Marital Debt?

The marital debt is the duty to have intercourse with one’s spouse upon request, usually said with respect to such an act as a means to prevent the strain of the concupiscible passions from becoming psychologically painful or even from growing into a nearly uncontrollable urge to sin, whether through self-abuse or infidelity of some other sort.¹⁹ Each spouse owes this debt to the other, at least in proportion with the seriousness and reasonableness of the request, as a fundamental part of married life.²⁰ This debt is better characterized as a “legal debt” rather than a “moral debt,” meaning it is owed in strict justice rather than merely according to a kind of fittingness. It is not simply “the appropriate thing to do,” like signs of respect toward superiors we are not subject to, it is the strictly necessary thing to do under terms of commutative justice between spouses.²¹ According to St. Thomas, the payment of the debt is even more formally significant as to the good of fidelity (bonum fidei) than the duty to refrain from adultery.²² In other words, it is a worse sin to deny one’s spouse his or her rights (understood correctly) which were positively promised (“I will”) than it is to commit adultery, which was merely negatively promised (“I will not”). She owes him, and he owes her, in virtue of their marriage, unless the most serious problems obtain.²³ (Adultery implicitly renounces this right.)²⁴ The relaxation of “concupiscence” (here meaning “sexual desire,” especially when occurring unwillingly,) is one of the classical motives for marriage,²⁵ with direct Scriptural foundations in 1 Corinthians 7, verses 2 and 9, annexed to the good of fidelity, the bonum fidei, as a secondary good or end of marriage and its act.²⁶ St. Paul’s explanation of the marital debt conveniently falls in between these same verses (3-5). ¹⁹ Sometimes “marital debt” or a similar phrase will be used simply to indicate conjugal relations. ²⁰ The ability to pay the marital debt is so important that those who are perpetually impotent are unable to marry for the reason that they cannot pay it if requested, failing to fulfill a basic part of what it means to be married. See Canon 1084, §1 in the CIC (1983); see also St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Suppl., q. 58, a. 1. (Hereafter cited as ST.) Note that the debt may not be extracted by force. ²¹ See ST, I-II, q. 80; q. 102, a. 2, ad. 2. ²² ST, Suppl., q. 49, a. 2, ad. 3: “Just as the marriage promise means that neither party is to have intercourse with a third party, so does it require that they should mutually pay the marriage debt. The latter is indeed the chief of the two, since it follows from the power which each receives over the other.” (All translations are from the Second and Revised Edition [Blackfriars: Westminster, UK, 1920]. Online edition transcribed for New Advent by Kevin Knight, 2017.) In the exchange of consent at a wedding, one promises (implicitly) both not to have relations with anyone else and to be available to the other – and not simply based on one’s own feelings about having relations at a given time. ²³ In the young St. Thomas’ Commentary on the Sentences, we find a protracted casuistic examination on the use of marriage, including the following case: suppose a man contracts leprosy, a contagious and hideous skin disease which can even kill. The leprous man requests his wife to sleep with him. Is she bound to acquiesce? The answer given is a resounding, “yes,” though he clarifies that she is not bound to live in the same house with him, lest she contract the disease by prolonged exposure. See ST, Suppl., q. 64, a. 1, ad. 4. (The content of the Supplementum is essentially identical to the Commentary on the Sentences; I use the Supplementum references for the convenience of the reader.) In the Response to the Third Objection in the same Question, we are told, however, that the request for the debt is excessive in various ways and therefore unnecessary (or even immoral) to pay, such as being asked for repeatedly or in a case where it would be physically harmful. ²⁴ See Canon 1152 (CIC, 1983); cf. ST Supp., q. 62 – St. Thomas is here using the ecclesiastical jurisprudence and law of his time and place. Note in Article 3 his explicit reference to the fact that the Church could compel a spouse to pay the debt by the sentence of an ecclesiastical court. (Contracting a spiritual relationship with one’s spouse also has implications for the marital debt in the ecclesiastical law of St. Thomas’s world. See ST Supp., q. 56, a. 1.) ²⁵ See ST Suppl., q. 54, a. 5; Interestingly, the fact of the usefulness of marriage for concupiscence as a natural motive for marriage seemingly implies that those who fully reach the acquired virtue of chastity while unmarried in fact ought to presume themselves to be in possession of the charism to live in celibacy unless otherwise evident. ²⁶ The three “goods” (“blessings”) of Matrimony are children, fidelity (or faith), and sacrament. See ST Supp., q. 49.

Now concerning the matters about which you wrote. It is well for a man not to touch a woman. But because of the temptation to immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not rule over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not rule over his own body, but the wife does. Do not refuse one another except perhaps by agreement for a season, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, lest Satan tempt you through lack of self-control. I say this by way of concession, not of command. I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has his own special gift from God, one of one kind and one of another. To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain single as I do. But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.^{27 27} 1 Corinthians 7:1-9 (NSRVCE).

The use of the marital debt protects the uniqueness of the couple’s union: the availability of sexual goods from one’s spouse removes or at least diminishes the felt desire to seek such goods elsewhere. The “one flesh union” of marriage is a major renunciation of the control over oneself as a sexual being; one is giving that control in large part to one’s spouse.^{28 28} Another major source for this discussion is St. Thomas’ Commentary on 1 Corinthians (§320-329). Yet another is found in the De Malo q. 15 a. 2, where St. Thomas urges against “unnecessary” uses of marriage due to such acts being venial sins. The doctrine presented in the De Malo is largely a reiteration of what is presented in the Commentary on the Sentences.

If the marital debt is a category belonging to commutative justice, among the spouses as equals, rather than to domestic justice which is distributive from husband to wife, then it appears that it cannot be a sin in and of itself to request the marital debt, including to avoid sin, which is a good end.²⁹ This is because one cannot sin in asking for what one is truly owed. However, the Commentary on the Sentences does directly imply that requesting the debt to relieve concupiscence is venial sin, in line with the doctrine of St. Augustine, but it does not explain very deeply why this is the case.³⁰ In Article 8 of Question 64 we read on whether it is a mortal sin to ask for the debt at a holy time. The Answer: “To ask for the debt on a feast day is not a circumstance drawing a sin into another species; wherefore it cannot aggravate infinitely. Consequently a wife or husband does not sin mortally by asking for the debt on a feast day. It is however a more grievous sin to ask for the sake of mere pleasure, than through fear of the weakness of the flesh.”³¹ Given the lack of an explanation, including elsewhere in the Question, we are left wondering why making use of marriage at least to avoid sin is itself imputable as sin.³² The best direct response to this comes much earlier, in Question 49, Article 5, in the Reply to the Second Objection: ²⁹ See ST II-II, q. 57, a. 4. ³⁰ For some examples, see St. Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence, Book I, ch. 16, and On the Good of Marriage, §6 and §11. ³¹ ST Suppl., q. 64, a. 8, resp. Note that St. Thomas distinguishes between the request being “for mere pleasure” and being “for relief of concupiscence to avoid sin.” Evidently, these are not quite exactly the same thing to him, a distinction with relevance for the deeper discussion which this book takes on later. ³² Article 7 of Question 64 also seems to imply the opposite by specifying that it is not lawful to ask for the debt on holy days when one must be specially given over to prayer; were it never lawful, the more appropriate formulation of the Article’s thesis would be whether it is mortal sin rather than whether it is “lawful,” which we are given in the following Article (8), which then proceeds to presume sin in the asking of the debt by arguing circumstance cannot aggravate the sin into grievous guilt as it does not draw the act into a new species. Evidently, for St. Thomas, that a request for the debt is “lawful” in this sense does not mean free of moral guilt but rather that it exercises a binding claim over the other such that it would be immoral to refuse – “legal” debt.

If a man intends by the marriage act to prevent fornication in his wife, it is no sin, because this is a kind of payment of the debt that comes under the good of “faith.” But if he intends to avoid fornication in himself, then there is a certain superfluity, and accordingly there is a venial sin, nor was the sacrament instituted for that purpose, except by indulgence, which regards venial sins.^{33 33} ST Suppl. q. 49, a. 5, ad. 2.

The Question does not address the issue of the possibility of concupiscence hindering the ability to pray or do good deeds by a kind of distraction. In the so-called Catechism of St. Thomas, (specifically the sermons constituting the Commentary on the Ten Commandments,) written in the last period of the saint’s life, we will see a similar treatment of the matter which provides a very succinct formula for the evaluation of the motives for the use of marriage.

A natural reading of 1 Corinthians 7:6, the verse regarding allowing the use of marriage for the removal of temptation by concession or permission (συγγνώμην) rather than by command (ἐπιταγήν) is that the Apostle is saying that he is not imposing an obligation on married persons to use their rights to conjugal acts in order to remove temptation; rather, he is merely allowing them to do so, indicating that it is not necessarily sinful in itself. In fact, this helps to make more sense of the following verse in which the Apostle explains that he wishes all were continent like himself, not needing such assistance but rather disciplining oneself through total continence; this regards a higher pursuit of perfection, rather than merely avoiding sin. Were St. Paul speaking of venial sin in the use of marriage to remove temptation “by concession,” it seems he would have contrasted this with the use of marriage to procreate rather than with perfect continence and celibacy.

Of course, Christ Himself counsels celibacy. The apostles decline from the Lord’s words forbidding divorce and remarriage and thus lead themselves to the conclusion – “It is better not to marry.” (Matthew 19:10) Their selfish motives for desiring celibacy are the upshot of their selfish motives for marriage, yet they are valid motives nevertheless – it is easier to absent oneself from such trouble as might lead to the desire for divorce and then be unable to do so in view of marrying again. The propensity for a spouse to misuse their rights to conjugal acts, in favor of children or not, is in fact a similar reason why it is better to avoid marriage. One must realize that marriage is a true renunciation of self – a risking of one’s whole life.

It must be noted that the fundamental concern of St. Augustine and St. Thomas – and essentially the entire body of classical authors, ancient, medieval, and baroque, even up to the 1900’s – is about the suspension of the act of reason by which we know, love, and serve God. Because of its intense pleasure, the sexual act inhibits the reason’s proper functioning, like drunkenness. This is why there is a need to excuse the marriage act.^{34 34} See ibid., a. 1.