The Reformers and Sexual Issues
Marriage
Sixteenth-century reformers rejected many features of medieval marriage practice. Like earlier critics—not all of them heretics—Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli deplored the prevalence of clandestine marriage and the Alexandrine theory of marriage by present consent alone, which made clandestine unions so easy to contract.
Luther insisted not only that marriage must be public, but that consent of the parents of both parties was essential for Christian marriage, a stance that Martin Bucer (1491-1551) strongly supported as well.[2052] Disobedience to one’s parents, Luther claimed, was rebellion against God. Christian authorities, Luther believed, should not merely forbid marriages contracted without parental consent, but should hold them invalid.[2053] Calvin agreed. Calvins legislation at Geneva included a provision that rescinded marriages contracted by young people without the blessings of their parents,[2054] [2055] while the marriage court that Zwingli established in Zurich also held such marriages invalid.®An even more basic break with the past was the resounding rejection by every major reformer of the Roman Catholic doctrine that marriage was a sacrament. Calvin knew that this belief had appeared during the medieval period (although he credited it erroneously to Pope Gregory VII). He denounced the notion as a corruption that arose from misunderstanding the reference in Eph. 5;32 to marriage as a mystery (St. Jerome had translated mysterion as sacramentum in the Vulgate). Moreover, Calvin observed, it was hardly consistent for Catholic theologians to maintain that marriage was a sacrament and then to vilify marital sex as unclean pollution and carnal filth. This, Calvin thought, was absurd; indeed, it verged on the grotesque.[2056] Luther also rejected the sacramentality of marriage and was, if anything, even more scornful of the teaching.
In his 1520 treatise On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Luther maintained that marriage was a product of the natural order and in no sense a sacrament of the Christian religion.[2057] Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560), whom Luther respected more than any other contemporary theologian, delighted his admirer by seconding his rejection of the sacramentality of marriage.[2058] Radical reformers, such as the Anabaptists, whom Luther emphatically did not admire, at least agreed with him on this point.[2059]Clerical Celibacy
Having rejected the belief that marriage was a sacrament, the reformers advocated abolition of clerical celibacy. The clergy ought to be free to marry, Luther declared in his address To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520). He characterized Catholic insistence on celibacy as tyrannical, arbitrary, and wanton, adding that celibacy was not God’s commandment and certainly not necessary for salvation.[2060] Calvin heartily agreed with the other reform leaders on this score:
Surely the forbidding of marriage to priests came about by an impious tyranny not only against God’s word but also against all equity. First, to forbid what the Lord left free was by no means lawful to men. Again, that the Lord expressly took care by his Word that this freedom should not be infringed upon is too clear to require a long proof.[2061]
Moreover, Calvin continued, celibacy, as a late development in Catholic practice, could not be justified by appeal to ancient custom or immemorial tradition.[2062] Not only was celibacy unsupported by scripture or ancient practice, but the reformers agreed that it engendered moral corruption. Priests and other clerics bound in theory to celibacy found the discipline in practice untenable, the reformers maintained. Hence Roman clerics often kept concubines or, even worse, indulged in unnatural sexual passions with other men. Ironically, Me- Ianchthon declared, celibacy did not promote sexual purity at all, since married persons were often more chaste than their celibate clergy.[2063] [2064] The sexual habits of the Roman Catholic clergy, according to reformers, were a sewer of iniquity, a scandal to the laity, and a threat of damnation to the clergy themselves. Bucer, too, considered it an offense against God to deny men the right to marry.13 Zwingli, like Bucer, maintained that the clergy had a perfect right to marry if they wished to, just as other Christians did. To deny them the exercise of that right was a perversion of Christian doctrine and moral order. The Reformation accordingly offered priests who lived with concubines the opportunity to regularize their domestic situations and to legitimize their offspring at the same time. It was an opportunity that sizable numbers of clerics accepted. It must have presented a sore temptation to many others who, for one reason or another, chose not to avail themselves of it.[2065] Luther, however, was no uncritical admirer of the married state. There was truth, he said, in the proverb that “It takes a brave man to wed a wife.” But although marriage might entail misery, the married man was still better off than his unwillingly celibate brother: “In any case marriage is preferable, for it is better to be unhappy without sinning than to sin without unhappiness, much less to sin and also be unhappy.”[2066] Sexual feelings, according to Luther, were inborn, part of our essential human nature. It was folly, he asserted, to talk of sexual feelings as if they were something voluntary: we experience sexual feelings, whether we want them or not. Men and women must learn to confront their sexuality and deal with it as an inescapable part of being human.[2067] Not only was it not shameful to feel sexual desire, but there was no intrinsic wrong in satisfying it, since sex was essential to human health.[2068] Marital Sex Both Luther and Calvin rejected the teaching that marital sex must be specifically directed toward procreation in order to be without sin. Calvin conceded that there might be some reason to believe that when married couples yielded to lust and had sex just for venereal pleasure they fell short of Christian perfection; but he added that God pardons whatever sin might be involved because of the value of holy matrimony. Bucer adopted a position similar to Calvin’s, but without some of the qualifications that Calvin insisted upon. It was blasphemy, Bucer maintained, to call marital sex sinful.[2070] Luther explicitly rejected Jerome’s condemnation of the married man who burned with sexual desire for his wife: The old teachers used to quote the heathen saying: ?The too-ardent lover commits adultery with his own wife.’ But a pagan said that and accordingly I pay it no heed and maintain that it is not true. No man can commit adultery with his own wife, unless he does not treat her as his wife or caresses her as if she were not his wife.[2071] Calvin, however, was unwilling to reject this time-honored formula, for he feared that to do so might leave the way open for wanton and unrestrained romping in the matrimonial bed. Instead, he admonished married couples to remember that their union was blessed by God and that they must therefore refrain from “uncontrolled and dissolute lust” in conjugal relations: Therefore let not married persons think that all things are permitted to them, but let each man have his own wife soberly, and each wife her own husband. So doing let them not admit anything at all that is unworthy of the honorableness and temperance of marriage. For it is fitting that thus wedlock contracted in the Lord be recalled to measure and modesty so as not to wallow in extreme Iewdness.[2072] Marital sex was virtuous in Calvin’s eyes only so long as the couple observed the limits of modesty and propriety. Even so, Calvin considered marriage “a good and holy ordinance of God” and indignantly rejected the opinions of those who described marital sex as unclean and a source of defilement.[2073] Anabaptists and other radical reformers saw marital sex in much the same way that Calvin did. Although the major reformers demoted marriage from sacramental status, they nonetheless considered it a great good, the spiritually preferable state of life for most people in this world.[2076] Sex, they believed, was a necessary part of any marriage. Marital sex both symbolized and embodied conjugal affection.[2077] The virtue of sex in marriage, as the reformers viewed things, was not that it led to procreation, but rather that it expressed and increased the couples love for one another. It was the affectionate and loving relationship between married persons that constituted the good of marriage and lay at the heart of the marital state. Procreation, in their scheme of things, was a second-order virtue in married life.[2078] Extramarital Sex While the reformers considered marital sex blameless, they were no more prepared than their Roman counterparts to countenance sex outside of marriage. Indeed, the reformers and their followers treated nonmarital sex with considerable harshness and had no patience with the resigned tolerance of some Catholic writers. Fornication, Luther declared, was evil: it was bad for body, soul, family, fortune, and honor.[2079] Zwingli also opposed sexual license and made seduction subject to stiff penalties at Zurich.[2080] Calvin, to be sure, thought that extramarital sex had a place, of sorts, in the scheme of salvation. The sordid squalor of extramarital sex, particularly with prostitutes, he argued, made manifest the fallen condition of mankind. Some of Calvin’s Puritan followers took a considerably less benign view. They saw adultery and prostitution as both physical and spiritual offenses that merited stern retribution, physical and spiritual, in this life as well as hereafter. Fornication or adultery, they believed, resulted from serious mental and spiritual shortcomings. Christians must keep their hearts and minds pure and avoid situations that might lure them to pursue fleshly desires outside of marriage. Those who yielded to sexual temptation or enticed others to yield deserved no mercy.[2082] Bucer argued that civil authorities ought to punish adultery by death. Calvins followers added that if civil authorities failed to do their duty in this regard, God would intervene directly. The Lord demanded that sexual sins receive exemplary punishment in this world so as to deter others from similar behavior. Thus Samuel Saxey, who published his Straunge and Wonderfull Example of the Iudgement of almighty God, shewed upon two adulterous persons in London in 1583, related the cautionary tale of a couple who kept an adulterous rendezvous in St. Bride’s Church, whereupon a fire broke out and burned the pair to death. Divine judgment had decreed, according to Saxey, that the couple who had been consumed by the fires of illicit passion must then be incinerated physically. Saxey also found spiritual uplift in the case of a prostitute hanged for adultery. Her fate, he maintained, was not at all disproportionate to her offense, and, moreover, it might dissuade others from wallowing in carnal sin.34 But Saxey s views were puritan and extreme. It was, in fact, more common practice in Calvinist circles to imprison adulterers and prostitutes than to burn or hang them.35 Divorce and Remarriage Reformers further differed from their opponents in their approach to divorce and remarriage. While Roman Catholic canonists and theologians, as we have seen, had severely restricted the grounds on which marriages could be dissolved and allowed annulments only when the validity of supposed marriages was seriously in doubt, sixteenth-century reformers Contenaneed the outright dissolution of failed marriages and allowed the innocent party to remarry. This difference resulted from the reformers’ rejection of the sacramentality of marriage. Since Luther, Calvin, and others denied that marriage was a sacrament, they felt less constrained than writers of the Roman persuasion in determining when and under what circumstances a marriage between Christians might legitimately be dissolved. Luther was particularly indignant about traditional canon law on marriage and divorce: The cursed papal law [he wrote] has created such confusion and distress, while the negligence of both the spiritual and temporal powers has caused such awful abuses and dreadful situations, that I would much prefer to ignore the whole problem and not to hear about it.36 Despite this, he plunged straightway into a scathing denunciation of the errors and hypocrisy of canon law on divorce, which he described as “A net for gold and silver and a noose for the soul. ”37 While he lamented the breakup of marriages and denied that he was in favor of divorce, Luther nonetheless maintained that in some situations not only was divorce unavoidable, but remarriage was also to be encouraged, since the natural appetite for sex made it unlikely that the couple would be able to live apart in chastity.38 Luther specified some grounds for divorce that carried a right or even a duty of remarriage: when the partners were unable to have intercourse with one another, when one party 31Schnucker, “Position puritaine,” p. 1380. 35Bellamy, Crime and Public Order, p. 166. Luther also believed that the death penalty should be imposed on adulterers, and regretted that authorities were unlikely to implement this ideal; Vom ehelichen Leben, in WA 10/2:289. 38Luther, Vom ehelichen Leben, in WA 10/2:275: “Denn der lamer durch Bepstlich verdampte gesetz alsso Schendlich Verwyrret ist, datzu durch hynlessig regiment, beyde gcystlichs und welltlichs sehwerts sso viel grewlicher missbreuch und irriger felle sich drynnen begeben haben, das ich nicht gern dreyn sehe, noch gern davon hore.” 37Luther, Vom ehelichen Leben, in WA 10/2:280: “Unnd tzwar er sie auch selb nicht fester noch Stereker hellt, den hiss man sie mit gollt und silher umbstosse, Und sie auch nur datzu erfunden sind, das sie gelltnetz und seelstrick seyn sollten, 1 Pet. 2.” 38Luther, Vom ehelichen Leben, in WA 10/2:280. committed adultery, or refused to have sexual relations or interposed so many objections to sex that marital relations became a struggle, then the couple ought to divorce and the partners should enter new marriages in the hope that these might work out more satisfactorily.[2083] Luther also favored retaining the canonical grounds of saevitia, but for separation only, without the right of remarriage by either partner. A man who found himself with a shrewish mate, said Luther, had no claim to remarry, since his wife, disagreeable as she might otherwise be, had not refused to have sex with him. He might well be justified in separating from her, lest he yield to the temptation to do something worse, but since he had not been deprived of conjugal rights, he could not remarry in order to satisfy his sexual desires—“He who wants the heat must put up with the smoke.”[2084] The same reasoning presumably applied to battered wives as to henpecked husbands. Whereas Luther grounded his teachings about divorce and remarriage on elemental feelings about sex, and rejected Catholic views on the matter with fiery defiance, Calvin was cooler and more reasoned in the exposition of his divorce doctrine. Calvin, like Luther, would allow divorce under certain circumstances, but for him the right to remarry following divorce was not so much a matter of sexual need as of freedom of conscience. Religious judges had no right to require a man or woman whose spouse committed adultery either to continue in a broken marriage or to endure involuntary celibacy. Religious authorities, Calvin noted, could not possibly restrain every vice. They must take account of what people are able to do and not impose unreasonable or impossible limitations on personal conduct, especially limitations that are nowhere prescribed by Scripture.[2085] Other reform leaders were also prepared to countenance divorce and remarriage. Buccr argued that the Scriptures clearly authorized divorce on account of adultery. Like Zwingli, Bucer added that if either party suffered from incurable sexual impotence, leprosy, or insanity, civil authorities were justified in permitting divorce on those grounds as well.[2086] It was an essential condition of marriage, Bucer thought, that the spouses must maintain a common life. Catholics were wrong, he declared, in teaching that the marital bond persisted after a couple had separated.[2087] Accordingly, if either spouse deserted the other without cause, the innocent party had the right to remarry, according to Bucer.[2088] Moreover, since marital sex was also essential to married life, Bucer contended that if either partner persistently refused to have conjugal relations with the other, the couple were no longer married.[2089] Anabaptists and other radical reformers, however, considered these teachings as shocking departures from the revealed word of God. Divorce and remarriage might be permitted solely on grounds of adultery, according to them, and no other reason Couldjustify the dissolution of Christian marriage. True, if one party to a marriage deviated from the truths of Christian faith as the Anabaptists understood those truths, the other party might be obliged to sever their relationship, but that was shunning, not divorce, in the Anabaptist view of things.[2090] The Place of Women The positive value that many reformers attributed to human sexuality also led them to reject some misogynist tenets of medieval anthropology. Luther, as usual, was colorful and forthright in stating his views. Earlier writers, he declared, spoke of women as sources of irritation, annoyance, and temptation, but nonetheless necessary for all of that. This attitude, Luther declared, verged on blasphemy, for womankind was a deliberate creation of God and had not sprung spontaneously into being. Hence to grumble and complain that women were unfortunate and irritating aberrations in a man’s world was to criticize the work of the Creator. “But I suppose,” he added, “that if women were to write books, they would say much the same sorts of things about men.”[2091] Neither sex, however, has any monopoly on virtue. We are what God made us and neither man nor woman ought to disparage the Creator’s work: Thus we are: I a man, you a woman, just as God made us, to be honored and respected as Godly work. Man has no right to despise or scoff at woman’s body or character, nor has woman any right to denigrate man. Rather each should honor the appearance and body of the other as a divine good work, an achievement that is pleasing even to God Himself.[2092] Such words as these should not be taken to mean, however, that reform leaders necessarily saw women as men’s equals. For Bucer, Calvin, and others women remained the weaker sex, frail, vain, and lightheaded, more prone than men to succumb to sexual temptation. Hence women must be guided and controlled by their fathers and husbands lest they stray into foolishness and sin.49