The Saint as Marriage Counselor

The Saint as Marriage Counselor December 8, 2016

One of the greatest Celtic saints was Colmcille, or Columba, who lived from c.521-597. About a century after his death, the scholar Adomnán of Iona composed a Life of the great saint, which is a treasury of information about the society and religious life of the time. Here, I want to explore one particular story, which tells us a great deal about church attitudes to marriage and sex in that time. It really raises some questions about historical context, on which I would request advice.

One day, the saint was on Rathlin Island, off the far northern coast of Northern Ireland (ii 42). A woman came to visit him to ask advice. She was married to one Luigne, a ship’s pilot, who was either ugly or deformed, so much so that she could not bear to sleep with him or to have sex with him. The saint rebukes her because she is withdrawing her flesh from herself. What he means by this is that the marriage has united the flesh of the two partners in one, so that they shall be one flesh (citing Genesis 2.24, and also Mark 10.8). Married people are now one flesh, and part of that flesh does not refuse the other part, at the risk of incurring sin. One partner in a marriage should not refuse the sexual rights of another.

Columba_at_Bridei's_fort-1

image is in public domain

Now, early and medieval Christianity strictly rationed the number of days when a married couple could properly have sex, and by the later Middle Ages, large portions of the year were off limits, due to various feasts, fasts and holy days. At other times, though, one partner should not and could not properly refuse the other.

But Luigne’s wife just would not oblige, or fulfill her marital duties. Instead, she offered the saint a number of options. She could live with her husband and be dutiful in every other aspect of life except the sexual; or she could go into foreign exile; or she could go into a nunnery. Anything else, but not the marriage bed. The story then continues:

The saint then said, ‘What thou dost propose cannot be lawfully done, for thou art bound by the law of the husband as long as thy husband liveth, for it would be impious to separate those whom God has lawfully joined together.’ Immediately after these words he added: ‘This day let us three, namely, the husband and his wife and myself, join in prayer to the Lord and in fasting.’

But the woman replied: ‘I know it is not impossible for thee to obtain from God, when thou askest them, those things that seem to us either difficult, or even impossible.’

It is unnecessary to say more. The husband and wife agreed to fast with the saint that day, and the following night the saint spent sleepless in prayer for them. Next day he thus addressed the wife in presence of her husband, and said to her: ‘O woman, art thou still ready to-day, as thou saidst yesterday, to go away to a convent of women?’

‘I know now,’ she answered, ‘that thy prayer to God for me hath been heard; for that man whom I hated yesterday, I love today; for my heart hath been changed last night in some unknown way—from hatred to love.’

Why need we linger over it? From that day to the hour of death, the soul of the wife was firmly cemented in affection to her husband, so that she no longer refused those mutual matrimonial rights which she was formerly unwilling to allow.

In the lives and miracles of medieval saints, there are lots of stories where they heal households, reconcile married couples, and so on. To my knowledge though, and I am  prepared to be corrected, this account is very unusual in its explicitly sexual focus, the idea of inducing a partner to participate in sex with a spouse. In this case, the reluctant person is the woman, but as medieval belief saw women as more lustful than men, it is quite possible to imagine an account like this where a hypothetical saint orders a man to go to bed with his wife. But how common are such stories, in fact? It might be that this author is less circumspect than others, and other stories about family disharmony were in fact much more focused on sexual complaints, but monastic authors drew a modest veil over that fact.

Am I right here? Is this Colmcille tale as unusual as I am suggesting?

Medievalists assemble!

I also make another point. At various points in Christian history, church writers and especially monastics praised celibacy to the point of exalting celibates as the truest and most faithful believers. It would be easy to imagine a story like this being told with a “happy ending” in which the wife abandons the marriage and enters a convent. Alternatively, a hypothetical saint might advise the couple to stay together, but to eschew sex altogether: to live chastely as holy brother and holy sister. In this instance, though, the saint’s power is displayed by restoring the marriage to its proper and divinely ordained state, complete with sexual relations.

On this occasion at least, celibacy did not win.

 

For convenience, I have here used an older online translation of the Life of Columba, but there is a newer and much superior version edited by Richard Sharpe, in Penguin Classics (1995)


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