“Just as the sun has no power to stop shining, so also is it implanted in human nature, whether male or female, to be fruitful. That God makes exceptions of some, as, for instance, on the one hand of the bodily infirm and impotent, and on the other of certain exalted natures, must be regarded in the same light as other miracles.... Therefore it is likewise not my will that such should marry.”[755]
“A man cannot dispense with a wife for this reason: The natural instinct to beget children is as deeply implanted as that of eating and drinking.” Hence it is that God formed the human body in the manner He did, which Luther thereupon proceeds to describe to his readers in detail.[756]
“Before marriage we are on fire and rave after a woman.... St. Jerome writes much of the temptations of the flesh. Yet that is a trivial matter. A wife in the house will remedy that malady. Eustochia [Eustochium] might have helped and counselled Jerome.”[757]
One sentence of Luther’s, which, as it stands, scarcely does honour to the female sex, runs as follows: “The Word and work of God is quite clear, viz. that women were made to be either wives or prostitutes.”[758]
By this statement, which so easily lends itself to misunderstanding, Luther does not mean to put women in the alternative of choosing either marriage or vice. In another passage of the same writing he says distinctly, what he repeats also elsewhere: “It is certain that He [God] does not create any woman to be a prostitute.” Still, it is undeniable that in the above passage, in his recommendation of marriage, he allows himself to be carried away to the use of untimely language.—In others of the passages cited he modifies his brutal proclamation of the force of the sexual craving, and the inevitable necessity of marriage, by statements to quite another effect, though these are scarcely noticeable amid the wealth of words which he expends in favour of man’s sensual nature; for instance, he speaks of the “holy virgins,” who “live in the flesh as though not of the flesh, thanks to God’s sublime grace.”[759] “The grace of chastity”[760] was, he admits, sometimes bestowed by God, yet he speaks of the person who possesses it as a “prodigy of God’s own”;[761] such a one it is hard to find, for such a man is no “natural man.”[762] Such extravagant stress laid on the fewness of these exceptions might, however, be refuted from his own words; for instance, he urges a woman whose husband is ill to do her best with the ordinary grace of God bestowed on her as on all others, and endure with patience the absence of marital intercourse. “God is much too just to rob you of your husband by sickness in this way without on the other hand taking away the wantonness of the flesh, if you on your part tend the sick man faithfully.”[763]
That for most men it is more advisable to marry than to practise continence had never been questioned for a moment by Catholics, and if Luther had been speaking merely to the majority of mankind, as some have alleged he was, his very opponents could not but have applauded him. It is, however, as impossible to credit him with so moderate a recommendation as it is to defend another theory put forward by Protestants, viz. that his sole intention was to point out “that the man in whom the sexual instinct is at work cannot help being sensible of it.”
His real view, as so frequently described by himself, is linked up to some extent with his own personal experiences after he had abandoned the monastic life. It can scarcely be by mere chance that a number of passages belonging here synchronise with his stay at the Wartburg, and that his admission to his friend Melanchthon (“I burn in the flames of my carnal desires ... ‘ferveo carne, libidine’”)[764] should also date from this time.
In an exposition often quoted from his course of sermons on Exodus, Luther describes with great exaggeration the violence and irresistibility of the carnal instinct in man, in order to conclude as usual that ecclesiastical celibacy is an abomination. His strange words, which might so readily be misunderstood, call for closer consideration than is usually accorded them; they, too, furnished a pretext for certain far-fetched charges against Luther.
With the Sixth Commandment, says Luther, God “scolds, mocks and derides us”; this Commandment shows that the world is full of “adulterers and adulteresses,” all are “whore-mongers”; on account of our lusts and sensuality God accounted us as such and so gave us the Sixth Commandment; to a man of good conduct it would surely be an insult to say: “My good fellow, see you keep your plighted troth!” God, however, wished to show us “what we really are.” “Though we may not be so openly before the world [i.e. adulterers and whore-mongers], yet we are so at heart, and, had we opportunity, time and occasion, we should all commit adultery. It is implanted in all men, and no one is exempt ... we brought it with us from our mother’s womb.”[765] Luther does not here wish to represent adultery as a universal and almost inevitable vice, or to minimise its sinfulness. Here, as so often elsewhere, he perceives he has gone too far and thereupon proceeds to explain his real meaning. “I do not say that we are so in very deed, but that such is our inclination, and it is the heart that God searches.” Luther is quite willing to admit: “There are certainly many who do not commit fornication, but lead quite a good life”; “this is due either to God’s grace, or to fear of Master Hans” (the hangman). “Our reason tells us that fornication, adultery and other sins are wrong.... All these laws are decreed by nature itself,” just like the Commandment not to commit murder.[766] “But we are so mad,” “when once our passions are aroused, that we forget everything.” Hence we cannot but believe, that “even though our monks vowed chastity twice over,” they were adulterers in God’s sight. The conclusion he arrives at is: “Such being our nature, God forbids no one to take a wife.”