Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

Those who are so fond of asserting that monogamy and indissoluble marriage determine the existence of nations, are either ignorant of the past history and present condition of the nations, or conceal their knowledge behind the prejudiced view that the white humanity of Europe is to be taken as the criterion for the morality as well as for the faith of the whole race.

On the other hand, what can be proved is this: that the vitality of a people depends first and foremost on the capacity and willingness of its women to bear and foster children fit to live, and on their husbands’ capacity and willingness to protect the national existence. In the next place, it depends on the whole people’s fondness for work and ability in the achievement of prosperity for itself and of value for mankind at large, and finally on the will of the individual to sacrifice his own ends when the common weal demands it. What can further be proved is that, if a people wastes its strength in sexual dissipation, this will often prevent its fulfilling the conditions we have mentioned as necessary to its progress, and will thus bring about its ruin.

But this does not involve any proof that a nation will be ruined if it alters the forms of sexual life according to a newly-acquired knowledge of the most reasonable sexual morality!

Monogamy was victorious from many causes, above all from experience of its advantages. It minimised the struggle of the men for the women and thus economised forces for other ends; it provided an incentive to work for offspring; it developed modesty and tenderness within the sexual relationship and thus raised the position of the woman and with it her importance in the bringing-up of the children; it provided them and her with a protection against the arbitrary will of the husband; through home life it fostered self-command and co-operation; the need of the two for each other led to mutual kindness. The authority of the husband was ennobled by the sense of responsibility and the joy of protection; the dependence of the wife by devotion and fidelity. This last was strengthened by fear of the husband’s proprietary jealousy, by his craving for the certainty that his property would be inherited by his own children; by religions, according to which the admixture of foreign blood in the race was a sin; by the hope of Christianity for a life together beyond the grave; and by their common children, the feeling of tenderness for whom grew deeper as development proceeded. And monogamy still continues to exercise this cultivating influence on the morals and on the soul. It might, therefore, seem that this admission of the value of even an imperfect monogamy rendered all further proof unnecessary for those who assert that the true development of sexual morality can only be secured through a gradually perfected monogamy. But they forget that monogamy, which was a custom long before the introduction of Christianity, became injurious as well as beneficial to true sexual morality, from the moment the Church prescribed it as the only form of this morality.

Then, by a common trick of thought, the conclusion was drawn that the mighty development of culture which had taken place under monogamy would have been impossible if this had not been the sole legitimate form of sexual relationship. And thus it was established as the indispensable condition of all higher culture!

The import of the moral controversies which now arise with increasing frequency is the examination of the relatively higher value for real sexual morality of marriage or love.

So long as man believed that he had been created perfect, had then fallen and continued in everlasting strife between the spirit and the flesh, no doubt could arise of the absolute value of the Christian ideal of morality. Even those who strove hardest to attain this ideal, even those vanquished in the strife, confessed themselves sinners in so far as the flesh triumphed over the spirit. It was evolutionism that first gave man courage to wonder whether he may not also be “sinning” when the spirit triumphs over the flesh; to ask himself whether perchance marriage did not exist for mankind, and not mankind for marriage; to assert the right of the present time to more universal experience with regard to the sexual customs most favourable to the development of the race. For “the idea of marriage” is to them nothing else than to further this development. But universal experience cannot be won so long as religion and law prescribe a single custom as certainly the right custom and all others are thus condemned and obstructed—as soon as they show themselves with serious frankness—while secret trespass against the monogamous ideal is countenanced. It cannot be denied that the sanctioning of this ideal has incited many to try to realise it; indeed, hypocrisy itself is an indirect tribute to its worth. But its fixity has now become a danger to continued evolution.

On the question of marriage, as in all other respects, Lutheranism is a compromise, a bridge between two logical views of the universe: the Catholic-Christian and the Individualistic Monist. And bridges are made to go over, not to stand upon.

None of our “immoral” authors has insisted more strongly than Luther and Olaus Petri on the power of the sexual life. Both regard modesty without marriage as unthinkable. Both see in marriage the means given by God to satisfy desire, just as food is the means given by God to satisfy hunger. But man has as little right to satisfy the former by unchastity as he has to still the latter by theft. There would be nothing to object to in this if unchastity had not been made synonymous with every form of sexual relation outside matrimony, while chastity became equivalent to every form of marriage.

Luther showed some knowledge of nature when he taught that, though it may be possible for human beings to repress their actions outside wedlock, they cannot repress their feelings and desires. On the other hand he knew nothing of that creation of culture, love, and therefore he failed to see that exactly the same sentence which he used to confute celibacy may also be employed to confute marriage, for the vow of fidelity no more entails real faithfulness than the vow of chastity is the cause of true purity. Real fidelity can only arise when love and marriage become equivalent terms. The substance of Luther’s controversy on marriage was not a higher conception of matrimony than that of the Catholic Church, it was merely the restoration of marriage to churchmen and monastic communities. We have to thank Luther for the Lutheran parsonage and with it for a great contribution to the poetry of country life, to popular culture, to the production of many great minds, and—indirectly—to the moulding of many passionate free-thinkers. The Lutheran doctrine of marriage, on the other hand, deserves no thanks, since—like Protestantism as a whole—it stopped short in an insoluble contradiction. Instead of upholding, in the spirit of the Catholic Church and of Christ, the indissolubility of marriage and demanding the suppression of sensuality when the peace of the soul required it, Luther, by his insistence on the strength of natural inclinations, was forced into concessions, which—quite in accordance with the teachings of the Bible—went so far as to approve of bigamy. To the gross apprehension of the Reformation period the choice of a personal love meant nothing. With marriage possible from a natural point of view alone, it might be contracted with any one; indeed, to the genuinely pious it seemed a higher thing to enter into matrimony without any earthly love, which interfered with the love of God. The Lutheran doctrine of marriage made God “indulgent” towards all the impurity that the sexual life shut up within the whited sepulchre of lawful wedlock. He has shut his eyes to all the wife-murders that the command of fecundity involved; to all the worthless children produced by ill-matched and impure marriages. He has “blessed” all unions entered into, even though from the lowest motives, under the most unnatural circumstances: between a sick person and a healthy one, an old and a young, a willing and an unwilling or two unwilling ones, coupled together by their families. To-day, countless women are still being sacrificed to this doctrine of marriage, or to its unconscious effects; their exhausted wombs are a poor soil for the new generation; their crushed souls a broken support for the growth of new wills. For one woman who defends herself with the resolution lent by horror, there are thousands who have conceived and still conceive children in loathing. For one wife who is met with the modest prayer of love, there are thousands who with a feeling of humiliation concede to their proprietors the right inculcated by the Lutheran doctrine of matrimony. But the signs of the times are visible even within the Lutheran Church. There are to be found younger men who maintain that love—not merely the formula about love in the marriage-service—must be present if the marriage is to be regarded as a moral one. And probably these neo-Lutheran prophets of love use their influence to prevent a number of repulsive marriages. But it does not occur either to them or to their congregation to treat with contempt a couple who have been married for the most despicable reasons. On the other hand, if two young and healthy people, united only by their love, should live together and fulfil the command of fruitfulness, then indeed this couple would be made to feel, through shameful treatment—if not by the young clergyman himself, then by his flock—that a sexual connection sanctioned by law is the only one that is respected, and that, therefore, it is not the seriousness of personal love in itself, but primarily society’s official stamp that makes it pass as a moral ground for the cohabitation of two human beings. And if a person who is unhappy in a loveless marriage frees himself and establishes a new home on “personal love, the moral ground of marriage,” then the churchmen hasten to substitute for “the moral ground of marriage” that of duty.