Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  Luther appeals expressly to the Pope’s “books” in which marriage is spoken of as a “sinful state.” 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.” “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.”

  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.

  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. 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.”

  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,” “On the Sacrament of Matrimony,” and the excellent “Mirror of the Matrimonial Order,” by the Dominican Marcus von Weida. 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.

  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.” The passage already given, in which he describes marriage as an Order instituted by Christ ( 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.

  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. 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. 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. Franz Falk has dwelt in detail on the testimony borne by the Late Middle Ages to the dignity of marriage.

  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 opinio
n 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.” 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.”

  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.” 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.” 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.” 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.

  “Just as Church and Councils energetically took the side of marriage” when it was decried in certain circles, 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.” The author adduces facts which “utterly disprove any such general disdain for woman.”

  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: “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: “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.”

  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.

  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 b
etter 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. 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.” 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.