How did the saints meet their spouses? Courtship of the Saints offers the greatest love stories of mankind, each one a bright example of sanctity in the vocation of marriage. Read on for the holy romance of St. Elizabeth of Hungary and Louis IV.
In ancient days, many marriages were arranged for political reasons, especially among Catholic royalty. This custom is still practiced in some cultures today whereby a couple is forced to fall in love out of obedience rather than from matters of the heart. While an arranged marriage can be a recipe for a difficult and unhappy marriage, especially if one spouse had already pledged their heart to another person before their marriage, some saints saw the hand of God behind it all. One of those cases was the princess Saint Elizabeth of Hungary and her husband Louis IV, Landgrave of Thuringia. Though Louis IV is not a saint, he is venerated as one.
Around the age of four, Saint Elizabeth was promised in marriage to the eleven-year-old Louis IV and moved from her native land to Germany shortly thereafter. “She was transported there in a silver cradle lined with silk sheets, together with a sumptuous dowry,” according to Ferdinand Holböck. Her foster mother, Countess Sophia, would be her future mother-in-law. In 1221, the fourteen-year-old Elizabeth married the twenty-one-year-old Louis IV. The couple returned to Elizabeth’s native country of Hungary for their honeymoon and eventually resided in Wartburg, Germany. Biographer Walter Nigg said it best about this holy couple:
She [Elizabeth] lived her married life affectionately, with every fiber of her being, and revealed to her husband a sweet womanly charm full of tenderness. Elizabeth’s marriage was contracted for dynastic reasons and not on the basis of a personal inclination; nevertheless, the marital union was happy beyond all expectations. . . . Elizabeth was not the sort of wife who is cool and aloof, who draws back like a mimosa at every tender approach or pleads a headache as an excuse; no, she was an extremely warm, affectionate person who hungered for love and intimacy. The spouses had been acquainted since their childhood; the same mother had reared them; and even after their wedding they still called each other brother and sister. From a very early date there was between them a love more intimate than that experienced by many couples who have been married for a long time.
What did their love look like? It was said that this couple “could not stand to be separated from each other either for a long time or by a great distance. Therefore Elizabeth frequently followed her husband along rough roads, on lengthy journeys, and in bad weather, led more by the ardor of pure love than by carnal desire. For the chaste presence of her modest husband did not hinder this most pious wife either from watching and praying or from other good works.” Clearly, Saint Elizabeth and Louis IV were madly in love. Just as nothing could separate them from the love of Christ (see Rom. 8:35), so also nothing could separate them from one another. The two loves go hand in hand. Those couples who love Christ can never be separated in life or in death.
While Saint Elizabeth and Louis IV loved each other profoundly, they also loved each other as brother and sister in Christ. Their love personifies the words from the Canticle of Canticles, “my sister, my spouse” (Cant. 4:12). When Louis was away on trips, Elizabeth would spend her time in prayer and penance. And when Louis IV returned from his work travels, she “would run to meet him, embrace him with great joy, and with her passionate Hungarian blood, ‘kiss him affectionally more than a thousand times on the mouth.’”
Together this couple bore three children, one son and two daughters, one of whom became an abbess. Despite pressure from his inner circle to be unfaithful to his wife, Louis once said, “Let people say what they will, but I say it clearly: Elizabeth is very dear to me, and I have nothing more precious on this earth.”
This devout couple reveals another salient lesson: marriage is not a one-time pursuit. When they said, “I do,” Saint Elizabeth and Louis IV’s love had just begun. Sadly, many couples’ loves fade from a forest fire to a flickering candle. What Saint Elizabeth and Louis IV’s marriage teaches us is that our marriage vows ought to unfold every day as we seek to sacrifice for one another until death. Like this devout couple, we ought to fall more deeply in love with our spouse each day and most of all with God. Just as we ought to seek the deepest union with God while on earth, so also with our spouse, if God should call us to marriage. This was a challenge for Saint Elizabeth. She prayed frequently in the middle of the night “to withstand an excessive love for my husband.” She often felt interiorly conflicted as to whether she loved her husband too much at the expense of her love for God. At the age of nineteen and only six years into their marriage, Elizabeth’s world crumbled when her husband Louis IV died from the plague en route to the Crusades. In her tears, Elizabeth said, “Now the world and everything in it that I loved is dead.” After Louis’s death, she devoted her life to raising her children and tending to the sick and poor in a hospital she founded.
An arranged marriage is the last way most women, especially in an autonomous Western society, want to meet their spouse. Yet, in some tight Catholic circles, there is an unspoken and sometimes even spoken desire among friends for their children to get married. While no money or land is exchanged, something far greater happens, a blessed and fruitful marriage. One of the greatest wishes for any parent is to see their son or daughter marry a godly spouse and share a happy, holy union. Although parents ought never to force their children to marry someone, they must also not be afraid to give their reasons both in favor and against potential suitors, especially if there are serious reservations. Above all, parents must pray for their children to meet a virtuous man or woman, perhaps one who comes from devout parents, even amongst friends. The apple does not fall too far from the tree, and what a blessing for our children to partake of a fruit that comes from a tree known to us.
Like Saint Elizabeth of Hungary and Louis IV’s marriage, the Divine Matchmaker can bring a man and woman together no matter their location, age, circumstances, and nationality, especially due to advances in modern technology. What initially began as a political union between Saint Elizabeth and Louis IV became a deeply spiritual and bodily union. God’s mode of introducing couples is often very ordinary, such as a homeschool group, school, or parish. Young adult groups or even work can serve as a medium for God to build up His kingdom. God puts people in our path for a reason. Sadly, we are often too preoccupied to notice. Individuals seeking a spouse rarely must scout the ends of the earth to find their mate; instead, before their very eyes could be the one God has prepared for them. And if there is a natural attraction, a desire for virtue and raising children, and above all, a shared pursuit for heavenly things, a couple has the foundations for a happy marriage like so many saintly unions.
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This article is taken from a chapter in Courtship of the Saints by Patrick O’Hearn which is available from TAN Books.
