The Ark

The founder of German Protestantism, Martin Luther, rejected his vows of celibacy and married a former nun in 1525.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

He preached and wrote about the sexual urge (libido), and pronounced it good and essential to life. The Catholic Church denounced him as a lustful heretic.

THEME

Rachael Kohn: When you hear the word 'libido', forget about Sigmund Freud, you should be thinking about Martin Luther!

On The Ark today, we'll introduce you to the man who really put 'the libido' on the map, and it wasn't the father of psychoanalysis. It was the father of German Protestantism, Martin Luther.

In fact, Luther's libido was of such interest to him that he thought it time to take it in hand, as it were, and accept it as God-given.

Merry Wiesner-Hanks from the University of Wisconsin has been a guest of Ormond College at the University of Melbourne, and is a specialist in gender studies. Recently she focused on Martin Luther and the 16th century.

Merry Wiesner-Hanks: It's a culture in which patriarchy in its narrow sense, meaning the fact that older men have power over everyone else, younger men, their own children and their wives and daughters, is simply the accepted norm. But it's also speaking more narrowly of Europe.

It's a culture in terms of sexuality in which people felt that both men and women had a sex drive and then in fact if they thought about medicine, that the female sex drive was necessary in order to effect procreation.

My students or other people, when they think back on the past ages, they sort of have a nation that if the 19th century was Victorian, then the 16th century had to be even more Victorian, and people didn't understand anything about female sexuality or they didn't think that women had any kind of sexual desire.

That's absolutely not the case for the 16th century, when people thought that the only way that you would have an effective act of sexual intercourse, meaning one that would produce a child, is if both male and female desire was awakened. And so that there was interest in and great concern with both male and female desire and sexuality or sex drive. Because people are very interested in having children.

Rachael Kohn: But of course that was a time when the Devil was everywhere, making mischief in people's lives. Martin Luther himself was a monk who had rejected that life, and married an ex-nun, and of course his critics spoke about him as someone in the thrall of the Devil, that he was a lustful heretic. So lust and libido was sometimes attributed to the Devilish machinations of the Dark Angel.

Merry Wiesner-Hanks: Indeed it was. And in fact his critics, including Thomas More, who writes very scathingly about Luther, he describes, in facts attributes the entire Protestant Reformation to Luther's own libido, here's a guy who couldn't control his sex drive, so he gives up his life as a monk and runs off and marries a nun, which More talks about in fact as incest, because the nun, Katharina von Bora had been married to Christ before, and Luther was in some way a brother of Christ, so they were a brother and sister, spiritually. Therefore their marriage was not only terrible in terms of people who had broken their vows, but was incest.

And other Catholic writers at the time, really attribute the whole thing, the whole Protestant Reformation as simply to be attributed to Luther's own sex drive. And there are cartoons, scathing cartoons, depicting Luther's sex drive in very graphic ways.

Rachael Kohn: Yes, I think Martin Luther and his wife Kate, were supposed to have in their union, produced the anti-Christ.

Merry Wiesner-Hanks: Indeed. That's part of Catholic propaganda we would call it now, Catholic pamphlets at the time.

Those are matched by Protestant pamphlets in fact depicting sexuality in the monasteries, Luther describes homosexuality in fact as something that originated at the court in Rome at the Papal court in Rome, and the Germans he says didn't know very much about it until they learned about this from the dreadful Italians.

And in fact for Luther himself when he's talking about sexual desire of the libido, lust, he clearly says over and over again, that lust is something that comes from the Fall. In other words there was no lust originally in the Garden of Eden, he says there was sex. Adam and Eve had sexual relations with one another, and there would have been children had there been enough time before the Fall, but that those sexual relations were motivated by kind of affection, by love to some degree, but not desire.

So that desire or libido, (and I keep trying to use the word libido, because that's the word he uses) libido was something that came into human nature through the Fall. So it was something that originated with the Devil, indeed. Procreation is created by God.

Rachael Kohn: Mary, so Luther himself was interested in the libido? Did he actually spend much time reflecting on it?

Merry Wiesner-Hanks: Yes, he talked about it, and because he wrote so many things, and his Collected Works are 90-some volumes in German, gigantic volumes. The man never had an unpublished thought.

He reflects on the libido in sermons that he gives in German to people every day congregations, he reflects on it in lectures that he gives to his students, he reflects on it in letters that he writes to his learned friends, he reflects on it in a letter that he wrote to women urging them to leave the convent. So in many different places he thinks about this.

It's there in the very earliest of his writings from the early 1520s when he decides that because of the power of libido in both men and women vows, monastic vows are simply impossible to maintain for all but a tiny, tiny share of people who have the special God-given gift of chastity. But he sees that group of people as so small that vows are something that are worse than useless. They're requiring people to do something that they simply cannot do. He compares at one point, trying to withstand the sex drive as attempting not to urinate. It's just as impossible.

He also compares the sex drive also though to epilepsy and to leprosy, that it's something that came about just as disease did, as a result of the Fall.

Rachael Kohn: Gosh, that certainly has a very different connotation. It almost seems to go back to the Christian abhorrence of sexuality as some kind of impurity.

Merry Wiesner-Hanks: It does. He has to walk a fine line here, because procreation and sexual relations, and he says this over and over again, these are God-given. Sexual relations come from God, they're good things. However, they've been tainted by the Fall because they now have, or were motivated by the libido rather than by a more pure desire of husband-wife for one another.

He doesn't think that the Devil looks behind every sex act and motivates the libido in each of us today, but it comes from the fall. But procreation is, and this is where he does of course break with the Catholic tradition, it's God's plan for the universe for everyone, or almost everyone, and that trying to avoid that part of your nature is something that's not godly.

Rachael Kohn: Merry, much has been made of Luther's coarse language, his vulgarity, his frequent scatological references. What do you think they indicate about him?

Merry Wiesner-Hanks: Well first of all I think they indicate that that's the way that people talked in the 16th century, and wrote.

Again, including people like Thomas More or Erasmus, I mean the most highly learned people wrote in what language that we would now think of as vulgar and scatalogical, particularly when they were dealing with things that they saw as powerful or things for which they had powerful feelings. And that of course then comes to include one's religious opponents, for Luther and for many others, includes his remarks about the Jews, or the Turks, it is the way that Luther talks about the papacy, it's the way that his Catholic opponents talked about him. So that it's not specific to Luther, it's simply that people were perhaps a bit more forthright than we sometimes expect them to be. But it's not peculiar to him.

Rachael Kohn: So do you think Eric Erikson's psycho-analytic assessment of Luther in his famous book, Young Man Luther is not correct? I mean I think Erikson there portrays him as a repressed, neurotic and anal-retentive personality obsessed with his nether regions etc.

Merry Wiesner-Hanks: Well I guess I would say that I think Erikson would need to turn his eye then to everybody else in the 16th century and see how he would interpret that.

I think that he is perhaps a bit more coarse in his language than some of the other reformers, but I think part of that is because he was trained as a preacher, as a person who would be an effective communicator with normal, everyday people sitting or standing in churches. So part of the way that he talks is a kind of rhetorical way that you want to communicate with people, and so you use language that they understand.

Rachael Kohn: So Merry, does Luther strike you as a more healthy-minded person, someone who has wrested Christianity from the celibate, cloistered life of the Catholic monastery, and had a robust kind of appreciation of the sexual dimension of life. Is that how you see him?

Merry Wiesner-Hanks: To some degree I do. I should say that this work I was doing on Luther's notions of the libido, came about because a colleague of mine, Susan Karant-Nunn, who teaches at the University of Arizona and I just did a book of translations titled Luther on Women, but it's really Luther's writings on women and the family and sexuality. And both of us were not in the camp that sees the Protestant Reformation as kind of rescuing women from the terrible misogyny of the mediaeval Catholic church.

The Protestant Reformers were just as patriarchal or just as degrading of women or understanding of women in a degraded way, as their Catholic counterparts, so that there's not a great break in what we would understand as gender ideology with the Protestant Reformation. But the more we read of Luther, the more he kind of emerged as a more sympathetic figure than we expected him to be when we started out on this project. Part of that is his notions about sexuality, and also his intense feelings for his own family members.

Rachael Kohn: Yes, I'd like to ask you about his appreciation of his wife. Now I've read a bit about how he describes his wife, tends to be quite overblown about her positive attributes. Does his writing about his wife strike you as sincere? Can it be read as face value?

Merry Wiesner-Hanks: Well that's very difficult to say, because all we have of course are the writings themselves.

But because he wrote so much, say in contrast to somebody like the reformer John Calvin, who didn't write nearly as much, and who we don't know his private opinions about lots of things, Luther wrote a lot and he also, you may know, that many of his conversations at the dinner table were recorded by his admirers and students and other folks who happened to be sitting around the very large dinner table, because Luther and his wife lived in what had been the monastery where he was living, so it was often a very large household and a very large dinner table that they were all sitting around, because his admirers were so concerned to record everything that he said, there are these -

Rachael Kohn: The table-talk.

Merry Wiesner-Hanks: The table-talk, yes.

Rachael Kohn: Yes, quite spicy, too.

Merry Wiesner-Hanks: It's very spicy, and we have in the table-talk, sometimes there'll be three or four different people who record the same conversation.

It's by his admirers and by his students and so of course they're going to put him in the best possible light, at least in the best possible light in their opinion, so they probably didn't record things that they thought would be unflattering to him. But any number of them record his comments about his wife, there are occasional table-talk that record her comments back to him, and I think he clearly had a sense of regard for his wife.

He chides her at times, he says, 'Oh, you want to know so much' and he teases her and calls her Master Kate, you know sort of like You want to be a professor, you want to know so much about theology. But she was a learned woman, she had been a nun, she was a member of the minor nobility, had quite a good learning for a woman in the 16th century, and so she no doubt did engage in conversation with the men at the table.

Rachael Kohn: Are you encouraged by Luther's depiction of his wife, his appreciation of her? Or is it perhaps idealised?

Merry Wiesner-Hanks: I'm sure it's somewhat idealised, although there are comments in the table-talk about when he sort of teased her about one thing or another. So there are some unflattering comments of him about her that emerge in the table-talk, because they didn't to the students who were recording these comments, they didn't seem to be unflattering to him.

Rachael Kohn: Well Merry, what in the end can we learn about Luther from his libido. That is, does his libido tell us something about his theology?

Merry Wiesner-Hanks: Yes, and I think what I'd like to do is separate out his own libido, though he does say that he knows that the power of the libido is unstoppable, is uncontrollable from his own experience, and he talks about that a great deal, and that's a very famous part of his life.

But I think that it's not only from his own personal experience and from his own personal sense of the libido, that he stresses the power of the sex drive in human nature, it's from his interpretation of Scripture, it's from his sort of contemplation of things, and libido he sees then as though it is something that comes from the Fall.

It is an unavoidable part of human nature, and so if you're going to think about how are we saved, how are we justified, the word he would use What's the relationship between humans and God, the libido has to be part of that equation. When one thinks about the soul, one has to also think about the body, because salvation or justification is that of the whole person. So I think it's very central to his theology.

Rachael Kohn: Merry Wiesner-Hanks is the author of Ages of Woman, Ages of Man. More details are on our website.

Join me, Rachael Kohn next week at this time for curious tales from religions history on The Ark.

Guests

Merry Wiesner-Hanks
is Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin and has wriiten about the libido in Luther's theology.

Further Information

Martin Luther
http://www.educ.msu.edu/homepages/laurence/reformation/Luther/Luther.htm

Project Wittenberg
Project Wittenberg is an electronic text initiative which converts to electronic form the writings of Martin Luther and Other Lutherans.
http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/wittenberg/wittenberg-home.html

Publications

Title: Ages of Woman, Ages of Man: Sources in European Social History, 1400-1750
Author : Monica Chojnacka and Merry Wiesner-Hanks
Publisher: Longman, 2002