In his remarks on this subject in 1527 he openly accused the Papists of saying that “whoever is desirous of having to do with God and spiritual matters must, whether man or woman, remain unmarried,” and “thus,” so he says, “they have scared the young from matrimony, so that now they are sunk in fornication.”[408]
At first Luther only ventured on the charge, that matrimony had been “de facto” forbidden, though it had not actually been declared sinful, by the Pope;[409] by forbidding the monks to marry he had fulfilled the prophecy in 1 Timothy iv. 1 ff., concerning the latter times, when many would fall away from the faith and forbid people to marry. “The Pope forbids marriage under the semblance of spirituality.”[410] “Squire Pope has forbidden marriage, because one had to come who would prohibit marriage. The Pope has made man to be no longer man, and woman to be no longer woman.”[411]
As years passed Luther went further; forgetful of his admission that the Pope had not made matrimony sinful, he exclaimed: To him and to his followers marriage is a sin. The Church had hitherto treated marriage as something “non-Christian”;[412] the married state she had “handed over to the devil”;[413] her theologians look down on it as a “low, immoral sort of life,”[414] and her religious can only renounce it on the ground that it is a kind of legalised “incontinence.”[415]
In reality, however, religious, when taking their vow, merely acted on the Christian principle which St. Augustine expresses as follows: Although “all chastity, conjugal as well as virginal, has its merit in God’s sight,” yet, “the latter is higher, the former less exalted.”[416] They merely renounced a less perfect state for one more perfect; they could, moreover, appeal not only to 1 Cor. vii. 33, where the Apostle speaks in praise of the greater freedom for serving God which the celibate state affords, but even to Luther himself who, in 1523, had interpreted this very passage in the same sense, and that with no little warmth.[417]
His later and still more extravagant statements concerning the Catholic view of marriage can hardly be taken seriously; his perversion of the truth is altogether too great.
He says, that married people had not been aware that God “had ordained” that state, until at last God, by His special Grace, and before the Judgment Day, had restored the dignity of matrimony no less than that of the secular authority and the preaching office, “through His Word [i.e. through Luther’s preaching].” The blame for this state of things went back very far, for the Fathers, like Jerome, “had seen in matrimony mere sensuality,” and for this reason had disparaged it.[418]
The Prophet Daniel had foreseen the degradation of marriage under the Papacy: It is of the Papal Antichrist “that Daniel says [xi. 37], that he will wallow in the unnatural vice which is the recompense due to contemners of God (Rom. i.[27]), in what we call Italian weddings and silent sin. For matrimony and a right love and use of women he shall not know. Such are the horrible abominations prevailing under Pope and Turk.”[419] “The same prophet,” he writes elsewhere, “says that Antichrist shall stand on two pillars, viz.: idolatry and celibacy. The idol he calls Mausim, thus using the very letters which form the word Mass.” The Pope had deluded people, on the one hand by the Mass, and, on the other, “by celibacy, or the unmarried state, fooling the whole world with a semblance of sanctity. These are the two pillars on which the Papacy rests, like the house of the Philistines in Samson’s time. If God chose to make Luther play the part of Samson, lay hold on the pillars and shake them, so that the house fall on the whole multitude, who could take it ill? He is God and wonderful are His ways.”[420]
Luther appeals expressly to the Pope’s “books” in which marriage is spoken of as a “sinful state.”[421] 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.”[422] “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.”[423]
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.