Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

The doctrine that love is the moral ground of sexual relations is thus as yet only an unendorsed sequence of words. The attempt to realise it was for a long time a punishable crime in Lutheran countries, and will probably be still treated about the year 2000 as a culpable error.

Thus the marriage doctrine of Lutheranism—like that of Christianity in general—has ended, according to the moral ideas of the religion of Life, in immorality, since it no more protects the right of the race to the best conditions of life than it admits the right of the individual to realise his love according to the needs of his personal morality. The object of the Lutheran marriage was to unite man and woman, with or without love, as a means to securing their mutual morality, to make them breeders of children for society, and in addition to retain the husband as breadwinner. By relentlessly pursuing this object, the church has succeeded in damming up but not in purifying sensuality, in developing the sense of responsibility but not of love. It has thus merely rough-planed the material for a higher morality. This rough-planed material may still be the most suitable for general use, but more and more people will now require finer instruments.

The new conception of morality grows out of the hope of the gradual ascent of the race towards greater perfection. Those forms of sexual life which best serve this progress must therefore become the standards of the new morality. But as the nature of a relation can only be determined by its results, those who hold the faith of Life will apply a conditional judgment also in the case of sexual affairs. Only cohabitation can decide the morality of a particular case—in other words, its power to enhance the life of the individuals who are living together and that of the race. Thus sanction can never be granted in advance nor—with certain exceptions relating to children—can it be denied to any matrimonial relationship. Each fresh couple, whatever form they may choose for their cohabitation, must themselves prove its moral claim.

This is the new morality, which is now called immoral by the same type of souls as condemned Luther on his appearance as immoral,—a judgment which is repeated in the Catholic world, where to-day the same abuse is heaped upon “the unchaste monk” as is poured upon the adherents of “free love” within the Lutheran communities. The question for Luther’s present-day “liberal” followers, both in this matter and in that of faith, is whether they shall turn back or go forward; back to the firm ground of absolute authority, or over the bridge of free experiment into the untrodden country of an entirely personal faith; back to indissoluble marriage or over the bridge of coercion to the rights of love. The right course of a consistent thought admits of no third possibility.

The neo-Protestant doctrine of marriage is already much less logical than Luther’s. They agree with him in admitting the right of the sensual side of love, and with their contemporaries in granting to love its share in human life. But when they proceed to draw limits for both, they bring themselves into an untenable position.

They bring themselves into an untenable position not because they insist upon self-control within as well as outside of matrimony (all preparation for a final enhancement of life involves temporary checks upon life) but because the self-control they demand is so comprehensive that it will be in a high degree obstructive to life without the compensation of a final enhancement, for they limit the sexual part of love to the task of continuing the species, and the part of love in human life to a single relationship. Those couples who are unable or unwilling to take upon themselves the responsibility for a new life are thus condemned to celibacy in marriage. Those couples who have once founded their marriage on love must maintain the relationship even without love.

These demands are more ruthless to human nature than those opposed by Luther. Complete celibacy is easier than married celibacy. The needs of the soul are stronger than those of the senses. This ought not, however, to prevent the setting up of the strict demands if these were really conducive to a higher existence from the sexual point of view. But only one who disregards life’s reality (and the Christian is often such a one) can at the same time set up personal love as the ground of sexual morality and limit its rights within certain bounds of morality.

Personal love, as now developed by civilisation, has become so complicated, comprehensive, and involved that not only does it constitute in itself (independently of its mission to the race) a great asset in life, but it also raises or lowers the value of all else. It has acquired a new significance besides its original one: that of bearing the flame of life from generation to generation. No one calls him immoral who—disappointed in his love—abstains from continuing the race in his marriage; nor would the couple be called immoral who continue in a marriage made happy by love, although it has shown itself to be childless. But in both these cases, the parties concerned follow their subjective feelings at the cost of the race and treat their love as an end in itself. The right already granted to the individuals in these cases at the cost of the race will in future be extended more and more in proportion as the significance of love grows. On the other hand, the new morality will demand of love an ever greater voluntary limitation of its rights, during the times that a new life claims it, as well as voluntary or compulsory renunciation of the right to produce new lives, under conditions which would render them of less value.