Luther, vol. 4 of 6

by Hartmann Grisar

By his patronage of polygamy, forced on him by his wrong interpretation of the Bible, Luther put the crowning touch on his contempt for Christian marriage.[466] This was to relinquish the position of privilege in which Christianity had established marriage, when, following the Creator’s intention, it insisted on monogamy.

Birth of the New Views on Marriage during the Controversy on the Vow of Chastity.

How did Luther reach his opinion and succeed in endowing it with credibility and life? A glance at its birth and growth will give us an instructive insight into Luther’s manner of proceeding.

He had already long been engaged in his struggle with “Popish abuses” and had already set up all the essential points of his new theology, before becoming in the least conscious of the supposed contempt in which marriage was held by the Roman Church. In his exposition of the Ten Commandments, in 1518, he still speaks of it in the respectful language of his earlier years; in his sermon on the Married State, in 1519, he still terms it a Sacrament, without hinting in any way that it had hitherto been considered disreputable. Whether he uses the term Sacrament in its traditional meaning we do not, of course, know. At any rate, he says: “Matrimony is a Sacrament, an outward, holy sign of the greatest, most sacred, worthy and exalted thing that ever has been, or ever will be, viz. of the union of the Divine and human nature in Christ.”[467] Enumerating the spiritual advantages of marriage, which counteract the “sinful lusts therewith intermingled,” he expressly appeals to the “Doctors” of the Church, and the three benefits they perceived in matrimony; “first, marriage is a Sacrament,” “secondly, it is a bond of fidelity,” “thirdly, it brings offspring, which is the end and principal office of marriage”; a further benefit must be added, viz. the “training of the offspring in the service of God.”[468]

In his book “On the Babylonish Captivity” (1520) he has already arrived at the explicit denial to marriage of the name and character of a sacrament.

But it was only in the war he waged against his own vow of chastity that the idea arose in his mind, and even then only gradually, that the true value and excellence of marriage had never hitherto been recognised. The more he sought for theological grounds on which to prove the worthlessness of religious celibacy and the nullity of the vow of chastity, the more deeply he persuaded himself that proofs existed in abundance of the utter perversity of the prevailing opinions on matrimony. He began to impute to the Church extravagant views on virginity, of which neither he nor anyone else had ever thought. He now accused her of teaching the following: That virginity was the only state in which God could be served perfectly; that marriage was forbidden to the clergy because it was disreputable and a thing soiled with sin; finally, that family life with its petty tasks must be regarded as something degrading, while woman herself, to whom the chief share in these tasks belongs and who, moreover, so often tempts man to sins of incontinence, is a contemptible creature.

All these untruths concerning the ancient Church were purely the outcome of Luther’s personal polemics.

His system of attack exhibits no trace of any dispassionate examination of the testimonies of antiquity. But his false and revolting charges seemed some sort of justification for his attack on religious vows and clerical celibacy. From such theoretical charges there was but a step to charges of a more practical character and to his boundless exaggerations concerning the hideous vices supposed to have been engendered by the perversion of the divinely appointed order, and to have devastated the Church as a chastisement for her contempt for marriage.

In the second edition of the sermon of 1519 on the Married State he places virginity on at least an equal footing with matrimony. Towards the end of the sermon he (like the earlier writers) calls matrimony “a noble, exalted and blessed state” if rightly observed, but otherwise “a wretched, fearful and dangerous” one; he proceeds: Whoever bears this in mind “will know what to think of the sting of the flesh, and, possibly, will be as ready to accept the virginal state as the conjugal.”[469] Even during his Wartburg days, when under the influence of the burning spirit of revolt, and already straining at the vows which bound him, he still declared in the theses he sent Melanchthon, that “Marriage is good, but virginity better” (“Bonum coniugium, melior virginitas”),[470] a thesis, which, like St. Paul, he bases mainly on the immunity from worldly cares. This idea impressed Melanchthon so deeply, that he re-echoes it in his praise of virginity in the “Apology for the Confession of Augsburg”: “We do not make virginity and marriage equal. For, as one gift is better than another, prophecy better than eloquence, strategy better than agriculture, eloquence better than architecture, so virginity is a gift excelling marriage.”[471]