25.  “The Adam and Eve of the New Gospel of Concubinage.”

This is the honorary title which Catholics bestow upon Martin Luther and Catherine von Bora, who were married June 13, 1525, during the Peasants’ War.  Luther was forty-two years old at the time and his bride past twenty-six.  She had left the cloister two years before her marriage, and had found employment during that time in the home of one of the citizens of Wittenberg.  Their first child, Hans, was born June 7, 1526.

The grounds on which Catholics object to this marriage are, chiefly, three.  In the first place, they declare the marriage the outcome of an impure relation which had existed between Luther and Catherine prior to their marriage.  The marriage had virtually become a matter of necessity, to prevent greater scandal.  Moreover, in this impure relationship Luther with his lascivious and lustful mind, in which fleshly desires were continually raging, had been the prime mover.  The second ground on which Catholics object to Luther’s marriage is, because Luther held professedly low views of the virtue of chastity and the state of matrimony.  He had stripped matrimony of its sacramental character, and regarded it as a mere physical necessity and a social and civil contract.  Thirdly, Catholics criticize Luther’s marriage because it was entered into by both the contracting parties in violation of a sacred vow:  Luther had been a monk and Catherine a nun, both sworn to perpetual celibacy.

Moral cleanness is indelibly stamped upon hundreds of pages of Luther’s writings.  The Sixth Commandment in its wider application to the mutual relation of the sexes and the sexual condition of the individual was to Luther the solemn voice of God by which the holy and wise Creator guards and protects the fountains whence springs human life.  “Because there is among us,” he says, “such a shameful mixture and the very dregs of all kinds of vice and lewdness, this commandment is also directed against all manner of impurity, whatever it may be called; and not only is the external act forbidden, but every kind of cause, incitement, and means, so that the heart, the lips, and the whole body may be chaste and afford no opportunity, help, or persuasion for impurity.  And not only this, but that we may also defend, protect, and rescue wherever there is danger and need; and give help and counsel, so as to maintain our neighbor’s honor.  For wherever you allow such a thing when you could prevent it, or connive at it as if it did not concern you, you are as truly guilty as the one perpetrating the deed.  Thus it is required, in short, that every one both live chastely himself and help his neighbor do the same.” (Large Catechism, p. 419.) The reason why God in the Sixth Commandment refers to only one form of sexual impurity Luther states correctly thus:  “He expressly mentions adultery, because among the Jews it was a command and appointment that every one must be married.  Therefore also the young were early married, so that the state of celibacy was held in small esteem, neither were public prostitution and lewdness tolerated as now.  Therefore adultery was the most common form of unchastity among them.” (Ibid.)