Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages—I

Extract

John Noonan’s long history of contraceptive practice and prohibition demands and merits a second reading—a cautious one. For all the intelligence and careful research that has obviously gone into it, still it has its gaps and misreadings, some of them by no means peripheral to the author’s overall picture of an ‘evolving’, ‘developing’ ecclesiastical doctrine of love and marriage and the Church’s consequent attitudes toward contraception. One of the wider gaps is the failure to consider a man named Nicole Oresme; and one of the more serious misreadings is of St Thomas Aquinas.

Noonan proposes that Martin le Maistre—a late fifteenth-century layman of considerable standing and reputation in the University of Paris—was the first theologian to make the ‘modern’ breakthrough. Prior to him the Augustinian insistence, found also in St Thomas, on procreative purpose as the only justifying motive for conjugal intercourse held all but exclusive sway. Marriage was rarely or only secondarily thought of in terms of love, and where love happened to be encouraged it was not the kind that had to do with sex. Sex as a biological function productive of the child, well and good (for the most part); but as an expression of love, as an experience of joy and pleasure, no—on pain of at least venial sin. But with le Maistre we have ‘the beginning of a new stage in the Catholic approach to marriage’. His ethics offer reasons justifying conjugal intercourse other than procreation and even suggests (though hesitantly) venereal pleasure as a licit motive.