Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

Both regard the question in an equally superficial way. To compare the fundamental conditions of natural life, the motive forces of civilised life, love and hunger, with any other passion than each other, falsifies the whole statement of the problem. The instinct of love, as that of hunger, may to a certain extent be suppressed; in both cases an increase of strength in a certain direction may incidentally be gained. But both needs must be satisfied in the right way if the individual being and the human race are to live and fulfil the intention of life in a higher development. Fasting men in the question of love are of as little value to the enhancement of life as they are in other fields.

Christianity has so accustomed us to treat sexual purity as a question of the individual that, whether we regard it from the point of view of the enthusiast for chastity or from that of the enthusiast for liberty, we do not perceive that, while one satisfies hunger to prolong one’s own life, one produces children to prolong that of the race. This renders the ascetic talk about the innocuousness of abstinence as superficial as the alleged right to satisfy sexual desire with the same freedom as hunger.

If the individual remains without food, he himself loses his life; but if he remains without the right of procreation, the race loses the life he might have given to it. Again, if the individual dies of overeating, he is the only one who suffers; if the sexual instinct is abused through excess, it is the race that suffers.

The existing immorality involves an uninterrupted blood-poisoning of the organism of humanity. The existing order of society and morality starves this organism. It is not only with the melancholy their own inevitable fate inspires in them, but also with indignation against unnecessary suffering, that innumerable excellent men and women know that they are condemned to die without having given their blood, their souls, as an inheritance to a new generation of beings.

It is beyond all question that the instinct of the individual to continue his existence in the race must be controlled, if it is to be an enhancement, and not an obstruction, to life. But this, in the most literal sense, is the vital question for the individual and for the race: HOW and WHY and TO WHAT EXTENT this control is to be exercised.

Thus both the life of the individual and that of the race are enhanced when young people live in abstinence till they have reached full maturity. The development of the race gains when the lives less worthy to survive are not reproduced in offspring; but the life of the individual and of the race suffers when young people, mature and in every way fit, are not in a position to produce and rear offspring.

At a low stage of development, hunger as well as celibacy has been an ennobling force. Man has gradually learned to limit the quantity of his food while improving its quality and regulating the supply. He now knows that the value of food depends to a large extent on the enjoyment it provides and the gratification with which it is associated; that what is unappetising does not fulfil its purpose. He knows too that the organism cannot be nourished by a diet accurately calculated for every age or for every class of work, but that only a certain superfluity really gives the necessary satisfaction. Experience has shown that too great economy is as injurious as excess and that personal needs must within certain limits be the deciding criterion in a full and life-enhancing system of diet. Our understanding of this subject is now far in advance of the ability of the bulk of mankind to follow it. In the question of the racial instinct, on the other hand, we are still a long way from knowledge of the conditions of equilibrium, and we have much farther still to go before we actually arrive at that equilibrium between the starvation and excess in the satisfaction of this need which are at present characteristic of our Western communities.

It was natural that Luther should put an end to fasting as well as celibacy. Both were expressions of the Oriental longing to attain the ideal condition of freedom from desire; both had been necessary factors in the education of the Germanic peoples. But at the same time it was unfortunately inevitable that Luther’s work of liberation should be inconclusive; that he was incapable of adopting the belief of the ancients in the divinity of humanity, the rights of nature; that he continually sought the sanctification of human nature by means exterior to itself. Someone has said that the courage of Luther the monk in marrying a nun was worth more than all his doctrine. That is a true saying. Filippo Lippi certainly did the same. The world gained thereby some magnificent madonnas and—Filippino Lippi. But neither Fra Filippo nor any other vow-breaking monk brought about a revolution: that was the achievement of Luther alone, who asserted his divine and natural right to his action.

The problem of the present day is to follow up the consequences of this declaration of natural rights.