardinal Dominici.[442]
“Just as Church and Councils energetically took the side of marriage”
when it was decried in certain circles,[443] so the accusation of
recent times that, in the Middle Ages, woman was universally looked
upon with contempt, cannot stand; according to Finke this was not the
case, even in “ascetical circles,” and “still less elsewhere.”[444]
The author adduces facts which “utterly disprove any such general
disdain for woman.”[445]
The splendid Scriptural eulogy with which the Church so frequently
honours women in her liturgy, might, one would think, be in itself
sufficient. To the married woman who fulfils her duties in the home
out of true love for God, and with zeal and assiduity, the Church, in
the Mass appointed for the Feasts of Holy Women, applies the words
of Proverbs:[446] “The price of the valiant woman is as of things
brought from afar and from the uttermost coasts. The heart of her
husband trusteth in her ... she will render him good and not evil all
the days of her life. She hath sought wool and flax and hath wrought
by the counsel of her hands.... Her husband is honourable in the gates
when he sitteth among the senators of the land.... Strength and beauty
are her clothing, and she shall laugh in the latter day. She hath
opened her mouth to wisdom.... Her children rose up and called her
blessed, her husband, and he praised her.... The woman that feareth
the Lord, she shall be praised.”--Elsewhere the liturgy quotes the
Psalmist:[447] “Grace is poured abroad from thy lips,” “With thy
comeliness and thy beauty set out, proceed prosperously and reign....
Therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness
above thy fellows.”
It cannot be objected that the ordinary woman, in the exercise of her
household duties and of a humbler type of virtue, had no part in this
praise. On the contrary, in honouring these Saints the Church was at
the same time honouring all women who had not, by their misconduct,
rendered themselves unworthy of the name. To all, whatever their rank
or station, the high standard of the Saints was displayed, and all
were invited to follow their example and promised their intercession.
At the foot of the altar all were united, for their mother, the
Church, showed to all the same consideration and helpful love. The
honours bestowed upon the heroines of the married state had its
influence on their living sisters, just as the Church’s “undying
respect for virginity was calculated to exercise a wholesome effect on
those bound by the marriage tie, or about to be so bound.”[448]
In Luther’s own case we have an instance in the devotion he showed in
his youth to St. Anne, who was greatly venerated by both men and women
in late mediæval times. The vow he had made to enter the cloister he
placed in the hands of this Saint. The liturgical praise to which we
have just listened, and which is bestowed on her in common with other
holy spouses, he repeated frequently enough as a monk, when saying
Mass, and the words of the Holy Ghost in praise of the true love of
the faithful helpmate he ever treasured in his memory.[449]
How well Luther succeeded in establishing the fable of the scorn in
which the married state was held in the Middle Ages is evident from
several recent utterances of learned Protestants.
One Church historian goes so far, in his vindication of the Reformer’s
statements concerning the mediæval “contempt felt for womankind,”
as actually to lay the blame for Luther’s sanction of polygamy
on the low, “mediæval view of the nature of matrimony.” Another
theologian, a conservative, fancies that he can, even to-day, detect
among “Romanists” the results of the mediæval undervaluing of
marriage. According to Catholics “marriage is not indeed forbidden to
everyone--for otherwise where would the Church find new children?--but
nevertheless is looked at askance as a necessary evil.” Perfection in
Catholic theory consists in absolute ignorance of all that concerns
marriage. One scholar declares the Church before Luther’s day had
taught, that “marriage had nothing to do with love”; “of the ethical
task [of marriage] and of love not a trace is to be found” in the
teaching of the Middle Ages. An eminent worker in the field of the
history of dogma also declares, in a recent edition of his work, that,
before Luther’s day, marriage had been “a sort of concession to the
weak”; thanks only to Luther, was it “freed from all ecclesiastical
tutelage to become the union of the sexes, as instituted _by God_
[his italics], and the school of highest morality.” Such assertions,
only too commonly met with, are merely the outcome of the false ideas
disseminated by Luther himself concerning the Church of olden days.
The author of the fable that woman and marriage were disdained in the
Middle Ages scored a success, of which, could he have foreseen it, he
would doubtless have been proud.
Two publications by Professors of the University of Wittenberg have
been taken as clear proof of how low an opinion the Catholic Middle
Ages had of woman and marriage. Of these publications one, however, a
skit on the devil in Andr. Meinhardi’s Latin Dialogues of 1508--which,
of the two, would, in this respect, be the most incriminating--has
absolutely nothing to do with the mediæval Church’s views on marriage,
but simply reproduces those of the Italian Humanists, though revealing
that their influence extended even as far as Germany. It tells how
even the devil himself was unable to put up with matrimony; since the
difficulties of this state are so great, one of the speakers makes
up his mind “never to marry, so as to be the better able to devote
himself to study.” Despite this the author of the Dialogue entered
the married state. The other publication is a discourse, in 1508, by
Christopher Scheurl, containing a frivolous witticism at the expense
of women, likewise due to Italian influence. This, however, did not
prevent Scheurl, too, from marrying.[450] The truth is that the
Italian Humanists’ “favourite subjects are the relations between the
sexes, treated with the crudest realism, and, in connection with this,
attacks on marriage and the family.”[451] At the same time it cannot
be denied that individual writers, men influenced by anti-clerical
Humanism, or ascetical theologians knowing nothing of the world, did
sometimes speak of marriage in a manner scarcely fair to woman and did
occasionally unduly exalt the state of celibacy.
Against such assertions some of Luther’s finest sayings on woman’s
dignity deserve to be pitted.
_Luther’s Discordant Utterances on the Value of Marriage in his Sermons
and Writings._
Any objective examination of Luther’s attitude towards woman and
marriage must reveal the fact, that he frequently seeks to invest
Christian marriage, as he conceived it, with a religious character and
a spiritual dignity. This he does in language witty and sympathetic,
representing it as a close bond of love, though devoid of any
sacramental character. Nor does he hesitate to use the noble imagery of
the Church when describing his substitute for the Christian marriage of
the past.
“It is no small honour for the married state,” he says in a sermon of
1536, “that God should represent it under the type and figure of the
unspeakable grace and love which He manifests and bestows on us in
Christ, and as the surest and most gracious sign of the intimate union
between Himself and Christendom and all its members, a union than which
nothing more intimate can be imagined.”[452]
In another sermon he praises the edification provided in the married
state, when “man and wife are united in love and serve each other
faithfully”; Luther invites them to thank God “that the married state
is profitable alike to body, property, honour and salvation.” “What,
however, is best of all in married life,” so he insists, “for the sake
of which everything must be suffered and endured, is that God may give
offspring and command us to train it in His service. This is earth’s
noblest and most priceless work, because God loves nothing so well as
to save souls.”[453]
Such exhortations of Luther’s, apart from peculiarities of expression,
differ from those of earlier writers only in that those authors,
relying on the traditional, sacramental conception of the matrimonial
union, had an even greater right to eulogise marriage and the blessing
of children.
Catholic preachers might quite profitably have made use of the greater
part of a wedding discourse delivered by Luther in 1531,[454] though
they might have failed to emulate the force and emphasis with which
it was uttered. His theme there is “that marriage is to be held in
honour”; he quotes Hebr. xiii. 4, “Marriage is honourable in all,
and the bed undefiled”; he continues: “It is true that our flesh is
full of evil lusts which entice us to sin, but to these we must not
consent; if, however, you hold fast to the Word of God and see to it,
that this state is blessed and adorned, this will preserve and comfort
you, and make of it a holy state for you.”[455] It was necessary, he
continues, not merely to fight against any sensual lusts outside of
the marriage bond, but also to cultivate virtue. Conjugal fidelity
must be preserved all the more carefully since “Satan is your enemy
and your flesh wanton.” “Fornication and adultery are the real stains
which defile the marriage bed.” “Married persons are embraced in the
Word of God.” This they must take as their guide, otherwise (here
Luther’s language ceases to be a pattern) “the bed is soiled, and,
practically, they might as well have passed their motions in it.”[456]
Such an emphasising of the religious side of matrimony almost gives
the impression, that Luther was following an interior impulse which
urged him to counteract the effects of certain other statements of his
on marriage. Doubtless he felt the contrast between his worldly view
of matrimony and the higher standard of antiquity, though he would
certainly have refused to admit that he was behindhand in the struggle
against sensuality. In view of the sad moral consequences which were
bearing witness against him, he was disposed to welcome an opportunity
to give expression to such sentiments as those just described, which
tended to justify him both to his listeners and to himself. Nor were
such sentiments mere hypocrisy; on the contrary, they have their
psychological place as a true component part of his picture. On one
occasion Luther bewails the want of attention paid to his excellent
doctrines: “The teachers are there, but the doers are nowhere to be
found; as with the other points of our doctrine, there are but few who
obey or heed us.”[457]
Not infrequently, however, instead of praising the dignity of woman and
the purity of married life, Luther speaks in a far from respectful,
nay, offensive manner of woman, though without perhaps meaning all
that his words would seem to convey. He thereby exposes woman, in
her relations with man, to the danger of contempt, and thus forfeits
the right of posing as the defender of feminine dignity and of the
married state against alleged detractors among the Catholics. His false
aspersions on former days thus stand out in a still more unpleasant
light.
In a sermon of 1524, where it is true he has some fine words on the
indulgent treatment to be meted out to the wife, he says: St. Peter
calls woman the “weaker vessel” (1 Peter iii. 7); he “had given faint
praise to woman,” for “woman’s body is not strong and her spirit, as a
general rule, is even weaker; whether she is wild or mild depends on
God’s choice of man’s helpmate. Woman is half a child; whoever takes a
wife must look upon himself as the guardian of a child.... She is also
a crazy beast. Recognise her weakness. If she does not always follow
the straight path, bear with her frailty. A woman will ever remain a
woman.... But the married state is nevertheless the best, because God
is there with His Word and Work and Cross.”[458]
With those who complain of the sufferings of the mother in pregnancy
and childbirth he is very angry, and, in one sermon, goes so far as
to say: “Even though they grow weary and wear themselves out with
child-bearing, that is of no consequence; let them go on bearing
children till they die, that is what they are there for.”[459]
His description of marriage “as an outward, material thing, like any
other worldly business,[460] was certainly not calculated to raise
its repute;” and in the same passage he proceeds: “Just as I may eat
and drink, sleep and walk, ride, talk and do business with a heathen
or a Jew, a Turk or a heretic, so also I may contract marriage with
him.”[461]
Matrimonial cases had formerly belonged to the ecclesiastical courts,
but Luther now drives the parties concerned to the secular judge,
telling them that he will give them “a good hog,” i.e. a sound
trouncing, for having sought to “involve and entangle him in such
matters” which “really concerned the secular authority.”[462] “Marriage
questions,” he says, “do not touch the conscience, but come within the
province of the secular judge.”[463] Previously, parties whose rights
had been infringed were able to seek redress from the ecclesiastical
tribunals, the sentences of which were enforced by Canon Law under
spiritual penalties, to the advantage of the injured party. Luther, on
the other hand, after having secularised marriage, finds himself unable
to cope with the flood of people clamouring for justice: “I am tired of
them [the matrimonial squabbles] and I have thrown them overboard; let
them do as they like in the name of all the devils.”[464] He is also
determined to rid the preachers of this business; the injured parties
are, he says, to seek for justice and protection “in the latrines of
the lawyers”; his own conduct, he hopes, will serve as a model to the
preachers, who will now repel all who solicit their help.[465]
The increase in the number of matrimonial misunderstandings and
quarrels, the haste with which marriage was entered upon and then
dissolved, particularly in the Saxon Electorate and at Wittenberg, was
not merely the result of the new Evangelical freedom, as Luther and
his friends sadly admitted, but was due above all to the altered views
on marriage. In the new preaching on marriage the gratification of the
sensual impulse was, as will be shown below, placed too much in the
foreground, owing partly to the fanatical reaction against clerical
celibacy and religious vows. “To marry is a remedy for fornication”;
these words of Luther’s were again and again repeated by himself and
others in one form or another, as though they characterised the main
object of marriage. Nature was persistently painted as excessively
weak in the matter of chastity, and as quite captive under the yoke of
passion. People were indeed admonished to curb their passions with the
help of Grace, but such means of acquiring God’s Grace as mortification
and self-conquest were only too frequently scoffed at as mere
holiness-by-works, while as for the means of grace sought by Catholics
in the Sacraments, they had simply been “abolished.”
By his patronage of polygamy, forced on him by his wrong interpretation
of the Bible, Luther put the crowning touch on his contempt for
Christian marriage.[466] This was to relinquish the position of
privilege in which Christianity had established marriage, when,
following the Creator’s intention, it insisted on monogamy.
_Birth of the New Views on Marriage during the Controversy on the Vow
of Chastity._
How did Luther reach his opinion and succeed in endowing it with
credibility and life? A glance at its birth and growth will give us an
instructive insight into Luther’s manner of proceeding.
He had already long been engaged in his struggle with “Popish abuses”
and had already set up all the essential points of his new theology,
before becoming in the least conscious of the supposed contempt in
which marriage was held by the Roman Church. In his exposition of the
Ten Commandments, in 1518, he still speaks of it in the respectful
language of his earlier years; in his sermon on the Married State, in
1519, he still terms it a Sacrament, without hinting in any way that
it had hitherto been considered disreputable. Whether he uses the term
Sacrament in its traditional meaning we do not, of course, know. At any
rate, he says: “Matrimony is a Sacrament, an outward, holy sign of the
greatest, most sacred, worthy and exalted thing that ever has been,
or ever will be, viz. of the union of the Divine and human nature in
Christ.”[467] Enumerating the spiritual advantages of marriage, which
counteract the “sinful lusts therewith intermingled,” he expressly
appeals to the “Doctors” of the Church, and the three benefits they
perceived in matrimony; “first, marriage is a Sacrament,” “secondly,
it is a bond of fidelity,” “thirdly, it brings offspring, which is the
end and principal office of marriage”; a further benefit must be added,
viz. the “training of the offspring in the service of God.”[468]
In his book “On the Babylonish Captivity” (1520) he has already arrived
at the explicit denial to marriage of the name and character of a
sacrament.
But it was only in the war he waged against his own vow of chastity
that the idea arose in his mind, and even then only gradually, that
the true value and excellence of marriage had never hitherto been
recognised. The more he sought for theological grounds on which to
prove the worthlessness of religious celibacy and the nullity of the
vow of chastity, the more deeply he persuaded himself that proofs
existed in abundance of the utter perversity of the prevailing opinions
on matrimony. He began to impute to the Church extravagant views on
virginity, of which neither he nor anyone else had ever thought. He
now accused her of teaching the following: That virginity was the
only state in which God could be served perfectly; that marriage was
forbidden to the clergy because it was disreputable and a thing soiled
with sin; finally, that family life with its petty tasks must be
regarded as something degrading, while woman herself, to whom the chief
share in these tasks belongs and who, moreover, so often tempts man to
sins of incontinence, is a contemptible creature.
All these untruths concerning the ancient Church were purely the
outcome of Luther’s personal polemics.
His system of attack exhibits no trace of any dispassionate examination
of the testimonies of antiquity. But his false and revolting charges
seemed some sort of justification for his attack on religious vows
and clerical celibacy. From such theoretical charges there was but a
step to charges of a more practical character and to his boundless
exaggerations concerning the hideous vices supposed to have been
engendered by the perversion of the divinely appointed order, and to
have devastated the Church as a chastisement for her contempt for
marriage.
In the second edition of the sermon of 1519 on the Married State he
places virginity on at least an equal footing with matrimony. Towards
the end of the sermon he (like the earlier writers) calls matrimony “a
noble, exalted and blessed state” if rightly observed, but otherwise
“a wretched, fearful and dangerous” one; he proceeds: Whoever bears
this in mind “will know what to think of the sting of the flesh,
and, possibly, will be as ready to accept the virginal state as
the conjugal.”[469] Even during his Wartburg days, when under the
influence of the burning spirit of revolt, and already straining at
the vows which bound him, he still declared in the theses he sent
Melanchthon, that “Marriage is good, but virginity better” (“_Bonum
coniugium, melior virginitas_”),[470] a thesis, which, like St. Paul,
he bases mainly on the immunity from worldly cares. This idea impressed
Melanchthon so deeply, that he re-echoes it in his praise of virginity
in the “Apology for the Confession of Augsburg”: “We do not make
virginity and marriage equal. For, as one gift is better than another,
prophecy better than eloquence, strategy better than agriculture,
eloquence better than architecture, so virginity is a gift excelling
marriage.”[471]
But this great gift, to Luther’s mind, was a moral impossibility,
the rarest of God’s Graces, nay, a “miracle” of the Almighty. Hence
he teaches that such a privilege must not be laid claim to, that the
monastic vow of chastity was therefore utterly immoral, and clerical
celibacy too, to say nothing of private vows of virginity; in all such
there lurked a presumptuous demand for the rarest and most marvellous
of Divine Graces; even to pray for this was not allowed.
At the conclusion of his theses for Melanchthon, Luther enforces what
he had said by the vilest calumnies against all who, in the name of the
Church, had pledged themselves to remain unmarried. Were it known what
manner of persons those who profess such great chastity really are,
their “greatly extolled chastity” would not be considered fit “for a
prostitute to wipe her boots on.”
Then follow his further unhappy outbursts at the Wartburg on religious
vows (vol. ii., p. 83 ff.) consummating his perversion of the Church’s
teaching and practice regarding celibacy and marriage. In marriage
he sees from that time forward nothing by the gratification of the
natural impulse; to it every man must have recourse unless he enjoys
the extraordinary grace of God; the ancient Church, with her hatred
of marriage, her professed religious and celibate clergy, assumes in
his imagination the most execrable shape. He fancies that, thanks to
his new notions, he has risen far above the Christianity of the past,
albeit the Church had ever striven to guard the sanctity of marriage
as the very apple of her eye, by enacting many laws and establishing
marriage-courts of her own under special judges. He becomes ever more
reckless in casting marriage matters on the shoulders of the State.
In the Preface to his “Trawbüchlin,” in 1529, he says, for instance,
“Since wedlock and marriage are a worldly business, we clergy and
ministers of the Church have nothing to order or decree about it,
but must leave each town and country to follow its own usage and
custom.”[472]
From that time forward, particularly when the Diet of Augsburg had
embittered the controversy, Luther pours out all the vials of his
terrible eloquence on the bondage in which marriage had been held
formerly, and on the contempt displayed by Rome for it. He peremptorily
demands its complete secularisation.
And yet he ostentatiously extols marriage as “holy and Divine,”
and even says that wedlock is most pleasing to God, a mystery and
Sacrament in the highest sense of the word. Of one of these passages
Emil Friedberg, the Protestant canonist, remarks in his “Recht
der Eheschliessung”: “Luther’s views as here expressed completely
contradict other passages, and this same discrepancy is apparent
throughout the later literature, and, even now, prevents [Protestants]
from appreciating truly the nature of marriage.”[473]
Every impartial observer could have seen that the preference given to
virginity by the Catholic Church, her defence of the manner of life of
those whom God had called to the cloister, and her guardianship of the
celibacy of the priesthood, handed down from the earliest ages, did not
in the least imply any undervaluing of marriage on her part--unless
indeed, as Joseph Mausbach remarks, he was prepared to admit that,
“because one thing is better, its opposite must needs be bad.”
“Who thinks,” continues the same writer, that “preference for gold
involves contempt for silver, or preference for the rose a depreciation
of all other flowers? But these very comparisons are to be met with
even amongst the ancient Fathers.... Why should the Church’s praise of
virginity be always misconstrued as a reproach against matrimony? All
this is mere thoughtlessness, when it is not blind prejudice, for the
Church did everything to prevent any misunderstanding of her praise of
virginity, and certainly taught and defended the sanctity of marriage
with all her power.”[474]
Luther’s judgment was not due so much to mere thoughtlessness as to
his burning hatred of the Papacy; this we see from the vulgar abuse
which, whenever he comes to speak of marriage and celibacy, he showers
on the Pope, the supreme champion of the Evangelical Counsels and of
the priestly ideal of life; on the other hand, it was also to some
extent due to his deeply rooted and instinctive aversion for everything
whereby zealous Christians do violence to nature out of love for God,
from the motive of penance and from a desire to obtain merit.
_The Natural Impulse and the Honour of Marriage._
Ecclesiastical writers before Luther’s day speak frequently and plainly
enough of the impulse of nature, but, as a rule, only in order to
recommend its control, to point out the means of combating excesses,
and to insist on the Sacrament which sanctifies conjugal intercourse
and brings down the blessings we require if the earthly and eternal
purpose of marriage is to be fulfilled.
Luther, however, if we may trust one of his most zealous defenders,
rendered a great service with regard to sexual intercourse in that “he
shook off the pseudo-ascetic spirit of the past.” He demonstrated,
so we are told, particularly in what he wrote to Spalatin about
the “_actus matrimonialis_”[475]--words which some have regarded as
offensive--“that even that act, though represented by his opponents as
obscene, to the faithful Christian who ‘receives it with thanksgiving’
(1 Tim. iv. 4), contained nothing to raise a blush or to forbid its
mention.” According to the “Roman view” it is perfectly true that
“the ‘_actus matrimonialis_’ is sinless only when performed with the
object of begetting children, or in order to fulfil the conjugal
due.”[476] This, he exclaims, “was forsooth to be the sole motive of
conjugal intercourse! And, coupled with this motive, the act even
becomes meritorious! Is there any need of confuting so repulsive a
notion?... Luther’s view is very different. The natural sexual passion
was, according to him, the will and the work of God.” “The effect of
the Roman exaltation of celibacy was to make people believe, that
the motive [of conjugal intercourse] implanted by God, viz. sexual
attraction, must not be yielded to.” This attraction Luther declared
to be the one motive on account of which we should “thankfully avail
ourselves” of matrimony. “This Luther conveys most clearly in his
letter to Spalatin, his intimate friend, shortly after both had
wedded.... We know no higher conception of conjugal intercourse.”
This description does not do justice to the mediæval Catholic teaching
on matrimony, its duties and privileges. This teaching never demanded
the suppression of sensual attraction or love. It fully recognised
that this had been implanted in human nature by God’s wise and
beneficent hand as a stimulus to preserve and multiply the human
race, according to His command: “Be fruitful and multiply.” But the
Church urged all to see that this impulse was kept pure and worthy by
attention to its higher purpose, viz. to the object appointed from
above. Instead of becoming its slave the Christian was to ennoble
it by allowing the motives of faith to play their part in conjugal
intercourse. The Church’s teaching would indeed have been “repulsive”
had it demanded the general repression of the sexual instinct and not
merely the taming of that unruliness which is the result of original
sin, and is really unworthy of man. Had she imposed the obligation to
wage an impossible struggle against it as a thing essentially sinful,
then her teaching might indeed have been described as “repulsive.”
Still it is sufficiently tragic, that, in spite of the gratification
of the sensual impulse of nature playing the principal part in his
new and supposedly more exalted view of conjugal intercourse, Luther
should, on account of the concupiscence involved, characterise the
“_actus matrimonialis_” as a mortal sin. In “_De votis monasticis_,”
his work written at the Wartburg, he says: “According to Ps. 1. 7, it
is a sin differing in nothing from adultery and fornication so far as
the sensual passion and hateful lust are concerned; God, however, does
not impute it to the married, though simply because of His compassion,
since it is impossible for us to avoid it, although our duty would
really be to do without it.”[477] We are already familiar with his
curious and impossible theory of imputation, according to which God is
able to close His eyes to a sin, which nevertheless is really there.
That there is actual sin in the act Luther also insists elsewhere, at
the same time pleading, however, that the sin is not imputed by God,
who, as it were, deliberately winks at it: “In spite of all the good
I say of married life, I will not grant so much to nature as to admit
that there is no sin in it; what I say is that we have here flesh and
blood, depraved in Adam, conceived and born in sin (Ps. 1. 7), and
that no conjugal due is ever rendered without sin.”[478]--The blessing
which God bestowed on marriage, he says elsewhere, fallen human nature
was “not able to accomplish without sin”; “without sin no married
persons could do their duty.”[479]
Hence the following inference would seem justified: Matrimony is
really a state of sin. Such was the opinion, not of the Church before
Luther’s day, but of her assailant, whose opponents soon pointed out
to him how unfounded was his supposition.[480] The ancient Church, by
the voice of her theologians, declared the “_actus matrimonialis_,”
when performed in the right way and to a right end, to be no sin; they
admitted the inevitable satisfaction of concupiscence, but allowed it
so long as its gratification was not all that was sought. According
to Luther--whom the author above referred to has quite rightly
understood--it is different: Sin is undoubtedly committed, but we may,
nay, are bound, to commit it.
With the above, all Luther’s statements on the inevitable strength
of the impulse of nature agree. Though the union of husband and wife
is a rule of the natural law applying to the majority rather than
to the individual, Luther practically makes it binding upon all. In
this connection he seems to be unable to view the moral relation of
the sexes in any other light than as existing for the gratification
of mutual lust, since without marriage they must inevitably fall
into every sort of carnal sin. “It is a necessary and natural thing,
that every man should have a wife,” he says in the lengthy passage
already quoted, where he concludes, “it is more necessary than eating
and drinking, sleeping and waking, or passing the natural motions of
the body.”[481] Elsewhere, in a characteristic comparison, he says:
“Were a man compelled to close his bowels and bladder--surely an utter
impossibility--what would become of him?”[482] According to him, “man
must be fruitful, and multiply, and breed,” “like all other animals,
since God has created him thereto, so that, of necessity, a man must
seek a wife, and a woman a husband, unless God works a miracle.”[483]
Many were they who, during the controversies which accompanied the
schism, listened to such teaching and believed it and were ready to
forgo the miracle in order to follow the impulse of nature; were ready
to indulge their weakness did their state of life prohibit marriage,
or to dissolve the marriage already contracted when it did not turn
out to their taste, or when they fancied they could advance one of
the numerous reasons proclaimed by Luther for its annulment. The
evil effects of such morality in the 16th century (see below, p. 164
ff. and xxiv. 1 and 2), witnessed to on all sides by Lutherans as
well as Catholics, prove conclusively that the originator of the new
matrimonial theories was the last man qualified to reproach the ancient
Church with a want of appreciation for marriage or for woman.
* * * * *
Nor must we look merely at the results. The man’s very character, his
mode of thought and his speech, suffice to banish him from the society
of the olden, earnest moralists. Albeit unwillingly, we must add here
some further statements to those already adduced.[484]
“If a man feels his manhood,” Luther says, “let him take a wife and
not tempt God. ‘_Puella propterea habet pudenda_,’ to provide him a
remedy that he may escape pollution and adultery.”[485]
“The sting of the flesh may easily be helped, so long as girls and
women are to be found.”[486]
Our readers will not have forgotten the reason he gives why women
have so little intellect;[487] or the reproof addressed to him by
Staupitz.[488]
Luther urges early marriage in the words of an old proverb: “To rise
early and to marry young will cause regret to no one.” “It will fare
with you,” he says to the same addressee, “as with the nuns to whom
they gave carved Jesuses. They cast about for others, who at least
were living and pleased them better, and sought how best to escape
from their convent.”[489]--“What greater service can one do a girl
than to get her a baby? This rids her of many fancies.”[490] Here, and
elsewhere too, he is anxious that people should marry, even though
there should not be enough to live upon; God would not allow the
couple to starve if they did their duty.[491]--“A young fellow should
be simply given a wife, otherwise he has no peace. Then the troubles
of matrimony will soon tame him.”[492]
On another occasion (1540) Luther expresses himself with greater
caution about too early matches: “It is not good for young people to
marry too soon. They are ruined in their prime, exhaust their strength
and neglect their studies.” “But the young men are consumed with
passion,” one of those present objected, “and the theologians work
upon their conscience and tell them that ‘To marry young will cause
regret to no one.’” Luther’s reply was: “The young men are unwilling
to resist any temptations.... They should console themselves with the
hope of future marriage. We used to be forbidden to marry in almost
all the Faculties, hence the youths indulged in all kinds of excesses,
knowing that, later on, they would no longer be able to do so. Thus
they sunk into every kind of disorder. But now everybody is allowed
to marry, even the theologian and the bishop. Hence, in their own
interests, they ought to learn to wait.”[493]
At other times he was inclined to promote hasty marriages from motives
of policy, and, without a thought of the dignity of the conjugal union
and the respect due to woman, to use it as a means to increase the
number of his followers.
This happened in the case of many of his converts from the ranks of
the clergy and religious.[494]
In the case of the Bishop of Samland, George von Polenz, and his
adviser, Johann Briesmann, the ex-Franciscan, who both were desirous
of marrying, Luther judged that delay would be disastrous. He urged
them to make haste and be publicly wedded, both having already
contracted a so-called marriage in conscience; in their case there
was “danger in delay,” and, as the saying goes, “If you wait a night,
you wait a year”; even Paul had said we must not receive the grace of
God in vain (2 Cor. vi. 1), and the bride in the Canticle complained
that the bridegroom “was gone,” because she had been tardy in opening
the door (v. 6). A German proverb said, “Wenn das Ferkel beut soll
man den Sack herhalten.” Esau’s lost birthright, and the solemn words
of Christ concerning separation from Him (John xii. 35 f.) were also
made to serve his purpose. “Take it when, where and how you can, or
you won’t get another chance.” A man could not be sure of his own mind
on account of the snares of the devil; a marriage not yet publicly
ratified remained somewhat uncertain.[495]
Before these exhortations reached them both the parties in question
had, however, already taken the public step.
It was in those very days that Luther celebrated his own wedding and
sent his pressing invitation to marry to the Cardinal and Elector
of Mayence, telling him that, short of a miracle, or without some
peculiar grace, it was a “terrible thing” for a man “to be found
without a wife at the hour of death.”[496] It was then, too, that he
sent to Albert of Prussia, the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, who
was contemplating marriage, his congratulations on the secularisation
of the lands of the Order and the founding of the Duchy, which he had
even previously strongly urged him to do. In this letter he tells
the Grand Master that it was “God Almighty,” “Who had graciously
and mercifully helped him to such a position [that of a secular
Prince].”[497] The Grand Master’s marriage and consequent breach of
his vow of chastity followed in 1526. He invited Luther to the wedding
and wrote to him, that God had given him “the grace to enter the Order
[of marriage] instituted by Himself” after he had “laid aside the
cross [the sign of the Order] and entered the secular estate.”
It cannot be denied, that in all these marriages which Luther
promoted, or at least favoured, what he had his eye on was the
advantage of the new Church system. Of any raising of the moral
position of women, of any deepening of the significance of marriage,
there is here no trace; these marriages served quite another purpose.
The circumstances attending them were, moreover, frequently far from
dignified. “The Bishop of Samland,” so Philip von Creutz, a Knight
of the Teutonic Order, relates, “gave up his bishopric to the Duke
[Albert] in the presence of the whole assembly.... He caused his mitre
to be broken up and, out of its precious stones and jewels, he had
ornaments made for his wife.”[498]
_Practical Consequences of the New View of Woman: Matrimonial
Impediments, Divorce._
The readiness shown by Luther to annul valid marriages, and the wayward
manner in which he disposed of the impediments fixed by the Church,
were not calculated to enhance respect either for marriage or for woman.
As regards the impediments to marriage we shall here merely refer to
the practical and not uncommon case where a person wished to marry
a niece. Whereas Canon Law, at one with Roman Law, regarded this
relationship as constituting an impediment, which might, however, be
dispensed from by the Pope, Luther at first saw fit to declare it no
impediment at all; he even issued memoranda to this effect, one of
which was printed in 1526 and circulated widely.[499] “If the Pope
was able to dispense,” he said later on concerning this, “why can’t I
too?”[500] In favour of the lawfulness of such marriages he appealed to
the example of Abraham, and in reply to objections declared: “If they
blame the work and example of the holy Patriarch Abraham, then let them
be scandalised.”[501] At a later date, nevertheless, he changed his
mind and held such marriages to be unlawful. His previous statements he
explained by saying that once he had indeed given a different decision,
not in order to lead others into excesses but in order “to assist
consciences at the hour of death against the Pope”; he had merely
given advice in Confession to troubled consciences, and had not laid
down any law; to make laws was not within his province, either in the
State or in the Church. His former memoranda were not to be alleged
now; a certain man of the name of Borner, who, on the strength of them,
had married his niece, had acted very ill and done injustice to his
(Luther’s) decision. The Pope alone, so Luther says, was to blame for
his previous advice--because many, owing to his laws, were reduced to
despair and had come to Luther for help. “It is true that in Confession
and in order to pacify consciences I have advised differently, but
I made a mistake in allowing such counsels to be made public. Now,
however, it is done. This is a matter for Confession only.”[502]
When speaking in this way, in 1544, he probably had in mind his
so-called advice in Confession to Philip of Hesse. He was still acting
on the principle, that advice given in Confession might afterwards be
publicly repudiated as quite wrong; he failed somehow to see that the
case of marriage of uncle and niece was of its very nature something
public.
The multitude of divorces caused him great anxiety. Even the preachers
of the new faith were setting a bad example by putting away their
spouses and contracting fresh marriages. Melander, for instance,
who blessed Philip’s second marriage, after deserting “two wives in
succession without even seeking legal aid, married a third.”[503] At
Gotha, as Luther himself relates, a woman deserted her husband and
her three children, and sent him a message to tell him he might take
another wife. When, however, he had done so the woman again asserted
her claims. “Our lawyers,” Luther complains, “at once took her part,
but the Elector decided she should quit the country. My own decision
would have been to have her done to death by drowning.”[504]
In a still existing letter of 1525, Luther permitted Michael Kramer,
preacher at Domitsch, near Torgau, to contract a third marriage, two
previous ones having turned out unfortunate. Kramer, as a Catholic
priest, had first married a servant maid and, for this, had been sent
to jail by Duke George his sovereign. When the maid proved unfaithful
and married another, Luther, to whom Kramer had attached himself,
declared her to be really “deceased” and told the preacher he might
use his “Christian freedom.” Kramer thereupon married a girl from
Domitsch, where he had been in the meantime appointed Lutheran pastor.
This new wife likewise ran away from him three weeks later. He now
addressed himself to the local board of magistrates, who, conjointly
with him, wrote to Luther, pointing out how the poor man “could not
do without a wife.” Luther thereupon sent a memorandum, addressed to
the “magistrates and the preacher of Domitsch,” in which he allowed a
divorce from the second wife and gave permission for a third marriage,
which, apparently, was more of a success. During the Visitations in
1528 this preacher, who had since been transferred to Lucka, got into
trouble on account of his three marriages, but saved his skin by
appealing to Luther’s letter.[505]
The reader already knows that, according to Luther, a woman who has
no children by her husband, may, with the latter’s consent, quietly
dissolve the marriage and cohabit with another, for instance, with
her brother-in-law; this, however, was to be secret, because the
children were to be regarded as her first husband’s. Should he refuse
his consent, says Luther, “rather than suffer her to burn or have
recourse to adultery, I would advise her to marry another and flee to
some place where she is unknown. What other advice can be given to
one who is in constant danger from carnal lusts?”[506] Duke George of
Saxony, referring to a similar passage in Luther’s work “On Conjugal
Life” (1522),[507] said in a letter to Luther which was immediately
printed: “When was it ever heard of that wives should be taken from
their husbands and given to other men, as we now find it stated in your
Evangel? Has adultery ever been more common than since you wrote: If a
woman has no children by her husband, then let her go to another and
bear children whom her husband must provide for as though he were the
father? This is the fruit of the precious Evangel which you dragged
forth out of the gutter. You were quite right when you said you found
it in the gutter; what we want to know is, why you didn’t leave it
there.”[508]
What Luther had said concerning the refusal to render the conjugal
due: “If the wife refuse, then let the maid come,” attracted more
attention than he probably anticipated, both among his own adherents
and among his foes. It is true, as already pointed out, that the
context does not justify illicit relations outside marriage (see vol.
iii., p. 252 f.), but the words as they stand, to say nothing of the
unlikelihood of any real marriage with the maid, and, finally, the
significance which may have clung to a coarse saying of the populace
possibly alluded to by Luther, all favoured those who chose to make
the tempting phrase a pretext for such extra-matrimonial relations.
When the sermon on marriage in which the passage occurs was published,
Duke George’s representative at the Diet of Nuremberg in 1522 sent his
master at Dresden a copy of the booklet, “which the devilish monk,”
so he writes, “has unblushingly published, though it has cost him the
loss of many followers about here; it would not go well with us poor
husbands, should our naughty wives read it. I shall certainly not
give my wife one.”[509] Duke George replied with a grim jest which
doubtless went the rounds at Nuremberg among those whom the booklet
had offended: “As to what you write,” George says, “viz. that you
won’t let your wife read the little book on marriage, me thinks you
are acting unwisely; in our opinion it contains something which might
serve even a jealous husband like you very well; for it says, that if
your wife refuses to do your will you have only to turn to the maid.
Hence keep a look out for pretty maids. These and similar utterances
you may very well hold over your wife.”[510]
In 1542 Wicel, in his Postils, speaking of the preachers, says: “The
words of St. Paul, ‘Art thou loosed from a wife, seek not a wife,’ 1
Cor. vii. 27, have a very unevangelical sound on the lips of these
Evangelists. How then must it be? Quick, take a wife or a husband;
whether you be young or old, make haste; should one die, don’t delay
to take another. Celebrate the wedding, if it turns out ill, then let
the maid come! Divorce this one and take in marriage that one, whether
the first be living or dead! For chambering and wantonness shall not
be neglected,”--“Since the coming of Christ,” says the same writer
elsewhere, “there have never been so many divorces as under Luther’s
rule.”[511]
Of the unlooked-for effects produced among Luther’s preachers by the
above saying, Sebastian Flasch, an ex-Lutheran preacher and native of
Mansfeld, complained in 1576: “Although the preachers are married, yet
they are so ill-content with their better halves, that, appealing to
Luther’s advice, they frequently, in order to gratify their insatiable
concupiscence, seduce their maids, and, what is even more shameful,
do not blush to misconduct themselves with other men’s wives or to
exchange wives among themselves.” He appeals to his long experience
of Lutheranism and relates that such a “_commutatio uxorum_” had been
proposed to him by a preacher of high standing.[512]--Much earlier
than this, in 1532, Johann Mensing, the Dominican, wrote sadly, that
the state of matrimony was dreadfully disgraced by the new preachers;
“for they give a man two wives, a woman two husbands, allow the man
to use the maid should the wife not prove compliant, and the wife
to take another husband should her own prove impotent.” “When they
feel disposed or moved to what is sin and shameful, they say the
Holy Spirit urges them. Is not that a fine tale that all the world
is telling about Melchior Myritsch of Magdeburg, of Jacob Probst
of Bremen and of others in the Saxon land. What certain mothers
have discovered concerning their daughters and maids, who listened
to such preaching, it is useless to relate.”[513]--The name of the
ex-Augustinian, Melchior Myritsch, or Meirisch, recalls the coarseness
of the advice given by Luther, on Feb. 10, 1525, to the latter’s new
spouse. (See vol. ii., p. 144.)
_Respect for the Female Sex in Luther’s Conversations._
Had Luther, as the legend he set on foot would make us believe, really
raised the dignity of woman and the married state to a higher level, we
might naturally expect, that, when he has to speak of matters sexual
or otherwise repugnant to modesty, he would at least be reticent and
dignified in his language. We should expect to find him surrounded
at Wittenberg by a certain nobility of thought, a higher, purer
atmosphere, a nobler general tone, in some degree of harmony with his
extraordinary claims. Instead we are confronted with something very
different. Luther’s whole mode of speech, his conversations and ethical
trend, are characterised by traits which even the most indulgent of
later writers found it difficult to excuse, and which, particularly his
want of delicacy towards women, must necessarily prove offensive to
all.[514]
Luther was possibly not aware that the word “nun” comes from the Low
Latin “_nonna_,” i.e. woman, and was originally the name given to those
who dwelt in the numerous convents of Upper Egypt; he knew, however,
well enough that the word “monk” was but a variant of “_monachus_.” He
jestingly gives to both the former and the latter an odious derivation.
“The word nun,” he says, “comes from the German, and cloistered women
are thus called, because that is the term for unsexed sows; in the
same way the word monk is derived from the horses [viz. the gelded
horses]. But the operation was not altogether successful, for they are
obliged to wear breeches just like other people.”[515] It may be that
Catherine, the ex-nun, was present when this was said; at any rate she
is frequently mentioned in the Table-Talk as assisting.[516]
He could not let slip the opportunity of having a dig at the ladies
who were sometimes present at his post-prandial entertainments. In
1542 conversation turned on Solomon’s many wives and concubines.
Luther pointed out,[517] that the figures given in the Bible must
be taken as referring to all the women dwelling in the palace, even
to such as had no personal intercourse with Solomon. “One might as
well say,” he continues, “Dr. Martin has three wives; one is Katey,
another Magdalene, the third the pastoress; also a concubine, viz.
the virgin Els.[518] This made him laugh [writes the narrator, Caspar
Heydenreich]; and besides these he has many girls. In the same way
Solomon had three hundred queens; if he took only one every night,
the year would be over, and he would not have had a day’s rest. That
cannot be, for he had also to govern.”[519]
He advised that those who were troubled with doubts concerning
their salvation should speak of improper subjects (“_loquaris de
venereis_”), that was an infallible remedy.[520] In one such case he
invited a pupil to jest freely with his own wife, Catherine. “Talk
about other things,” Luther urges him, “which entirely distract your
thoughts.”[521]
As we know, Luther himself made liberal use of such talk to cheer up
himself and others. Thus, in the presence of his guests, in 1537, he
joked about Ferdinand, the German King, his extreme thinness and his
very stout wife who was suspected of misconduct: “Though he is of
such an insignificant bodily frame,” he says, “others will be found
to assist him in the nuptial bed. But it is a nuisance to have the
world filled with alien heirs.”[522]--This leads him to speak of
adulteresses in other districts.[523]
A coarser tale is the one he related about the same time. A minister
came to him complaining of giddiness and asking for a remedy. His
answer was: “Lass das Loch daheime,” which, so the narrators explain,
meant, “that he should not go to such excess in chambering.”[524]--A
similar piece of advice is given by Luther in the doggerel verses
which occur in his Table-Talk: “Keep your neck warm and cosy,--Do not
overload your belly.--Don’t be too sweet on Gertie;--Then your locks
will whiten slowly.”[525]--On one occasion he showed his friends
a turquoise (“_turchesia_”), which had been given him, and said,
following the superstition of the day, that when immersed in water it
would make movements “_sicut isti qui eveniunt juveni cum a virgine
in chorea circumfertur_,” but, that, in doing so, it broke.[526] On
account of the many children he had caused to be begotten from priests
and religious, he, as we already know, compared himself to Abraham,
the father of a great race: He, like Abraham, was the grandfather of
all the descendants of the monks, priests and nuns and the father of a
mighty people.[527]
We may not pass over here Luther’s frequent use of filthy expressions,
which, though they agree well with his natural coarseness, harmonise
but ill with the high ideals we should expect in one whose vocation
it was to rescue marriage and feminine dignity from the slough of the
Papacy. He is fond of using such words in his abuse of the Popish
teaching on marriage: At one time, he writes, the Papists make out
marriage to be a Sacrament, “at another to be impure, i.e. a sort of
merdiferous Sacrament.”[528] The Pope, who waywardly teaches this and
other doctrines, “has overthrown the Word of God”; “if the Pope’s
reputation had not been destroyed by the Word of God, the devil
himself would have ejected him” (‘_a posteriori_’).[529] Elsewhere he
voices his conviction as to the most fitting epithet to apply to the
Pope’s “human ordinances.” One thing in man, he explains, viz. “the
‘_anus_,’ cannot be bound; it is determined to be master and to have
the upper hand. Hence this is the only thing in man’s body or soul
upon which the Pope has not laid his commands.”[530]
“The greatest blessing of marriage,” he tells his friends, “lies in
the children; this D.G. [Duke George] was not fated to see in his
sons, ‘_quos spectatissima principissa cacatos in lucem ederat_.’”[531]
The Pope and his people, he says in a sermon, had “condemned and
rejected matrimony as a dirty, stinking state.” “Had the creation of
human beings been in the Pope’s power he would never have created
woman, or allowed any such to exist in the world.”[532] “The Pope, the
devil and his Church,” he says in 1539, “are hostile to the married
state.... Matrimony [in their opinion] is mere fornication.”[533]
The Pope, he says, had forbidden the married state; he and his
followers, “the monks and Papists,” “burn with evil lust and love of
fornication, though they refuse to take upon themselves the trouble
and labour of matrimony.”[534] “With the help of the Papacy Satan has
horribly soiled matrimony, God’s own ordinance”; the fact was, the
clergy had been too much afraid of woman; “and so it goes on: If a man
fears fornication he falls into secret sin, as seems to have been the
case with St. Jerome.”[535]
He saw sexual excesses increasing to an alarming extent among the youth
of his own party. At table a friend of the “young fellows” sought
to excuse their “wild, immoral life and fornication” on the ground
of their youth; Luther sighed, at the state of things revealed, and
said: “Alas, that is how they learn contempt for the female sex.”
Contempt will simply lead to abuse; the true remedy for immorality was
prayerfully to hold conjugal love in honour.[536]
Luther, however, preferred to dwell upon the deep-seated vice of an
anti-matrimonial Papacy rather than on the results of his teaching upon
the young.
“Every false religion,” he once exclaimed in 1542 in his
Table-Talk,[537] “has been defiled by sensuality! Just look at the
|!”--[He must here have used, says Kroker, “a term for _phallus_,
or something similar,” which Caspar Heydenreich the reporter has
suppressed.][538] “What else were the pilgrimages,” Luther goes on,
“but opportunities for coming together? What does the Pope do but
wallow unceasingly in his lusts?... The heathen held marriage in far
higher honour than do the Pope and the Turk. The Pope hates marriage,
and the Turk despises it. But it is the devil’s nature to hate God’s
Word. What God loves, e.g. the Church, marriage, civic order, that he
hates. He desires fornication and impurity; for if he has these, he
knows well that people will no longer trouble themselves about God.”
_The New Matrimonial Conditions and the Slandered Opponents._
It is a fact witnessed to by contemporaries, particularly by Catholics,
that Luther’s unrestraint when writing on sexual subjects, his open
allusions to organs and functions, not usually referred to, and,
especially, the stress he laid on the irresistibility of the natural
impulse, were not without notable effect on the minds of the people,
already excited as they were.
In 1522, after having explained his new views on divorce, he puts
himself the question, whether this “would not make it easy for wicked
men and women to desert each other, and betake themselves to foreign
parts”? His reply is: “How can I help it? It is the fault of the
authorities. Why do they not strangle adulterers?”[539]
Certain preachers of Lutheranism made matters worse by the fanaticism
with which they preached the freedom of the Evangel. So compromising
was their support, that other of Luther’s followers found fault with
it, for instance, the preacher Urbanus Rhegius[540] It was, however,
impossible for these more cautious preachers to prevent Luther’s
principles being carried to their consequences, in spite of all the
care they took to emphasise his reserves and his stricter admonitions.
The Protestant Rector, J. Rivius, complained in 1547: “If you are an
adulterer or lewdster, preachers say ... only believe and you will
be saved. There is no need for you to fear the law, for Christ has
fulfilled it and made satisfaction for all men.” “Such words seduce
people into a godless life.”[541]
E. Sarcerius, the Superintendent of the county of Mansfeld, also
bewailed, in a writing of 1555, the growing desecration of the married
state: Men took more than one wife; this they did by “fleeing to
foreign parts and seeking other wives. Some women do the same. Thus
there is no end to the desertions on the part of both husbands and
wives.” “In many places horrible adultery and fornication prevail, and
these vices have become so common, that people no longer regard them
as sinful.” “Thus there is everywhere confusion and scandal both in
match-making and in celebrating the marriages, so that holy matrimony
is completely dishonoured and trodden under foot.” “Of adultery,
lewdness and incest there is no end.”[542]--These complaints were
called forth by the state of things in the very county where Luther
was born and died.
The convert George Wicel, who resided for a considerable time at
Mansfeld, had an opportunity of observing the effects of Luther’s
matrimonial teaching and of his preaching generally on a population
almost entirely Protestant. He writes, in 1536: “It is enough to
break a Christian’s heart to see so many false prophets and heretics
flourishing in Germany, whose comforting and frivolous teaching fills
the land not merely with adulterers but with regular heathen.”[543]
In an earlier work he had said: “Oh, you people, what a fine manner
of life according to the Gospel have you introduced by your preaching
on Grace! Yes, they cry, you would make of Christ a Moses and a
taskmaster; they, however, make of Him a procurer and an Epicurean by
their sensual life and knavish example.”[544]
Luther, it is true, had an excuse ready. He pleaded that the freedom
of the Gospel was not yet rightly understood. “The masses,” he wrote
to Margrave George of Brandenburg, on Sep. 14, 1531, “have now fallen
under the freedom of the flesh, and there we must leave them for a
while until they have satisfied their lust. Things will be different
when the Visitation is in working order [the first Visitation in the
Margrave’s lands had taken place as early as 1528]. It is quick work
pulling down an old house, but building a new one takes longer....
Jerusalem, too, was built very slowly and with difficulty.... Under
the Pope we could not endure the constraint, and the lack of the Word;
now we cannot endure the freedom and the superabundant treasure of the
Gospel.”[545]
Amidst all these disorders Luther found great consolation in
contemplating the anti-Christian character of the Popish Church and
Daniel’s supposed prophecy of Antichrist’s enmity for woman.[546] His
preachers only too eagerly followed in his footsteps.
George Wicel speaks of the preachers, who, while themselves leading
loose lives, used Daniel’s prophecy against the Catholic view of
marriage.[547] “They mock at those who wish to remain single or who
content themselves with one wife, and quote the words of Daniel: ‘He
shall not follow the lust of women nor regard any gods,’ so that
anyone belonging to this sect who is not addicted to the pursuit of
women, is hardly safe from being taken for Antichrist. The words
of St. Paul in Cor. vii., of Our Lord in Mat. xix., concerning the
third sex of the eunuchs, and of St. John in Apoc. xiv., on those
who have not defiled themselves with women, and, again, of St. Paul
when speaking of the ‘_vidua digama_’ in 1 Tim. v., don’t count a
farthing in this Jovinian school[548].... It is an Epicurean school
and an Epicurean life and nothing else.” With biting satire, in part
the result of the controversy thrust upon him, in part the outcome
of his temper, he had declared shortly before, that Lutheranism was
all “love of women,” was “full of senseless lust for women”; he uses
“gynecophiles” as an adjective to qualify it, and speaks of its
“gynecomania”; by this means men were to become better Christians,
and be more secure of salvation than all the Saints of God ever were
in the ancient apostolic Church. “See there what Satan is seeking by
means of this exalted respect for the love of women, and by his glib,
feminist preachers in Saxony. Hence his and his followers’ concern for
women, to whom they cling so closely that they can hardly get into
their pulpits without them, and, rather than live a celibate life, the
Evangelist would prefer to be the husband, not of one wife, but of
three or four.”[549]
An intimate friend of Luther’s, Johann Brenz, wrote, in 1532, in
a book to which Luther supplied the Preface: “The youngsters are
barely out of the cradle before they want wives, and girls, not yet
marriageable, already dream of husbands.”[550]--After the immoral
atmosphere has brought about their fall, writes Fr. Staphylus, “they
grow so impudent as to assert that a chaste and continent life is
impossible and the gratification of the sexual appetite as essential
as eating and drinking.”[551]--The same author, who returned to the
Catholic Church, also wrote, in 1562: “So long as matrimony was looked
upon as a Sacrament, modesty and an honourable married life was loved
and prized, but since the people have read in Luther’s books that
matrimony is a human invention ... his advice has been put in practice
in such a way, that marriage is observed more chastely and honourably
in Turkey than amongst our German Evangelicals.”[552]
The list of testimonies such as these might be considerably
lengthened.[553]
It would, however, be unfair, in view of the large number of such
statements, to shut our eyes to the remarkable increase, at that
time, in the immorality already prevalent even in Catholic circles,
though this was due in great measure to the malignant influence of the
unhappy new idea of freedom, and to that contempt for ecclesiastical
regulations as mere human inventions, which had penetrated even into
regions still faithful to the Church.[554] Owing to the general
confusion, ecclesiastical discipline was at a standstill, evil-doers
went unpunished, nor could moral obligations be so regularly and
zealously enforced. It is true that favourable testimonies arc not
lacking on both sides, but they chiefly refer to remote Catholic and
Protestant localities. As is usual, such reports are less noticeable
than the unfavourable ones, the good being ever less likely to
attract attention than the evil. Staphylus complains bitterly of both
parties, as the very title of his book proves.[555] Finally, all the
unfavourable accounts of the state of married life under Lutheranism
are not quite so bad as those given above, in which moreover, maybe,
the sad personal experience of the writers made them see things with a
jaundiced eye.
That, in the matter of clerical morals, there was a great difference
between the end of the 15th and the middle of the 16th centuries
can be proved by such ecclesiastical archives as still survive; the
condemnations pronounced in the 16th century are considerably more
numerous than in earlier times.
On the grounds of such data Joseph Löhr has quite recently made a very
successful attempt to estimate accurately the moral status of the
clergy in the Lower Rhine provinces, particularly Westphalia.[556]
He has based his examination more particularly on the records of
the Archdeaconry of Xanten concerning the fines levied on the
clergy for all sorts of offences. The accounts “cover a period of
about one hundred years.”[557] In the 16th century we find a quite
disproportionate increase in the number of offenders. There are,
however, traces, over a long term of years, of a distinct weakening
of ecclesiastical discipline which made impossible any effective
repression of the growing evil.
A glance at the conditions prevailing in the 15th century in the
regions on which Löhr’s researches bear is very instructive.
It enables us to see how extravagant and untrue were--at least with
regard to these localities--the frequent, and in themselves quite
incredible, statements made by Luther regarding the utter degradation
of both clergy and religious owing to the law of celibacy. “Of a total
of from 450 to 600 clergy in the Archdeaconry of the Lower Rhine
(probably the number was considerably higher) we find, up to the end
of the 15th century, on an average, only five persons a year being
prosecuted by the Archdeacon for [various] offences.”[558] “Assuming
a like density of clergy in Westphalia, the number prosecuted by the
ecclesiastical commissioner in 1495 and in 1499 would amount roughly
to 2 per cent., but, in 1515, already to 6 per cent.”[559]
The results furnished by such painstaking research are more reliable
than the vague accounts and complaints of contemporaries.[560] Should
the examination be continued in other dioceses it will undoubtedly do
as much to clear up the question as the Visitation reports did for the
condition of affairs in the 16th century under Lutheranism, though
probably the final result will be different. The Lutheran Visitation
reports mostly corroborate the unfavourable testimony of olden
writers, whereas the fewness of the culprits shown in the Catholic
lists of fines would seem to bear out, at least with regard to certain
localities, those contemporaries who report favourably of the clergy
at the close of the Middle Ages. One such favourable contemporary
testimony comes from the Humanist, Jacob Wimpfeling, and concerns the
clergy of the Rhine Lands. The statement of this writer, usually a very
severe critic of the clergy, runs quite counter to Luther’s general
and greatly exaggerated charges.[561] “God knows, I am acquainted with
many, yea, countless pastors amongst the secular clergy in the six
dioceses of the Rhine, who are richly equipped with all the knowledge
requisite for the cure of souls and whose lives are blameless. I know
excellent prelates, canons and vicars both at the Cathedrals and the
Collegiate Churches, not a few in number but many, men of unblemished
reputation, full of piety and generous and humble-minded towards the
poor.”
Luther himself made statements which deprive his accusations of their
point. Even what he says of the respect paid to the clerical state
militates against him. Of the first Mass said by the newly ordained
priest he relates, that “it was thought much of”; that the people on
such occasions brought offerings and gifts; that the “bridegroom’s”
“Hours” were celebrated by torchlight, and that he, together with his
mother, if still living, was led through the streets with music and
dancing, “the people looking on and weeping for joy.”[562] It is true
that he is loud in his blame of the avarice displayed at such first
Masses, but the respect shown by the people, and here described by him,
would never have been exhibited towards the clergy had they rendered
themselves so utterly contemptible by their immorality as he makes out.
In a sermon of 1521, speaking of the “majority of the clergy,” he
admits that most of them “work, pray and fast a great deal”; that they
“sing, speak and preach of the law and lead men to many works”; that
they fancy they will gain heaven by means of “pretty works,” though
all in vain, so he thinks, owing to their lack of knowledge of the
Evangel.[563] During the earlier period of his change of opinions he
was quite convinced, that a pernicious self-righteousness (that of the
“_iustitiarii_”) was rampant amongst both clergy and religious; not
only in the houses of his own Congregation, but throughout the Church,
a painstaking observance of the law and a scrupulous fulfilment of
their duty by the clergy and monks constituted a danger to the true
spirit of the Gospel, as he understood it. It was his polemics which
then caused him to be obsessed with the idea, that the whole world had
been seized upon by the self-righteous. It was his polemics again,
which, later, made him regard the whole world as full of immoral
clerics.
The extravagance of Luther’s utterances in his fight against clerical
celibacy might perhaps be regarded as due to the secluded life he had
led at Wittenberg during the years he was a monk, which prevented
him from knowing the true state of things. Experience gained by
more extensive travel and intercourse with others might indeed have
corrected his views. But, as a matter of fact, he was not altogether
untravelled; besides visiting Rome and Southern Germany he had been
to Heidelberg, Worms and Cologne. His stay at the latter city is
particularly noteworthy, for there he was in the heart of the very
region of which Wimpfeling had given so favourable an account.
Can he, during the long journey on foot and in his conversations
with his brother monks there, not have convinced himself, that the
clergy residing in that city were by no means sunk in immorality and
viciousness? His visit to Cologne coincided in all probability with the
general Chapter which Staupitz had summoned there at the commencement
of May, 1512. Luther only recalls incidentally having seen there the
bodies of the Three Kings; having swallowed all the legends told him
concerning them; and having drunk such wine as he had never drunk
before.[564]
_Two Concluding Pictures towards the History of Woman._
We may, in conclusion, give two pictures which cast a new and lurid
light on what has gone before.
Luther’s standpoint, and, no less, the confusion which had arisen in
married life and the humiliations to which many women were exposed,
come out clearly in the story of his relations with the preacher
Jodocus Kern and his spouse. Kern, an apostate monk, had wedded at
Nuremberg Ursula Tagler, an ex-nun from the convent of Engelthal. On
Dec. 24, 1524, Luther joyously commended him as “a monk, metamorphosed
into a married man,” to the care of Spalatin.[565] When Kern went to
Saxony in search of a post the girl refused to accompany him until he
had found employment. During his absence she began to regret the step
she had taken, and the letters she received from her former Prioress
determined her to return no more to her husband. The persuasion of her
Lutheran relatives indeed induced her to go to Allstedt after Kern
had been appointed successor to Thomas Münzer in that town, but there
her horror only grew for the sacrilegious union she had contracted.
Coercion was quite fruitless. The minister, at the advice of her own
relatives, treated her very roughly, forced her to eat meat on Good
Friday and refused to listen when she urged him to return to the
Catholic Church. Having made an attempt to escape to Mansfeld, her
case was brought before the secular Courts; she was examined by the
commissioner of Allstedt on January 11, 1526, when she declared, that
it was against her conscience to look upon Kern as her husband, that
her soul was dearer to her than her body and that she would rather
die than continue to endure any longer the bonds of sin. This the
commissioner reported to the Elector Johann, and the latter, on Jan.
17, forwarded her statement to Luther, together with Kern’s account,
for the purpose of hearing from one so “learned in Scripture” “how the
matter ought to be treated and disposed of in accordance with God’s
Holy Writ.”[566]
Luther took a week to reply: The Allstedt woman was suffering such
“temptations from the devil and men, that it would verily be a wonder
if she could resist them.” The only means of keeping her true to
the Evangel and to her duty would be to send her to her people at
Nuremberg. Should, even there, “the devil refuse to yield to God’s
good exhortation” then she would have to “be allowed to go,” and “be
reckoned as dead,” and then the pastor might marry another. Out of
the scandal that the wanton spirit had given through her God might
yet work some good. “The Evangel neither will nor can be exempt from
scandals.”[567]
The unhappy nun was, as a matter of fact, forcibly brought to Nuremberg
and placed amongst Lutheran surroundings instead of being conveyed to
her convent at Engelthal, as the laws of the Empire demanded. From
thence she never returned to Allstedt. Kern, during the proceedings,
had declared that he did not want her against her conscience, and was
ready to submit to the Word of God and to comply exactly with whatever
this imposed. In accordance therewith he soon found a fresh bride.
During the Visitations, in 1533, he was charged with bigamy and was
reprimanded for being a “drinker and gambler,” although his industry
and talents were at the same time recognised. Nothing is known of his
later doings.[568]
* * * * *
Two open letters addressed to Luther by Catholics in 1528 form a
companion picture to the above. They portray the view taken by many
faithful Catholics of Luther’s own marriage.
In that year two Professors at the Leipzig University, Johann Hasenberg
and Joachim von der Heyden, published printed circulars addressed to
Luther and Catherine von Bora, admonishing them--now that ten years had
elapsed since Luther first attacked the Church--on their breaking of
their vows, their desecration of the Sacrament of Matrimony and their
falling away from the Catholic faith.[569] It is probable that Duke
George of Saxony had something to do with this joint attack.[570] It is
also likely that hopes of sterner measures on the part of the Imperial
authorities also helped to induce the writers to put pen to paper.[571]
In any case it was their plan, vigorously and before all the world, to
attack the author of the schism in his most vulnerable spot, where it
would not be easy for him to defend himself publicly. Master Hasenberg,
a Bohemian, was one of George’s favourites, who had made him three
years previously Dean of the Faculty of Arts. He addressed his open
letter to “Martinus Luderus,” the “destroyer of the public peace and
piety.” Von der Heyden, known in Latin as Myricianus or Phrisomynensis
(a Frisian by birth), was likewise a Master, and Papal and academic
Notary at Leipzig. Of the two he was the younger. His letter was
addressed to “Khete von Bhore, Luther’s pretended wife,” and served
as preface to a printed translation he had made of the work: “_De
lapsu virginis consecratæ_,” then attributed to St. Ambrose.[572] Both
epistles, according to one of the answers, must have been despatched
by special messenger and delivered at Luther’s house. They drew forth
printed replies, some of which can be traced to Luther himself, while
Euricius Cordus ridiculed the writers in a screed full of biting
epigram.
The Leipzig letters, the first of which was also published in German,
made a great sensation in German circles and constituted an urgent
exhortation to thousands of apostates estranged from the Church by
Luther’s new doctrine on Christian freedom and on the nullity of vows.
Relentlessly Hasenberg put to Luther the questions: “Who has
blasphemously slandered the pious promise of celibacy which priests,
religious and nuns made to God, and which, throughout the ages,
had been held sacred? Luderus. Who has shrouded in darkness
free-will, good works, the ancient and unshaken faith, and that
jewel of virginity which shines more brightly than the sun in the
Church? Luderus.... Do you not yet see, you God-forsaken man, what
all Christians think of your impudent behaviour, your temerity and
voluptuousness?”
Referring to the sacrilegious union with Bora, he proceeds: “The
enormity of your sin is patent. You have covered yourself with guilt
in both your private and public life, particularly by your intercourse
with the woman who is not your wife.” In his indignation he does not
shrink from comparing the ex-nun to a lustful Venus. He thunders
against Luther: “You, a monk, fornicate by day and by night with a
nun! And, by your writings and sermons, you drag down into the abyss
with you ignorant monks and unlearned priests, questionable folk,
many of whom were already deserving of the gallows. Oh, you murderer
of the people!” “Yes, indeed, this is the way to get to heaven--or
rather to Lucifer’s kingdom! Why not say like Epicurus: There is no
God and no higher power troubles about us poor mortals? Call upon
your new gods, Bacchus, Venus, Mars, Priapus, Futina, Potina, Subigus
and Hymenæus.” His wish for Luther’s spouse is, that she may take to
heart the touching words of St. Ambrose to the fallen nun, so as not
to fall from the abyss of a vicious life into the abyss of everlasting
perdition prepared “for the devil and his Lutheran angels.” And again,
turning to Luther: “Have pity,” he says, “on the nun, have compassion
on the concubine and the children, your own flesh and blood. Send
the nun back to the cloistral peace and penance which she forsook;
free the unhappy creature from the embraces of sin and restore her to
her mother the Church and to her most worthy and loving bridegroom
Christ, so that she may again sing in unison with the faithful the
Ambrosian hymn: ‘_Iesu, corona virginum_.’[573]... This much at least,
viz. the dismissal of the nun, you cannot refuse us, however blindly
you yourself may hurry along the sad path you have chosen. All the
faithful, linked together throughout the world by the golden chain of
charity, implore you with tears of blood; so likewise does your kind
Mother, the Church, and the holy choirs of Angels, who rejoice over
the sinner who returns penitent.”
The writer, who seasons his counsel with so much bitterness, had
plainly little hope of the conversion of the man he was addressing;
his attack was centred on Catharine Bora. This was even more so the
case with von der Heyden, a man of lively character who delighted
in controversy; even from his first words it is clear that he had
no intention of working on her kindlier feelings: “Woe to you,
poor deluded woman.” He upbraids her with her fall from light into
darkness, from the vocation of the cloister into an “abominable and
shameful life”; by her example she has brought “many poor, innocent
children into a like misery”; formerly they had, as nuns, “lived in
discipline and purity,” now they are “not merely in spiritual but
in actual bodily want, nay, the poorest of the poor and have become
the most despicable of creatures.” Many of them now earned a living
in “houses of ill-fame,” they were frequently forced to pawn or sell
their poor clothing, and sometimes themselves; they had hoped for the
true freedom of the spirit that had been promised them, and, instead,
they had been cast into a “horrible bondage of soul and body.” Luther
“in his pestilential writings had mistaken the freedom of the flesh
for the true liberty of the spirit, in opposition to St. Paul, who
had based this freedom solely on the Spirit of the Lord, as in 2 Cor.
iii. 17: ‘Where the Spirit of God is, there is liberty’” Luther’s
preaching on liberty was one big lie, and another was his opinion that
the “vow of virginity, where it was observed, was wicked and sinful,
which statement was contrary to God and the whole of Scripture,” and
more particularly opposed to St. Paul, who strongly condemned those
who broke their plighted faith to Christ; St. Paul had quite plainly
recommended clerical celibacy when he wrote, that he who is without a
wife is solicitous for the things that are the Lord’s, but that the
husband is solicitous for the things of the world, how best he may
please his wife (1 Cor. vii. 32 f.).
Your “Squire Luther,” he says to Bora, “behaves himself very
impudently and proudly”; “he fancies he can fly, that he is treading
on roses and is ‘_lux mundi_’”; he forgets that God has commanded us
to keep what we have vowed; people gladly obeyed the Emperor, yet
God was “an Emperor above all Emperors,” and had still more right
to fealty and obedience. Was she ignorant of Christ’s saying: “No
man having put his hand to the plough and looking back is fit for
the Kingdom of God” (Luke ix. 62)? He reminds her of the severe
penalties imposed by the laws of the Empire on those religious who
were openly unfaithful to their vow, and, particularly, of the eternal
punishment which should move her to leave the “horrid, black monk”
(the Augustinians wore a black habit), to bewail like “St. Magdalene
the evil she had done” and, by returning to the convent, to make
“reparation for her infidelity to God.” St. Ambrose’s booklet on the
fallen nun might lead her, and her companions in misfortune, to a
“humble recognition” (of their sin), “and enable her to flee from
the swift wrath of God and return to the fold of Christ, attain to
salvation together with us all and praise the Lord for all eternity.”
We catch a glimpse of the gulf which divided people’s minds at that
time in the very title of the reply by Euricius Cordus: “The Marburg
literary society’s peal of laughter over the screed against Luther of
two Leipzig poets.”[574]
Two satirical and anonymous replies immediately appeared in print at
Wittenberg, the one entitled: “New-Zeittung von Leyptzig,” of which
Luther “was not entirely innocent,” and the other quite certainly his
work, viz. “Ein newe Fabel Esopi newlich verdeudscht gefunden.”[575]
In the first reply spurious epistles are made to relate how the two
Leipzig letters had been brought by a messenger to Luther’s house,
and had then been carried by the servants unread to the “back-chamber
where it stinketh.” “The paper having duly been submitted to the most
ignominious of uses it was again packed into a bundle and despatched
back to the original senders by the same messenger.”[576]
In his “Newe Fabel” (of the Lion and the Ass) Luther implicitly
includes von der Heyden, all the defenders of the Pope, and the Pope
himself under the figure of the Ass (with the cross on its back);
“there is nothing about the Ass that is not worthy of royal and papal
honours.”[577] The author of the letter he calls an ass’s head and
sniveller; the very stones of Leipzig would spit upon him; he was the
“horse-droppings in which the apples were packed”; his art had brought
on him “such an attack of diarrhœa that all of us have been bespattered
with his filth”; “If you wish to devour us, you might begin downstairs
at the commode,” etc.[578]
We find nothing in either writing in the nature of a reply--of which
indeed he considered the Leipzig authors unworthy--except the two
following statements: firstly, Luther had sufficiently instructed his
faithful wife, and the world in general, “that the religious life
was wrong”;[579] secondly, Ambrose, Jerome, or whoever wrote the
booklet, “had stormed and raved like a demon” in that work, which was
“more heretical than Catholic, against the nun who had yielded to her
sexual instincts; he had not spoken like a Doctor, ... but as one who
wished to drive the poor prostitute into the abyss of hell; a murderer
of souls pitted against a poor, feeble, female vessel.”[580] Hence
Luther’s views are fairly apparent in the replies.
The Church, yea, even the Church of the earliest times, was made to
bear the curse of having degraded woman and of having, by the religious
life, declared war on marriage.
A contemporary, Petrus Silvius, who read Luther’s writings with
indignation and disgust, wrote, in 1530: “Luther, with his usual lies
and blasphemy, calumniates the Christian Church and now says, that she
entirely rejected and condemned matrimony.”[581]
In what has gone before these falsehoods concerning the earlier
degradation and his own exaltation of woman have been refuted at
some length; the detailed manner in which this was done may find its
vindication in the words of yet another opponent of Luther’s, H.
Sedulius, who says: “It must be repeated again and again, that it is an
impudent lie to say we condemn marriage.”[582]