How well Luther succeeded in establishing the fable of the scorn in which the married state was held in the Middle Ages is evident from several recent utterances of learned Protestants.
One Church historian goes so far, in his vindication of the Reformer’s statements concerning the mediæval “contempt felt for womankind,” as actually to lay the blame for Luther’s sanction of polygamy on the low, “mediæval view of the nature of matrimony.” Another theologian, a conservative, fancies that he can, even to-day, detect among “Romanists” the results of the mediæval undervaluing of marriage. According to Catholics “marriage is not indeed forbidden to everyone—for otherwise where would the Church find new children?—but nevertheless is looked at askance as a necessary evil.” Perfection in Catholic theory consists in absolute ignorance of all that concerns marriage. One scholar declares the Church before Luther’s day had taught, that “marriage had nothing to do with love”; “of the ethical task [of marriage] and of love not a trace is to be found” in the teaching of the Middle Ages. An eminent worker in the field of the history of dogma also declares, in a recent edition of his work, that, before Luther’s day, marriage had been “a sort of concession to the weak”; thanks only to Luther, was it “freed from all ecclesiastical tutelage to become the union of the sexes, as instituted by God [his italics], and the school of highest morality.” Such assertions, only too commonly met with, are merely the outcome of the false ideas disseminated by Luther himself concerning the Church of olden days. The author of the fable that woman and marriage were disdained in the Middle Ages scored a success, of which, could he have foreseen it, he would doubtless have been proud.
Two publications by Professors of the University of Wittenberg have been taken as clear proof of how low an opinion the Catholic Middle Ages had of woman and marriage. Of these publications one, however, a skit on the devil in Andr. Meinhardi’s Latin Dialogues of 1508—which, of the two, would, in this respect, be the most incriminating—has absolutely nothing to do with the mediæval Church’s views on marriage, but simply reproduces those of the Italian Humanists, though revealing that their influence extended even as far as Germany. It tells how even the devil himself was unable to put up with matrimony; since the difficulties of this state are so great, one of the speakers makes up his mind “never to marry, so as to be the better able to devote himself to study.” Despite this the author of the Dialogue entered the married state. The other publication is a discourse, in 1508, by Christopher Scheurl, containing a frivolous witticism at the expense of women, likewise due to Italian influence. This, however, did not prevent Scheurl, too, from marrying.[450] The truth is that the Italian Humanists’ “favourite subjects are the relations between the sexes, treated with the crudest realism, and, in connection with this, attacks on marriage and the family.”[451] At the same time it cannot be denied that individual writers, men influenced by anti-clerical Humanism, or ascetical theologians knowing nothing of the world, did sometimes speak of marriage in a manner scarcely fair to woman and did occasionally unduly exalt the state of celibacy.
Against such assertions some of Luther’s finest sayings on woman’s dignity deserve to be pitted.
Luther’s Discordant Utterances on the Value of Marriage in his Sermons and Writings.
Any objective examination of Luther’s attitude towards woman and marriage must reveal the fact, that he frequently seeks to invest Christian marriage, as he conceived it, with a religious character and a spiritual dignity. This he does in language witty and sympathetic, representing it as a close bond of love, though devoid of any sacramental character. Nor does he hesitate to use the noble imagery of the Church when describing his substitute for the Christian marriage of the past.
“It is no small honour for the married state,” he says in a sermon of 1536, “that God should represent it under the type and figure of the unspeakable grace and love which He manifests and bestows on us in Christ, and as the surest and most gracious sign of the intimate union between Himself and Christendom and all its members, a union than which nothing more intimate can be imagined.”[452]
In another sermon he praises the edification provided in the married state, when “man and wife are united in love and serve each other faithfully”; Luther invites them to thank God “that the married state is profitable alike to body, property, honour and salvation.” “What, however, is best of all in married life,” so he insists, “for the sake of which everything must be suffered and endured, is that God may give offspring and command us to train it in His service. This is earth’s noblest and most priceless work, because God loves nothing so well as to save souls.”[453]