Tempering the Marital Mind: Civic Regimens of Love and Marriage in German Mid-Eighteenth-Century Moral Weeklies

Abstract

This article contributes to the historiography of romantic marriage in the eighteenth century by analyzing discourses on marital love and happiness in the moral weeklies of the German writers Georg Friedrich Meier and Samuel Gotthold Lange. Meier and Lange raise overarching questions about why so many marriages are unhappy and argue that long-term marital contentment requires spouses to discover and confirm each other's qualities and abilities on a daily basis. Each must reflect and affirm the other while also practicing a kind of de-escalation in conflict situations, for instance by withdrawing and calming oneself before facing problems anew. I argue that this apparently modern therapeutic approach to marital relationships was part of a civic morality in the making, a morality that pointed forward to the emergence of a modern individual self while also being rooted in a long tradition of spiritual exercises and therapeutic regimens.

Introduction

Social and cultural historians have recently highlighted the eighteenth century as the century of romantic marriage.¹ Although the notion of an origin has been heavily criticized, the overall thesis that men and women increasingly both expected and valued marital love and happiness has been both upheld and further explored. Overall, the romantic marriage has been connected to large-scale processes such as the emergence of a broad and prosperous bourgeoisie; the associated formation of a civic, individual, and partly secular identity and sense of self; and the communication of this identity through the media forms of the emerging public sphere.² While social historians in particular have charted institutional and legislative contexts as well as the growing criticism of arranged marriages, cultural and literary historians have explored representations of passionate love and marriage in romantic novels, poems, advice literature, and correspondence, particularly in eighteenth-century England and France.³ In contrast to both these strands of research, this article contributes new insights by charting marital love and happiness in moral weeklies in mid-eighteenth-century Germany. Moral weeklies, largely neglected in this context, were pivotal to the production and communication of new norms and patterns of behavior in the preromantic period. Those charted in this article also provide unique insights into how discourses on marital love and happiness fit into the crafting of a new kind of civic (bürgerliche) morality.

Between 1748 and 1768 the philosopher Georg Friedrich Meier and the theologian Samuel Gotthold Lange used moral weeklies to pose, explore, and communicate questions about marital relationships. Why are so many marriages unhappy? How can one break negative patterns in a marriage and how should one go about nurturing marital love and happiness over time? These questions, I suggest, were framed within a new type of civic morality—in the sense of a morality explicitly directed at the reading bourgeoisie—in which happiness was the result of an ongoing effort to cognitively and morally improve the self. In line with this logic, marriage constituted a virtuous relationship in which both parties engaged and found joy and happiness in each other's perfections. While the notion of marital happiness as the result of ongoing work on the self and the relationship might seem astonishingly modern, in what follows I show that it took shape in relation to a long tradition of philosophical and Christian spiritual exercises—pursued to cognitively and morally cultivate and strengthen but also therapeutically temper and cure the mind—which early modern intellectuals sometimes referred to as cultura animi.

Enlightened authors of moral weeklies

German Pietism emerged in the second half of the seventeenth century as a broad and disparate Lutheran reform movement that emphasized a personal and sensual but also a strict and ascetic relation to God.⁴ Meier and Lange were forged in the intersection between this strand of Lutheranism and early Enlightenment philosophy.⁵ On the one hand, they received their early education at the Pietist theologian August Hermann Francke's famous Orphanage, a large-scale educational institution in the Prussian town of Halle devoted to the disciplining and shaping of young children and students into pious Christians.⁶ Central to Francke's vision and to the Orphanage curriculum was the view that philosophy served to cultivate the intellect, whereas religious practices were to discipline, break, and replace the selfish will with a will to love and honor God.⁷ On the other hand, as students, Meier and Lange also discovered the Wolffian philosophy. At the time, Christian Wolff was a leading, if controversial, philosopher who in his writings strove to unify all science under a single rational method in which reason alone constituted the guiding principle that would lead man toward ever-greater cognitive and moral perfection.⁸

Having adopted parts of the Wolffian philosophy by the 1720s, Meier and Lange came increasingly under the influence of the Baumgarten brothers in the subsequent decade.⁹ Siegmund Jakob and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten were at the forefront of an intellectual endeavor to channel features of the Pietist and Wolffian strands of thought into a new revisionist theology, philosophy, and aesthetics revolving around the perfection of the intellectual and sensual self through theology and philosophy, but also through literature and poetry.¹⁰ While poets and writers initially gravitated toward topics of pious devotion, from the second half of the 1730s ancient philosophers and poets such as Epicurus and Anacreon became the new models. At the core of the so-called Anacreontic poetry was a carpe diem ideal: the sensual experience should be affirmed and celebrated, preferably in the convivial company of good friends.¹¹ The adoption of the ancient discourses of sensual friendship and happiness represented a departure from the instrumental and formalized friendship ideal of the nobility but also from the strict ascetic Pietism that many had experienced at the Orphanage and that Meier in particular believed was deeply damaging as it tended to degenerate into pure self-denial.¹² Barbara Rosenwein has introduced the concept of emotional community to capture “groups in which people adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value—or devalue—the same or related emotions.”¹³ Applied to this specific German context, the Anacreontic movement can be understood as a deliberate attempt to control and channel a complex social, cultural, and intellectual landscape into the formation of a civic lifestyle that also constituted a specific emotional community. For Meier, Lange, and many others brought up in strict Pietism, this new lifestyle and community offered if not an outright secular perspective, then at least one less Christianly ascetic and more life-affirming, appropriate to the new privileges and opportunities that came with improved economic and material conditions.

While most proponents limited themselves to academic and literary genres, Meier and Lange were committed to communicating the new lifestyle to a wider readership, thereby making it into the core of a broader civic identity. To accomplish this, they adopted the new media forms of the public sphere, including both public collections of letters and moral weeklies. In 1746 Lange, together with his colleague and friend Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, published an edited collection titled Friendly Letters (Freundschaftliche Briefe). The goal was nothing less than “to introduce the language of the hearts and affection, instead of the language of coercion and flattery, among the correspondents of our Fatherland.”¹⁴ Featuring the authors’ own correspondence, the letters exemplified how to engage in and maintain sensitive friendships but also marital love and happiness. In particular, Lange's own relationship with Dorothea, also known as Doris, was used to exemplify a marriage based on friendship and passion as well as mutual respect and virtue.¹⁵ The use of correspondence continued as Meier and Lange began to collaborate on moral weeklies in the late 1740s. This type of periodical had been adopted from England in the 1720s and featured short articles published first on a weekly basis and then as thick annual volumes.¹⁶ Editions were probably quite small but economically significant, especially for the publishers. Limited print runs did not necessarily mean that they reached only a few readers, as individual texts were often shared and read aloud in group settings.¹⁷ The articles typically addressed various aspects of civic life in a moral-educational yet entertaining and easily digestible way. Making heavy use of readers’ letters, reports, reflections, and other often absurd stories of eccentric persons with funny names (everything typically written by the editors), the moral weeklies gave the impression of involving a large number of people engaged in the various facets of civic life.¹⁸ In relation to their English counterparts, the German moral weeklies were marked by the Lutheran context and in particular by its tense relation to early Enlightenment thought.¹⁹ Those produced by Meier and Lange were furthermore—in contrast to the mainstream of sometimes rather superficial German weeklies—characterized by often initiated discussions and in particular by their own Enlightenment philosophy of perfection. Meier and Lange produced four moral weeklies over two decades: The Sociable (Der Gesellige, 1748–50), Man (Der Mensch, 1751–6), The Realm of Nature and Morals (Das Reich der Natur und der Sitten, 1757–62) and The Blissful (Der Glückselige, 1763–8).²⁰ In comparison to other moral weeklies, those of Meier and Lange reflected an underlying, highly systematized philosophy. Read alongside Meier's extensive five-volume Philosophical Ethics (Philosophische Sittenlehre, 1753–1761), many contributions clearly emerge as popularized summaries, sometimes to the point where passages are reproduced almost verbatim. This approach was a clever way of communicating about and spreading a civic morality that would otherwise have attracted few nonspecialist readers. While this might seem to have little to do with discourses of marital love and happiness, in the following section I will show that the civic ethics of perfection in fact constitutes a crucial context for Meier and Lange's rather specific views on the matter.

Cultura animi, perfection, friendship, and marital love

The early Enlightenment philosophy of perfection took form in relation to a broad framework that ancient and early modern intellectuals sometimes referred to as cultura animi.²¹ Here philosophy provided a form of therapy aimed at tempering and calming the mind, relieving it of those tormenting passions and affectual distresses considered to be the very basis of human suffering. In the last decades of the seventeenth century, leading early German Enlightenment philosophers such as Samuel Pufendorf and Christian Thomasius drew explicitly on this concept when emphasizing in the context of natural law the obligation to know, cultivate, and cure the soul from the passions.²² Similarly, Wolff stressed that every person is obliged to perfect the self and particularly the soul.²³ Because the experience of becoming more perfect is pleasurable, it nourishes the pursuit of further perfection. Perfection is thus the very engine of happiness. Far from regarding this as a theoretical matter, Wolff provided detailed instructions on how to perfect oneself cognitively and morally through the practice of philosophy and science and through regular daily examinations of one's moral character.²⁴

The philosophy of perfection was further elaborated by the Baumgarten brothers, but it was Meier who, in Philosophical Ethics, provided by far the most extensive and practically oriented instruction on how to perfect the self cognitively and morally.²⁵ In addition to further elaborating the kind of therapeutic regimen that Wolff had advocated, Meier also suggested that one should carefully observe and document one's thoughts and actions in a moral diary, a history of one's own heart and mind.²⁶ Thus identifying progress and failure would make it easier to intervene and improve one's moral conduct. In relation to the heavier academic texts, the moral weeklies served the important function of communicating the ethics of perfection in a lighter, more digestible form to a broader readership.²⁷

Meier and Lange's civic ethics of perfection differs from its classical counterpart in one important respect. In the traditional cultura animi, desires and passions fulfilled an essentially negative function. Forces that constantly threatened to lure people to ruin, they were to be subdued and, if possible, eradicated by reason. While this predominantly negative view of the passions persisted in the writings of Pufendorf, Thomasius, and Wolff, the advent of aesthetics prompted a reevaluation.²⁸ Not only were the senses and affects believed to be of vital importance for the poet and writer, but cognitive and moral perfection more generally seemed to require these forces. Insofar as they contributed to one's perfection, for instance by enriching and reinforcing knowledge and wisdom, they should be affirmed as part of a virtuous and happy life rather than denied or eradicated.

Meier and Lange's ethics of perfection was applied to a large number of topics in the moral weeklies, including both friendship and marriage. On the one hand, Meier and Lange drew on the classical Ciceronian conception when arguing that friendships emerge when persons are attracted to and mutually commit to each other's virtuous refinement.²⁹ “It [the friendship] never becomes base and mean; it always finds and discovers new perfections, which it not only maintains, but also constantly increases through esteem. Friendship is constantly endeavoring to make its friend more agreeable, or to do it service, and to seek new friends.”³⁰ A friendship is not a means to an end; rather, a true friend is someone who shares your joys and sorrows, your successes and failures, and who always has your best interests at heart. Friendships are, in other words, ideally egalitarian and altruistic relations. On the other hand, to this they added that friendships are not only virtuous but also passionate in the sense they are and should be felt and experienced with the senses. “There is a sensitive delight in the heart when we see the expressions and gestures of those whom we hold in high esteem: when we hear their voice, so pleasant to us, our impulses are revived, and a friendly embrace, an affectionate kiss, has an extraordinary effect.”³¹ Taking form in intimate connection with the ethics of perfection, the ideal of the virtuous yet sensual and passionate “Anacreontic” friendship was communicated in numerous works, including the moral weeklies.

The ethics of perfection applied also to marriage. Like friendship, marriage constituted a relationship in which both parties were committed to each other's cognitive and moral perfection. Thus it required that each possess a certain level of reason and virtue from the outset:

I presuppose that they are amiable persons who are in possession of some perfections: yes, I also require that they have sense and insight enough to recognize such in each other. These perfections have their place in the soul, and extend also to the body. The beauties of the spirit alone are the essential ones, and spread their splendor over the body also.³²

The happy marriage required a form of balance, in the sense that the parties must be cognitively and morally equipped and mutually recognize each other's qualities. As we will see later, however, this logic of equality sometimes clashed with a patriarchal order in which women were seen as inferior and subordinate.

If both parties had sufficient cognitive and moral constitutions, their marriage would unfold happily, according to the self-sustaining logic of the ethics of perfection. The mutual display and recognition of perfections produces a sense of pleasure and happiness which in turn reinforces the pursuit of further perfections. “Now, if two worthy persons are in a happy union, they will not only constantly admire new virtues in each other, but will themselves give each other the opportunity to increase more and more. This will be used to prevent coldness, weariness, and disgust, and will renew pleasure without interruption.”³³ For Meier and Lange this pleasure was not only platonic but sensual and physically intimate. To underscore this, they often used examples where it unfolded as tender embraces and kisses. Lange's own marriage with Doris was sometimes presented as an ideal. In one contribution, the author thus describes the longing for marital happiness that arises in him as he “sees a Damon [Lange] sitting next to his Doris, and … whispering some joke wittily in her ears, and she rewards him with a kiss, always saying: my child, my heart!”³⁴ Another case in point revolves around a happily married couple referred to as Aurelius and Concordia:

These two persons are the happiest of spouses because they both love each other unchangingly with the most tender fervor. All those who know this enviable couple marvel at the strength of this enduring love: but those who know their mutual character understand the possibility of a conjugal love that is as fiery in the tenth year of marriage as it was in the first week.³⁵

Meier and Lange were very clear in distancing themselves from the passionate love of the initial infatuation. While lust was doomed to fade and often paved the way for an outright unhappy marriage, this type of civic passion was based on the inherent logic of perfection, according to which the mutual cultivation and display of perfections also nurtured and constantly renewed love and passion. Situated in a broader context, this view can be seen as a specific expression of what Isabel Hull has described as an emerging civil society in which sexual fulfillment was considered a desirable and integral part of a happy marriage.³⁶

To sum up, Meier and Lange's discourse on marital love and happiness was intimately connected with the ethics of perfection. Insofar as the parties possessed adequate cognitive and moral capacities, marriage, like friendship, would ideally unfold as a virtuous relation of mutual perfection. When spouses displayed, mirrored, and affirmed each other's perfections on a daily basis, their love and happiness would be sustained. While physical intimacy constituted an integral part of the happy marriage, it again needs stressing that this was a civic passion that, unlike base and short-lived desire, sprang from the mutual enjoyment of cognitive and moral perfections.

The diseases of marriage

So far we have seen how marital happiness unfolded according to the self-perpetuating logic of the ethics of perfection. Yet, in reality, the happy marriage was as rare as true friendship and true virtue. One of the most central questions was precisely why so many marriages were so unhappy. Having regarded Lange and Doris's happy marriage with envy, the writer thus reminded himself of what most marriages are like in practice:

But as soon as I think of the everyday relations; as soon as I imagine the simple, slavish and unfortunate intentions of most lovers; as soon as I see the mean, the arrogant, the lustful, the tyrannical and jealous, under the figure of the lover on the one side, and the unfaithful, wasteful, proud, and imperious bride, under the guise of a luminous, pleasant, charming, and virtuous one: so soon I also feel a secret and silent joy that I am still so far away from this dangerous state. A thousand marriages are made, and hardly ten are successful; the rest sigh and curse their choice.³⁷

The pessimistic view of marriage in fact lent itself well to the moral weekly, whose perhaps most common rhetorical device was to depict different social types, preferably negatively and in a comic and often exaggerated way. In line with this logic Meier and Lange described various types of corrupted or diseased marriage:

What can one hope from married couples who do not know the feeling of a tender heart, and whose heavy and lazy blood is set in motion by nothing? They drag their inert bodies to bed and to the table; their house is similar to a Carthusian monastery because of its silence; one hardly hears one-syllable words from them, but only those that cannot be indicated, like Yes and No, by a slight movement of the head. They are as dead to society as they are to themselves; indeed, they flee it if it does not cause too much inconvenience … A cold north wind, a night frost in the first spring hardly does as much harm to the flowers as these human forms do to social life.³⁸

These farcical descriptions of unhappy marriages were structured by the influential humoral theory, according to which people's physical constitution and health depended on the balance between the four bodily fluids—blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm.³⁹ While diseases were explained as the result of temporary imbalances between these fluids, the more permanent humoral dispositions were thought to produce different temperaments or personalities. While the temperaments typically applied to individuals, they were also used quite creatively in other contexts. The quotation above thus features a typical phlegmatic marriage characterized by passivity and lack of energy. Another similar example features a choleric marriage marked by mutual dislike and conflict:

What do you think of such spouses who seek their pleasure in being able to offend each other? Since they have learned all the little things that make each other angry, they do not refrain from giving society samples of their skillfulness … Observe Grandille, how she presents her small round figure in a chair, and with carelessly thrown arms shows the company the very contemplation with which she annoys her husband in this position … Grandille is worthily married; she has a husband who is as whimsical as she is … As they take pleasure in insulting each other, so do they bring this disgusting manner to all social gatherings, in which they disturb the peace, the joy, and the pleasant atmosphere, and nearly exhaust the patience of those present.⁴⁰

The discourse on unhappy marriages reflects a tension inherent in the humoral theory itself: it was static in the sense that people were simply born with different humoral constitutions; at the same time, it was also dynamic since the humors and temperamental qualities could be controlled through various forms of medical and therapeutic intervention. While medicines and diets served to physically balance the humors, the cultura animi provided techniques for therapeutic regulation on a cognitive level.

The inherent tension in the humoral theory between static constitutions and dynamic change organized the discourse on marital diseases in two fundamental respects. First, a marriage could be diseased and corrupt simply because one or both parties were so: choleric or overly unforgiving, for example:

[Mr] Stubbornness, on the one hand, is not only hot-tempered, but his stubbornness drives him so far that he wants his wife to listen to and suffer through everything he says. She, on the other hand, has received a defect from her bad upbringing that certainly deserves the name of a vice, for she does not speak a word for a long time. He, who knows nothing about giving in, becomes more and more bitter, and she more and more spiteful. Therefore it often happens that they do not speak a word to each other in four weeks. The grumbling with which they get up and go to bed, with which they dine at the same table at noon and in the evening, is accompanied by the most unmanageable behavior. She pulls herself off chairs on which she has thrown herself more than she has sat down; she slams the door shut; she quickly pulls herself in front of him and often bumps into him, and he constantly turns his back on her … It is no wonder that these spouses become coldhearted and build a hell with each other instead of a heaven.⁴¹

Both this and the previous case exemplify how marital misery often derived from fundamental defects of character and temperament. Even if it might be possible in theory to cure these marriages, doing so would be difficult precisely because the problems were rooted in more permanent flaws. Second, also those marriages that started well tended to disintegrate over time. While the reasons might vary, the causes tended to derive from character flaws in one way or another. For this reason, it was crucial to make informed choices. Virtues such as wisdom, kindness, caring, diligence, and loyalty should be prioritized, whereas desire-driven and short-sighted qualities such as superficial beauty, wealth, and noble status should be avoided.⁴²

The diseases of marriage typically reflected the diseased minds of those who were married. Corrupt people, according to this logic, tended to make corrupt choices and end up with others with similar problems, while those with good character tended to gravitate to other virtuous persons. While some were beyond redemption, to the point of being pathological, most diseased marriages reflected problems and shortcomings that could be relatively easily remedied with the right skills and techniques. This brings us to Meier and Lange's core problematic regarding how to establish and maintain marital love and happiness over time.

Tempering and perfecting marital love

Cultural and literary historians have tended to reconstruct the eighteenth-century ideal of the romantic marriage from literary genres in which the passionate and often dramatic love affair stands in the foreground.⁴³ While genres such as the romantic novel and epistolary fiction certainly drove the ideal of romantic love, Meier and Lange put remarkably little energy into discussing the initial and, in their eyes, highly ephemeral passion. In stark contrast, their main concern revolved around how to establish and maintain marital love over time.

As we have seen, the choice of spouse was a central precondition for a good marriage. Once the choice was made, however, it was equally important to adopt the right attitudes and expectations. Meier and Lange thus advised men on the best way to regard their future wives:

5. Do not demand that your bride be without fault and blameless. No woman is a perfect saint. Each one has her faults and weaknesses … 6. Do not demand that your wife should be perfectly according to your tastes, your disposition, and your temperament … 7. Imagine often and vividly in advance that your wife will give you many opportunities for annoyance and displeasure. An evil that is foreseen does not move us very much when it becomes real, and we can prepare ourselves properly for it … 8. Imagine your bride much worse than she really is, especially you must not think her as good as she seems to be in her bridal state. When we imagine something better than it really is, we feel painful remorse as soon as we realize our error.⁴⁴

While this advice may at first glance appear rather cynical, situated in the context of the cultura animi it aligns with a long tradition of spiritual exercises. As the French historian of philosophy Pierre Hadot has shown in a number of groundbreaking works, the ancient philosophical schools relied on a broad spectrum of spiritual exercises designed to cognitively change our attitude toward things whose course and outcome are beyond our control.⁴⁵ Practitioners were thus encouraged to imagine future misfortunes and suffering in order to prepare themselves to face these with a calm and balanced mind. Cognitive exercises such as these were then passed on through both the philosophical and Christian spiritual traditions to figure in a range of contexts and discourses in the early modern period. In addition to making exercises of this type a natural part of their ethics, Meier and Lange also incorporated them into more specific discourses regarding illness and death, but also, as we see here, marital happiness. Rather than being the expression of an elaborately cynical and pessimistic view of marriage and of women, these were part of a regimen of the mind through which expectations that otherwise threatened to poison a marriage would be tempered and regulated.

While the establishment of marital happiness was, of course, important, perhaps even more crucial was its maintenance over time. Discussing the matter in a separate contribution, Meier and Lange started by addressing a reader's letter regarding a proposed negative dynamic inherent in the logic of perfection:

A question has been put to us: Whether and how it is possible that married couples do not fall into coldheartedness against each other? The author of this question has included a philosophical proof of the opposite in his letter, which we would have communicated if it had not been wrapped in a too philosophical and dry lecture. The main thing is that our pleasure ceases if it is not stimulated by discoveries of new perfections: the writer of the letter believes that the greatest pleasure, in the possession of perfections, decreases daily through habit: and since it is not possible to appear daily in a splendid form, it is natural that even the best spouses would have to gradually become insensitive and finally coldhearted.⁴⁶

The analysis reflects the ethics of perfection, according to which the perception of perfection produces pleasure. Applied to marriage, the same principle suggests that love and happiness are the direct result of the perception of each other's perfections. On the one hand, such perceptions abound in the early stages of a love relationship, but eventually tend to become blunted by time and habit. As this happens many marriages become coldhearted or corrupted in other ways. On the other hand, the authors objected to the analysis in the reader's letter by pointing out that this very development was partly the result of a misconception, whereby the initial passion, doomed to fade, was mistaken for perfection. For those who instead based their relationship on true perfections, the pleasure of perceiving them would not only remain but also stimulate further perfections. Although the authors thus rejected this reader's pessimistic analysis, they nevertheless agreed that in practice the logic of perfection was often compromised, as passions and desires either simply took command or corrupted the mind by appearing as perfections. Following the same self-reinforcing logic, imperfections produced further imperfections. For this reason, marital happiness not only required good matches but also that love be sustainably founded and continuously entertained:

One of the most important causes of unhappy marriages is that very few people understand the art of establishing a lasting and reasonable love. True love can only arise from the pleasure of the perfections of a beloved person. Therefore, if I want to begin to love a person in such a way that this love should be very strong, tender, and lasting, I must recognize in her very many and very great true perfections, and this recognition must be quite clear, certain, and touching.⁴⁷

For a marriage to be happy it was crucial to establish a proper foundation by learning to know and appreciate each other's perfections. Discovering new perfections or rediscovering old ones in a new light should thus become part of everyday married life:

If a person is to love another in a lasting way, he must constantly discover in the other new perfections, or a new side to the old perfections. Consequently, the spouses who want to love each other constantly must improve themselves daily in intellect, virtue, and skill. They must show each other, in the daily incidents of the marriage state, their insights and their understanding, and they must constantly give each other new samples of all their perfections through the practice of all virtues, especially the duties of service, politeness, and good behavior. Then they feel each other's perfections in a new way every day, and so they get a new cause to love each other every day.⁴⁸

Demonstrating perfection in daily behavior not only stimulated further perfection but also could help break negative patterns. One of the many examples in the moral weeklies recounts how Mr Joyful was able to do this. Joyful suffered from a bad mood with fits of rage, while his wife was sensible and took these outbursts hard:

In the first year of marriage, she could easily remain in her dark mood for an hour: gradually she brought it so far that she shut down, and did not look angry, but only became quiet. This moved her husband so much that he kissed her tenderly as often as he noticed it. This little quarrel served as a reconciliation that increased their love. Joyful gradually overcame his outbursts of anger, and I cannot say how surprised his wife was when, instead of a hot temper, she noticed a magnanimous indulgence. She then fell around his neck and a thousand kisses rewarded his efforts to improve. She caresses his cheeks and calls him a good man, and to him she seems like an angel.⁴⁹

It was thus by learning how to calm and temper his mind that Joyful was able to reestablish marital happiness. The case of Joyful is rather typical of the extraordinary psychological sensitivity that Meier shows in many of his analyses. Having written extensively on metaphysics, ethics, psychology, and aesthetics, Meier often used concrete cases to highlight the complexity of real human affairs. The cultura animi lent itself well to such analyses because the seemingly simple framework often boiled down to very complex and nuanced accounts of how desires and affects play out in concrete situations.

As with the regulation of expectations regarding marriage, the cultura animi often prescribed exercises in mending one's attitudes and regulating the affects. One virtue that was particularly important for work on the marital mind was peacefulness:

The peaceable is not sensitive, or he does not easily take something for an insult. He turns everything around for the best, he excuses the other person, he forgives him his transgressions, and does not hold them against him too highly … A peaceable person, if he has offended another, asks for forgiveness and makes all possible amends, and also easily accepts the same from his offender.⁵⁰

What made peacefulness such an important virtue was its ability to break negative patterns of behavior. Through this early modern variant of de-escalation, it was possible not only to stop repeating harmful actions but also to restore the positive balance of the ethics of perfection. Thus it was by suddenly changing his behavior and showing tenderness and love that Joyful awakened his wife's love and created a positive blueprint for the relationship. Although Joyful initially did this, so to speak, spontaneously, it was by systematically tempering his own mind that he managed to establish marital happiness more permanently.

To sum up, it was important to lay a good foundation for happiness in marriage and to maintain it over time. In both cases, however, the cultura animi provided the overall framework for achieving this. Rather than attributing the ills of marriage to one's partner's inadequacies, attention should instead be focused on one's own shortcomings and pernicious attitudes. Since the attitudes were the only things one could strictly control, they should also be the focus of one's efforts. By tempering the mind and adopting knowledgeable and virtuous attitudes to both spouse and marriage, one would be able to escape negative patterns by, for instance, responding to aggression with understanding and magnanimity, and to establish positive dynamics in accordance with the moral–psychological logic of the ethics of perfection.

Happiness at the intersection of egalitarian friendship and patriarchal authority

The question of how the perfection of marriage related to prevailing gender norms has so far been conspicuous by its absence—not because it is unimportant, but in order to address it in relation to previous contexts here in the final section. More specifically, I want to highlight and elucidate two aspects of gender. The first is purely historical and concerns the ways in which Meier and Lange were part of a movement that both affirmed and challenged traditional notions of gender. The second is more analytically complex and has to do with the fact that the discourse of marital happiness took shape at the breaking point between ideals of amicable equality and patriarchal authority.

Meier and Lange's discourse on marriage is fundamentally gendered. While gendering has so far appeared, so to speak, between the lines, there are plenty of passages where it emerges as one of the most central elements. This applied not least to the choice of spouse:

Choose a bride who is adorned with many lasting goods. Understanding and virtue include all these goods. Meanwhile, I will not advise a bridegroom to seek a learned and holy bride, for how many of that kind would be found? A woman who can only think, and understands everything that is required for a good mother, housewife, and companion; who has the most common virtues of friendship, social life, and service in her power, can already make the marriage state happy.⁵¹

There is today a host of literature showing that, in the eighteenth century, marriage and family life in particular were characterized by clearly defined gender roles, with the husband expected to provide for the family and the wife to take care of household and children.⁵² Men were expected to be intelligent, rational, and proactive, while women should embody virtues such as modesty, gentleness, and care, but also proactiveness within the household.⁵³ On the one hand, Meier and Lange largely agreed with and further reproduced this traditional order through numerous vignettes. Negative examples often revolved around people who failed to fulfill or even deliberately violated conventional expectations, just as positive examples tended to depict people who embodied gendered virtues. On the other hand, Meier and Lange's specific cultural context also partly challenged established ideals by promoting the figure of the witty and charming muse. One contribution to Friendly Letters contained a passage where a shy, dull, and submissive woman was compared to Lange's own wife, Doris:

Yes, there is a girl here, but an antipode to Doris, a girl who can only speak when she is asked … Mademoiselle, are you content? Yes. And also dear Mama? Yes. Are you then always so diligent? Yes. Would you allow me to look after you a bit? Yes. Should I help you to sew? Yes. Is that not cross-stitching? Yes … I believe that she would have answered yes even if had asked: Are you even dumber than dear Mama? In fact, she would have answered yes. Because I then asked her some question that she should have answered with a no but she still answered yes. Oh, you antipode! What a difference there is between you and Doris! What amiability, what wit, what pleasant enchanting being!⁵⁴

In the literary debates that took place in Germany in the first half of the eighteenth century, male poets often promoted female muses.⁵⁵ In the 1740s the Anacreontic poets frequently referred to Doris as just such a witty, charming, and talented woman. In Meier and Lange's portrayal of women, traditional female virtues were often playfully mixed with more progressive ones such as erudition, intelligence, wit, and charm. Situated in a larger social and cultural context, the exploration of civic identities brought new female virtues along with more flexible and diverse, yet clearly complementary, gender roles.

The complementary gender order brings us back to the relation between patriarchal hierarchy and friendship between equals. Friendship traditionally denoted a male relationship, but in the eighteenth century the notion of affectionate friendship was, as we have seen, applied also to marriage. In her study of early modern Scotland, Katie Barclay has argued that the companionate marriage did not necessarily imply equality but rather the negotiation between complementary gender roles defined within a larger patriarchal order.⁵⁶ Laura Thomason, on the other hand, has shown that women in eighteenth-century England sought to challenge this order by launching a more egalitarian ideal of marriage as a perfect companionship.⁵⁷ Similarly, the German context is also characterized by tensions and negotiations that often took place within but also sometimes challenged the patriarchal order.⁵⁸ In the specific context explored here, the discourse is marked by an almost constant tension between the reproduction of the traditional patriarchal order and the challenging of it through the ideal of marriage as friendship. So how should this apparent paradox be approached? One option would be to argue that marriage differs from (male) friendship precisely because it is not equal: the discovery of each other's perfections is fundamentally gendered and patriarchal. Not only should the man seek a spouse with the proper female virtues, but, as a man, embodying male virtues, he was also the head of the marriage itself. Consider, for example, the example of Aurelius and Concordia mentioned above. “Aurelius believed with reason that his spouse would not be offended if he regarded her as a weak tool. Just as he as the head of marriage had to take the most noble care of it, he also believed it was his duty to take primary responsibility for the maintenance of conjugal love.”⁵⁹ Well aware of his own superiority and greater responsibility, Aurelius devised a method by which he emotionally attached Concordia to himself. “I love my Concordia most tenderly, and I bind her daily, by a pleasant compulsion, to love me back just as strongly; by making myself constantly venerable, indispensable, and pleasing in her eyes.”⁶⁰ The author continues by illustrating the means by which Aurelius accomplished this:

He works her mind, and makes her wiser. He increases her virtue. He provides for her, he protects and defends her, he gives her all possible comforts, she is honored because of him, he renders her all great services of friendship. If she is distressed and suffers a misfortune, he comforts her, he gives her courage, he relieves her distress. In short, Concordia cannot live without him.⁶¹

Aurelius is a patriarch who assumes the role of the at once self-evidently superior and responsible husband who adheres to the very advice and techniques that marital happiness demands. The result is a kind of ideal marital happiness established partly through a form of softer patriarchal power that is in line with the civic ethics of perfection:

She always has free access to him, and he interacts with her openly. From this arises a familiarity that tends to set a pair of hearts in love ablaze. He always looks friendly, and if he is made annoyed, he does not utter harsh words against his wife in a fit of anger; rather, he remains silent, and goes aside for a quarter of an hour to calm down again. Often he sits at his study table, and Concordia on a chair opposite him, knitting or doing something similar. Now and then Aurelius raises his eyes and casts a tender glance at Concordia, who smiles at him. He does not believe that a man has a right to be rude or even crude with his wife.⁶²

The example of Aurelius and Concordia clearly illustrates the paradox that arises at the interface of marital friendship and patriarchy.⁶³ While the patriarch is clearly in command, he is also compelled to institute a balance that implies a form of equality in the sense of a mutual benevolent openness and willingness to compromise and collaborate. Meier and Lange's discourse reflects a new type of civic morality in which the love and affirmation of oneself as an empathetic and generous person, friend, and spouse clashed with the traditional ideal of the stern and authoritative patriarch and, by extension, the harsh patriarchal God.⁶⁴ This paradox cannot be entirely resolved as it reflects underlying and historically profound tensions between partially opposing concepts and discourses on friendship, love, and gender.⁶⁵

Concluding discussion

It is well known that the romantic marriage emerged as a new ideal in the eighteenth century. While a number of studies have examined representations of romantic marriage in novels, advice literature, and correspondence, the moral weeklies instead ask why so many marriages are unhappy and what can be done to establish and maintain marital happiness over time. In this article I have attempted to show how Meier and Lange's discourse took shape in direct relation to their civic ethics of perfection, which in turn reflected a long tradition of cultura animi, spiritual exercises and therapeutic regimens. While the classical cultura animi depicted philosophy as an exercise-oriented therapeutic cure of affectual distempers, Meier and Lange held that the sensual and affectual constituted a crucial part of the good life. In the context of marriage, they argued that unhappy relationships typically reflected character and temperamental defects. To establish and maintain marital happiness over time it is necessary to examine and temper the mind and to mutually develop, display, mirror, and confirm each other's cognitive and moral perfections. When this works it gives rise to a self-sustaining logic of perfection that instills pleasure and happiness that is not only virtuous but also sensual and passionate. In contrast to the initial and short-lived infatuation, this form of civic passion is nourished and renewed as long as the spouses discover and rediscover each other's perfections. If this positive chain is broken, however, marriages are easily thrown into a negative spiral of distanced coldness or open hostility. The way to break this negative pattern is typically to control one's temper and respond to animosity with indulgence, understanding, and serenity.

Meier and Lange's ethics of perfection was developed and communicated as a civic morality, providing guidelines as to how, to what extent, and in which contexts the sensual and affectual should be explored and affirmed or restrained and controlled. Marriage was only one of many arenas in which this ethics was established, and where myriad individual cases were used to explore norms and patterns of behavior, establishing boundaries in relation to Christian as well as class-related strands of thought. Situated in this context, Meier and Lange's explorations of marital love, friendship, and selfhood exemplify the interest in the unique individual experience that later came to characterize Romanticism and was linked both to romantic love and to the emergence of a modern individual self more generally.⁶⁶

Finally, as an ethical and therapeutic regimen closely linked to the culture of sensibility, the ethics of perfection appears as a highly conscious attempt to shape and establish an emotional community where the sensual and affective experience should not only be affirmed but also controlled and channeled as a part of a virtuous civic lifestyle.⁶⁷ Furthermore, Meier and Lange's concrete and practical examples and instructions are well in line with what Monique Scheer has labelled emotional practices.⁶⁸ Scheer launches the concept as a way to distance herself from a historiography where emotions just exist or happen in favor of a historiography where emotions are produced through historically specific practices. The early modern cultura animi lends itself to such an analysis precisely because of the emphasis placed on systematic and concrete spiritual exercises and therapeutic regimens. Meier and Lange's attempt to launch and communicate a specific civic ethics of perfection, where the therapeutic approach is applied to the area of marital love and happiness, constitutes a particularly interesting case of emotional practice as it involves a broad spectrum of questions and problems related to class, gender, identity, and self. As pioneering representatives of a modern individual self, Meier and Lange faced an open future with curiosity about who they were, who they could and should become, and how they could communicate their vision to the reading public.