it only to bid defiance to the devil and his world.”
In the closing sentence he aims his last bolt at the monk’s sense of honour: “It is merely a question of one little hour of shame to be succeeded by years of honour. May Christ, our Lord, impart His grace so that this letter … may bring forth fruit to the glory of His name and word, Amen.”
The letter was not intended merely for the unimportant person to whom it was addressed, and whose subsequent marriage with the daughter of a poor tailor’s widow in Torgau did not render him any the more famous. Publicity was the object aimed at in this writing, which was at once printed in German and Latin and distributed that it might “bear fruit.” The lengthier “Epistola gratulatoria to one about to marry,” immediately reprinted in German, was despatched by Luther’s Wittenberg friend Bugenhagen at the time of Reissenbusch’s wedding. It had been agreed upon to utilise the action of Reissenbusch for all it was worth in the propaganda in favour of the breaking of vows and priestly celibacy.
Luther was then in the habit of employing the strongest and most extravagant language in order to show the need of marriage in opposition to the celibacy practised by the priests and monks. It is only with repulsion that one can follow him here.
“It is quite true,” he says, in 1522, to the German people, “that whoever does not marry must misconduct himself … for God created man and woman to be fruitful and multiply. But why is not fornication obviated by marriage? For where no extraordinary grace is vouchsafed, nature must needs be fruitful and multiply, and if not in marriage, where will it find its satisfaction save in harlotry or even worse sins?”[297] Luther carefully refrained from mentioning the countless number who were able to control the impulses of nature without in any way touching the moral filth to which, in his cynicism, he is so fond of referring. What he said filled with indignation those who were zealous for the Church, and called forth angry rejoinders, especially in view of the countless numbers, particularly of women, to whom marriage was denied owing to social conditions.
It is true that after such strong outbursts as the above, Luther would often moderate his language. Thus he says, shortly after the utterance just quoted: “I do not wish to disparage virginity nor to tempt people away from it to the conjugal state. Let each one do as he is able and as he feels God has ordained for him. … The state of chastity is probably better on earth as having less of trouble and care, and not for its own sake only, but in order to allow one to preach and wait upon the Word of God, as St. Paul says 1 Corinthians vii. 34.”[298]
But then he continues, following up the idea which possesses him: “He who desires to live single undertakes an impossible struggle”; such people become “full of harlotry and all impurity of the flesh, and at last drown themselves therein and fall into despair; therefore such a vow is invalid, being contrary to the Word and work of God.”[299] Most of the younger religious, he declares elsewhere in a description which is as repulsive as it is untrue, were unable to control themselves, for it is not possible to take from fire its power of burning; among them, and the clergy, there prevailed “either harlotry under the name of a spiritual and chaste life, or an impure, unwilling, wretched, forlorn chastity, so that the wretchedness is greater than anyone could believe or tell.”[300]
What Luther says would leave us under the impression—to put the most charitable interpretation upon his words—that he had lived in sad surroundings; yet what we know of the Augustinian monasteries at Erfurt and Wittenberg affords as little ground for such an assumption as the conditions prevailing in the other friaries, whether Franciscan or Dominican, with which he was acquainted. He speaks again and again as though he knew nothing of the satisfaction with their profession which filled whole multitudes who were faithful to their vows, and which was the result of serious discipline and a devout mind. He goes on: “They extol chastity loudly, but live in the midst of impurity. … These pious foundations and convents, where the faith [according to his teaching] is not practised stoutly and heartily,”[301] must surely be gates of hell. Those who refrain from marriage for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven are, he considers, “so rare, that among a thousand men there is scarcely to be found one, for they are a special miracle of God’s own.”[302] He who enters a monastery, he writes (not in the least afraid of speaking as though this had been his own experience), can, in reality, never avoid sinning against his vow. The Pope leaves such a one to be, as it were, burnt and roasted in the fire; he accordingly might well be compared to the sacrifice which the children of Israel offered to Moloch the fiery idol. “What a Sodom and Gomorrha,” he cries in another passage, “has the devil set up by such laws and vows, making of that rare gift chastity a thing of utter wretchedness. Neither public houses of ill fame, nor indeed any form of allurement to vice, is so pernicious as are these vows and commandments invented by Satan himself.”[303] Such are his words in his “Postils,” written for general, practical use.
His “larger Catechism” was also used as a means to render popular his most extravagant polemics on this subject. The sixth Commandment makes of chastity a duty, and Christ’s counsel of voluntary continence was to serve for the preserving and honouring of this very command. Yet Luther says: “By this commandment all vows of unmarried chastity are condemned, and all poor, enslaved consciences which have been deceived by their monastic vows are thereby permitted, nay ordered, to pass from the unchaste to the conjugal state, seeing that even though the monastic life were in other particulars divine, it is not in their power to preserve their chastity intact.”[304] Thus “the married state” is, at least, according to this passage, prescribed for all without exception in the Ten Commandments.
Still further to strengthen his seductive appeals to the clergy and religious, Luther, as he himself informs us, advised those who were unable to marry openly “at least to wed their cook secretly.”[305]
To the Prince-Abbots he gave the advice that on account of the laws of the Empire they should, for the time being, “take a wife in secret,” “until God, the Lord, shall dispose matters otherwise.” In 1523 he advised all the Knights of the Teutonic Order, who were vowed to chastity, “not to worry” about their “weakness and sin” even though they had contracted some “illicit connections”; such connections contracted outside of matrimony were “less sinful” than to “take a lawful wife” with the consent of a Council, supposing such a permission were given.[306] This last letter, too, was at once printed by Luther for distribution.[307]
His spirit of defiance led him to clothe his demands in outrageous forms. On one occasion he declared in language resembling that which he made use of concerning the laws of fasting: “Even though a man has no mind to take a wife he ought, nevertheless, to do so in order to spite and vex the devil and his doctrine.”[308]
The Fathers of the Church accordingly found little favour with him when they required of the clergy, monks and nuns, not merely the observance of celibacy, but also the use of the means enjoined by asceticism for the preservation of chastity; or when they betrayed their preference for the vow of chastity, though without by any means disparaging marriage. They quoted what Our Lord had said of this doctrine: “He that can take it, let him take it” (Matt. xix. 12). The Fathers, in the spirit of St. Paul, who, as one “having obtained mercy of the Lord,” joyfully acquiesced in His “Counsel” of chastity (1 Cor. vii. 25), frequently advocated the doctrine of holy continence. But Luther asks: Of what use were their penitential practices for the preservation of their chastity to the Fathers, even to Augustine, Jerome, Benedict, Bernard, etc., since they themselves allow that they were constantly troubled by temptations of the flesh? In his opinion, as we already know, the attacks of sensuality, the movements of the carnal man and the enduring sense of our own concupiscence are really sins.
Jerome in particular, the zealous advocate of virginity, received at Luther’s hands the roughest treatment. This saint is erroneously reckoned among the Fathers of the Church; he is of no account at all except for the histories he compiled; he was madly in love with the virgin Eustochium; his writings give no proof of faith or true religion; he had not the least idea of the difference between the law and the Gospel, and writes of it as a blind man might write of colour, etc. His invitations to the monastic life are described by Luther as impious, unbelieving and sacrilegious. Scoffing at the Saint’s humble admission of his temptations in his old age and the severe mortifications