Martin Le Maistre

Martin Le Maistre (Latin: Martinus Magister; 1432 – 1482) was a French theologian, Rector Magnificus of the University of Paris and Chaplain to Louis the Eleventh.

Biography

Born in Tours, he was a professor first at the College of Navarre at the University of Paris, and ultimately the principal of the Collège Sainte-Barbe. Although he was of very low status, being the son of a butcher, Le Maistre became chaplain and confessor to King Louis XI.

He made himself famous by the treatises on philosophy and morality that he taught. He wrote a treatise on values, printed in Paris in 1489; a treatise on temperance, printed in the same city; a treatise on consequences, according to the doctrine of the Nominalists; an explanation of the universals of Porphyry, also printed in Paris; and a question of destiny, printed in the same place. Le Maistre received his bachelor degree in 1469, and his doctoral degree in 1473.

He died on his return from a pilgrimage to Cléry-sur-Loire and was buried in the church of Notre-Dame de Cléry.

Thought

According to John Noonan, Le Maistre was the first to present a theology or ethics of marriage that included the motives of love and sexual fulfilment as licit reasons for engaging in intercourse. Le Maistre challenged both the sexual pessimism of the church fathers, the augustinian doctrine, and the overly rationalist analyses of the purposes of marital intercourse made by Aquinas and other late Medieval theologians.

Using the aristotelian understanding of pleasure as a mean of bettering the condition of the person, he inferred that there was no sin if intercourse was sought for this motive. He declared that spouses could act virtuously when they engaged in marital sex for other reasons besides the procreation of a child, and the rendering of the marriage debt, but also the intention to avoid adultery, the desire for physical health and calm of spirit. Virtue being moderation, conjugal chastity must pursue a middle course between incontinence and insensibility. The husband is "scarcely master of himself because of the vehemence of the desire of lust," he said. His wife is "given to him for the sake of solace and remedy."

Yet these views had little immediate acceptance.

See also

• Denis the Carthusian
• John Major
• Thomas Sanchez

Works

• Questiones Morales (1489)
• Tractatus Consequentiarum (1489)
• De Temperantia Liber (1511)
• Contemplatio Melliflua et Bonae ac Piae Eruditionis Plenissima (1519)

External links

• Works by Martin Le Maistre at Gallica