Religion & Sex Part 7

"When we study the religious sentiment profoundly, especially in the Christian religion, and Catholicism in particular, we find at each step its astonishing connection with eroticism. We find it in the exalted adoration of holy women, such as Mary Magdalene, Marie de Bethany, for Jesus, in the holy legends, in the worship of the Virgin Mary in the Middle Ages, and especially in art. The ecstatic Madonnas in our art galleries cast their fervent regards on Jesus or on the heavens. The expression in Murillo's 'Immaculate Conception' may be interpreted by the highest voluptuous exaltation of love as well as by holy transfiguration. The 'saints' of Correggio regard the Virgin with an amorous ardour which may be celestial, but appears in reality extremely terrestrial and human."[96]

Another German authority remarks:--

"I venture to express my conviction that we should rarely err if, in a case of religious melancholy, we a.s.sumed the s.e.xual apparatus to be implicated."[97]

Dr. Bevan Lewis points out how frequently religious exaltation occurs with women at p.u.b.erty, and religious melancholia at the period of s.e.xual decline. And Dr. Charles Mercier puts the interchangeability of s.e.xual and religious feelings in the following pa.s.sage:--

"Religious observances provide an alternative, into which the amatory instinct can be easily and naturally diverted. The emotions and instinctive desires, which finds expression in courtship, is a vast body of vague feeling, which is at first undirected.... It is a voluminous state of exaltation that demands enthusiastic action. This is the state antecedent to falling in love, and if an object presents himself or herself, the torrent of emotion is directed into amatory pa.s.sion. But if no object appears, or if the selected object is denied, then religious observances yield a very pa.s.sable subst.i.tute for the expression of the emotion. Religious observances provide the sensuous atmosphere, the call for self-renunciation, the means of expressing powerful and voluminous feeling, that the potential or disappointed lover needs. The madrigal is transformed into the hymn; the adornment of the person that should have gone to allure the beloved now takes the shape of ecclesiastical vestments; the reverence that should have been paid to the loved one is transformed to a higher object; the enthusiasm that would have expanded in courtship is expressed in worship; the gifts that would have been made, the services that would have been rendered to the loved one, are transferred to the Church."[98]

Dr. Krafft-Ebing, after dwelling upon the substantial ident.i.ty of s.e.xual love and religious emotion, summarises his conclusions by saying:--

"Religious and s.e.xual hyperaesthesia at the acme of development show the same volume of intensity and the same quality of excitement, and may, therefore, under given circ.u.mstances interchange. Both will in certain pathologic states degenerate into cruelty."[99]

Even so orthodox a writer as the Rev. S. Baring-Gould points out that--

"The existence of that evil, which, knowing the const.i.tution of man, we should expect to find prevalent in mysticism, the experience of all ages has shown following, d.o.g.g.i.ng its steps inevitably. So slight is the film that separates religion from sensual pa.s.sion, that uncontrolled spiritual fervour roars readily into a blaze of licentiousness."[100]

No useful purpose would be served by lengthening this list of citations.

Enough has been said to show that the point of view expressed is one endorsed by many sober, competent, and responsible observers. There exists among them a general, and one may add a growing, recognition of the important truth that the connection between religious and s.e.xual feeling is of the closest character, and that one is very often mistaken for the other. Asceticism, usually taken as evidence to the reverse, is on the contrary, confirmative. The ascetic often presents us with a flagrant case of eroto-mania, expressing itself in terms of religion.

It is highly significant that the biographies of Christian saints should furnish so many cases of men and women of strong sensual pa.s.sions, and whose ascetic devotion was only the reaction from almost unbridled sensualism. No wonder that in the temptations experienced by the monks the figures of nude women so often appeared before their heated imaginations. s.e.xual feeling suppressed in one direction broke out in another. Feelings, in themselves perfectly normal, became, as a consequence of repression and misdirection, pathologic. And one consequence of this was that many of the early Christian writers brought to the consideration of the subject of s.e.x a concentration of mind that resulted in disquisitions of such a nature that it is impossible to do more than refer to them. The s.e.xual relation instead of being refined was coa.r.s.ened. Marriage was viewed in its lowest form, more as a concession to the weakness of the flesh than as a desirable state for all men and women. Nor can it be said, after many centuries, that these ideas are quite eradicated from present-day life.

A field of investigation that yields much illuminating information is the biographies of the saints and of other religious characters. In many of these cases the acceptance of s.e.xual feeling for religious illumination is very clear. Thus of St. Gertrude, a Benedictine nun of the thirteenth century, we read:--

"One day at chapel she heard supernaturally sung the words, '_Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus_.' The Son of G.o.d, leaning towards her like a sweet lover, and giving to her soul the softest kiss, said to her at the second _Sanctus_, 'In the _Sanctus_ addressed to My person, receive with this all the sanct.i.ty of My divinity and of My humanity.'... And the following Sunday, while she was thanking G.o.d for this favour, behold the Son of G.o.d, more beauteous than thousands of angels, takes her to His arms as if He were proud of her, and presents her to G.o.d the Father, and in that perfection of sanct.i.ty with which He had endowed her."[101]

Of Juliana of Norwich, who was granted a revelation in 1373, we are told that she had for long 'ardently desired' a bodily sight of the Lord upon the cross; and that finally Jesus appeared to her and said, "I love thee and thou lovest Me, and our love shall never be disparted in two."[102]

So, again, in the case of Sister Jeanne des Anges, Superior of the Convent of Ursulines of Loudun, and the princ.i.p.al character in the famous Grandier witchcraft case, we have a detailed account, in her own words, of the lascivious dreams, unclean suggestions, etc.--all attributed to Satan--and alternating with impressions of bodily union with Jesus.[103] Marie de L'Incarnation addresses Jesus as follows:--

"Oh, my love, when shall I embrace you? Have you no pity on the torments that I suffer? Alas! alas! My love! My beauty! My life! Instead of healing my pain, you take pleasure in it. Come, let me embrace you, and die in your sacred arms."[104]

Veronica Juliani, beatified by Pope Pius II., took a real lamb to bed with her, kissed it, and suckled it at her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. St. Catherine of Genoa threw herself on the ground to cool herself, crying out, "Love, love, I can bear it no longer." She also confessed to a peculiar longing towards her confessor.[105]

The blessed Mary Alacoque, foundress of the Sacred Heart, was subject from early life to a number of complaints--rheumatism, palsy, pains in the side, ulceration of the legs--and experienced visions early in her career. As a child she had so vivid a sense of modesty that the mere sight of a man offended her. At seventeen she took to wearing a knotted cord drawn so tightly that she could neither eat nor breathe without pain. She compressed her arms so tightly with iron chains that she could not remove them without anguish. "I made," she says, "a bed of potsherds, on which I slept with extreme pleasure." She fasted and tortured herself in a variety of ways, and the more her physical disorders increased the more numerous became her visions. Before she was eighteen years of age, in 1671, she entered a nunnery. From the time she donned the habit of a novice she was 'blessed' with visions. "Our Lord showed me that that day was the day of our spiritual wedding; He forthwith gave me to understand that He wished to make me taste all the sweetness of the caresses of His love. In reality, those divine caresses were from that moment so excessive, that they often put me out of myself." "Once," says one of her biographers, "having retired into her chamber, she threw off the clothes with which she had bedecked herself during the day, when the Son of G.o.d showed Himself to her in the state in which He was after His cruel flagellation--that is, with His body all wounded, torn, gory--and He said to her that it was her vanities that had brought Him into that condition." In one of these visions Jesus took the head of Mary, pressed it to His bosom, spoke to her in pa.s.sionate words, opened her side and took out her heart, plunged it into His own, and then replaced it. He then explained His design of founding the Order of the Sacred Heart. Ever after, Mary was conscious of a pain in her side and a burning sensation in her chest--two plain symptoms of hysteria.[106]

Santa Teresa, who died at the early age of thirty-three, and in whose family more than one case of well-developed neurasthenia can be traced, was favoured with 'messages' at a very early age. She believed some of these were temptations from the devil suggesting an 'honourable alliance.' A nervous breakdown followed directly after entrance into a convent. She was then twenty years of age, was subject to fainting fits and longed for illness as a sign of divine favour. She was subject to convulsions, and soon after taking the veil fell into a cataleptic trance, which lasted three days. She was thought to be dead, but at the end of the time sat up and told those around that she had visited both heaven and h.e.l.l, and seen the joys of the blessed and the torments of the d.a.m.ned. It is at least suggestive that, in spite of the longing for personal communion with Jesus, her first experience of the ecstasy of divine love was experienced after discovering a 'very realistic' picture of a martyred saint--St. Joseph. The significance of the intense contemplation of a tortured body--possibly made by one whose s.e.xual nature was undergoing a process of suppression--is unmistakable.[107]

On these and similar cases Professor William James makes the following comment:--

"To the medical mind these ecstasies signify nothing but suggested hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of superst.i.tion, and a corporeal one of degeneration and hysteria. Undoubtedly these pathological conditions have existed in many and possibly in all the cases, but that fact tells us nothing about the value for knowledge of the consciousness which they induce. To pa.s.s a spiritual judgment upon these states, we must not content ourselves with superficial medical talk, but enquire into their fruits for life."[108]

Now the question is really not what these ecstasies suggest to the 'medical mind,' as though that were a type of mind quite unfitted to pa.s.s judgment. It is a question of what the facts suggest to any mind judging the behaviour of a person under the influence of strong religious emotion exactly as it would judge anyone under any other strong emotional pressure. And if it be possible to explain these states in terms of known physiological and mental action, what warranty have we for rejecting this and preferring in its stead an explanation that is both unprovable and unnecessary? And one would be excused for thinking that cases which certainly involve some sort of abnormal nervous action are precisely those in which the medical mind should be called on to express an opinion. What is meant by pa.s.sing 'a spiritual judgment'

upon these states is not exactly clear, unless it means judging them in terms of the historic supernatural interpretation. But that is precisely the interpretation which is challenged by the 'medical mind.'

I do not see how any enquiry "into their fruits for life" can affect a rational estimate of the nature of these mystical states. Mysticism adds nothing to the native disposition of a person. It merely gives their energies a new turn, a new direction. What they were before the experience they remain, substantially, afterwards. That is why we find religious mystics of every variety. Some energetically practical; others dreamily unpractical. Professor James admits this in saying that "the other-worldliness encouraged by the mystical consciousness makes this over-abstraction from practical life peculiarly liable to befall mystics in whom the character is naturally pa.s.sive and the intellect feeble; but in natively strong minds and characters we find quite opposite results."[109] And when it is further admitted that "the mystical feeling of enlargement, union, and emanc.i.p.ation has no specific intellectual content whatever of its own," but "is capable of forming matrimonial alliances with material furnished by the most diverse philosophies and theologies, provided only they can find a place in their framework for its peculiar emotional mood," mysticism seems reduced to an emotional development on all fours with emotional development in other directions. It is not peculiar to religious minds because "it has no specific intellectual content." It is amorphous, so to speak. And it may form diverse 'matrimonial alliances' precisely because it does not point to a hidden world of reality, but is merely indicative of tense emotional moods. In the face of nature the non-theistic Richard Jeffries experiences all the feelings of mental enlargement and emotional transports that Mary Alacoque or Santa Teresa experienced in their visions of the 'Risen Christ.'

It is idle, then, to sneer at 'medical materialism,' and stigmatise it as superficial. Many people are const.i.tutionally afraid of words, and there is nothing that arouses prejudice so quickly as a name. But it is really not a question of materialism, medical or non-medical. It is a mere matter of applying knowledge and common sense to the cases before us. Are we to take the subject's explanation of his or her mental states as authoritative, so far as their nature is concerned; or are we to treat them as symptoms demanding the skilled a.n.a.lysis of the specialist?

If the former, how can we differentiate between the mystic and the admittedly hysterical patient? If the latter, what ground is there for placing the mystic in a category of his own? Rational and scientific a.n.a.lysis will certainly take far more notice of the nature of the feelings excited than of the object towards which they are directed.

Here is the case of a young lady, given by Dr. Moreau, in his _Morbid Psychology_:--

"During my long hours of sleeplessness in the night my beloved Saviour began to make Himself manifest to me. Pondering over the meditations of St. Francois de Sales on the _Song of Songs_, I seemed to feel all my faculties suspended, and crossing my arms upon my chest, I awaited in a sort of dread what might be revealed to me.... I saw the Redeemer veritably in the flesh.... He extended Himself beside me, pressed me so closely that I could feel His crown of thorns, and the nails in His feet and hands, while He pressed His lips over mine, giving me the most ravishing kiss of a divine Spouse, and sending a delicious thrill through my entire body."[110]

Get rid of the narcotising effect of theological a.s.sociations by eliminating the name of Jesus and other religious terms from this case, and from the others already cited, and no one would have the least doubt as to their real nature. Given a condition of physical health in these cases, with conditions that favoured social activity, healthy intercourse with the opposite s.e.x, culminating in marriage and parenthood, can there be any doubt that this species of religious ecstasy would have been non-existent? If, as Tylor says, the refectory door would many a time have closed the gates of heaven, happy family life would in a vast number of cases have prevented those religio-erotic trances which have played so powerful a part in the history of supernaturalism. Most people will agree with Dr. Maudsley:--

"The ecstatic trances of such saintly women as Catherine Sienne and St.

Theresa, in which they believed themselves to be visited by their Saviour and to be received as veritable spouses into His bosom, were, though they knew it not, little better than vicarious s.e.xual o.r.g.a.s.m; a condition of things which the intense contemplation of the naked male figure, carved or sculptured in all its proportions on a cross, is more fitted to produce in young women of susceptible nervous temperament than people are apt to consider. Every experienced physician must have met with instances of single and childless women who have devoted themselves with extraordinary zeal to habitual religious exercises, and who, having gone insane as a culmination of their emotional fervour, have straightway exhibited the saddest mixture of religious and erotic symptoms--a boiling over of l.u.s.t in voice, face, gestures, under the pitiful degradation of disease.... The fanatical religious sects, such as the Shakers and the like, which spring up from time to time in communities and disgust them by the offensive way in which they mingle love and religion, are inspired in great measure by s.e.xual feeling; on the one hand, there is probably the cunning of a hypocritical knave, or the self-deception of a half-insane one, using the weaknesses of weak women to minister to his vanity or his l.u.s.t under a religious guise; on the other hand, there is an exaggerated self-feeling, often rooted in the s.e.xual pa.s.sion, which is unwittingly fostered under the cloak of religious emotion, and which is apt to conduct to madness or to sin. In such cases the holy kiss owes its warmth to the s.e.xual impulse, which inspires it, consciously or unconsciously, and the mystical religious union of the s.e.xes is fitted to issue in a less spiritual union."[111]

Many manuals of devotion will be found to furnish the same kind of evidence as biographical narratives concerning the intimate relations that exists between s.e.xuality and religious feeling. What has just been said may be repeated here, namely, that if the religious a.s.sociations were dispelled, there would be no mistaking the nature of feelings that originated much of this cla.s.s of writing, or the feelings to which they appeal. The serious fact is that the appeal is there whether we recognise it or not, and it is a question worthy of serious consideration whether the unwary imagination of the young may be not as surely debauched by certain books of devotion as by a frankly erotic production. It is not without reason that d'Israeli the elder, in an essay omitted from all editions of his book after the first, remarked that "poets are amorous, lovers are poetical, but saints are both."[112]

Take, for example, the following from a collection of old English homilies, dating from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries:--

"Jesus, my holy love, my sure sweetness! Jesus, my heart, my joy, my soul-heal! Jesus, sweet Jesus, my darling, my life, my light, my balm, my honey-drop!... Kindle me with the blaze of Thy enlightening love. Let me be Thy leman, and teach me to love Thee.... Oh, that I might behold how Thou stretchedst Thyself for me on the cross. Oh, that I might cast myself between those same arms, so very wide outspread.... Oh, that I were in Thy arms, in Thy arms so stretchedst and outspread on the cross."

Or this, from the same collection:--

"Sweet Jesus, my love, my darling, my Lord, my Saviour, my balm, sweeter is the remembrance of Thee than honey in the mouth. Who is there that may not love Thy lovely face? Whose heart is so hard that may not melt at the remembrance of Thee? Oh! who may not love Thee, lovely Jesus?

Jesus, my precious darling, my love, my life, my beloved, my most worthy of love, my heart's balm, Thou art lovesome in countenance, Thou art altogether bright. All angels' life is to look upon Thy face, for Thy cheer is so marvellously lovesome and pleasant to look upon.... Thou art so bright, and so white that the sun would be pale if compared to Thy blissful countenance. If I, then, love any man for beauty, I will love Thee, my dear life, my mother's fairest son."[113]

The language of erotic piety figures much more prominently in Roman Catholic medieval writings than in Protestant literature. This is not because an appeal to the same feelings is absent from the religious literature of Protestantism, it is mainly due to the fact that more modern conditions leads to a less intense religious appeal, while the broadening of social life encourages a more natural outlet for all aspects of human nature. Still, the following expression of a young lady convert of Wesley's offers a fair parallel to the specimen given above.

It is taken from Southey's _Life of Wesley_:--

"Oh, mighty, powerful, happy change! The love of G.o.d was shed abroad in my heart, and a flame kindled there with pains so violent, and yet so very ravishing, that my body was almost torn asunder. I sweated, I trembled, I fainted, I sang. Oh, I thought my head was a fountain of water. I was dissolved in love. My beloved is mine, and I am His. He has all charms; He has ravished my heart; He is my comforter, my friend, my all. Oh, I am sick of love. He is altogether lovely, the chiefest among ten thousand. Oh, how Jesus fills, Jesus extends, Jesus overwhelms the soul in which He lives."

The _Imitation of Christ_ has been described by more than one writer as a manual of eroticism, and certainly the chapters "The Wonderful Effects of Divine Love," and "Of the Proof of a True Lover," might well be cited in defence of this view. In the following canticle of St. Francis of a.s.sisi it does not seem possible to distinguish a substantial difference between it and a frankly avowed love poem:--

"Into love's furnace I am cast, Into love's furnace I am cast, I burn, I languish, pine, and waste.

Oh, love divine, how sharp thy dart!

How deep the wound that galls my heart!

As wax in heat, so, from above, My smitten soul dissolves in love.

I live, yet languishing I die, While in thy furnace bound I lie."[114]

It would certainly be possible to furnish exact parallels from volumes of secular verse that would be strictly 'taboo' among those who fail to see anything objectionable in verses like the above when written in connection with religion. Such people fail to recognise that their attractiveness lies in the hidden appeal to amatory feeling, and owe their origin to the suppressed or perverted s.e.xual pa.s.sion of their author. We must not allow ourselves to be blinded by the consideration as to whether the object of adoration be an earthly or a heavenly one.

Men and women have not distinct feelings that are aroused as their objective differs, but the same feelings directed now in one direction, now in another. The direction of these feelings, their exciting cause, are sheer environmental accidents. How can one resist the implications of the following, from a devotional work widely circulated amongst the women of France:--

"Praise to Jesus, praise His power, Praise His sweet allurements.

Praise to Jesus, when His goodness Reduces me to nakedness; Praise to Jesus when He says to me, My sister, my dove, my beautiful one!

Praise to Jesus in all my steps, Praise to His amorous charms.

Praise to Jesus when His loving mouth Touches mine in a loving kiss.

Praise to Jesus when His gentle caresses Overwhelm me with chaste joys.

Praise to Jesus when at His leisure He allows me to kiss Him."[115]

Against this we may place the following hymn, sung at an American camp meeting of some thousands of persons between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five:--

"Blessed Lily of the Valley, oh, how fair is He; He is mine, I am His.

Sweeter than the angels' music is His voice to me; He is mine, I am His.

Where the lilies fair are blooming by the waters calm There He leads me and upholds me by His strong right arm.

All the air is love around me--I can feel no harm; He is mine, I am His."[116]

Special significance is given to this reference by the age of those who composed the gathering. This period embraces the years during which s.e.xual maturity is attained, and the organism experiences important physiological and psychological changes. The consequence is that the atmosphere is, so to say, charged with unsuspected s.e.x feeling, and it is not surprising that many complaints have been made of immorality following such gatherings. The organism is then peculiarly liable to suggestion in all forms. Along with the imitativeness of early years there is something of the decisive initiative of maturity. These qualities wisely guided might be turned to the great advantage of both the individual and of the community. Mere incitement by religious revivalism can result in little else than misdirection and injury. It should be the most obvious of truths that the attractiveness of hymns such as the one given, with the keen delight in the suggested pictures, lies in their yielding--all unknown, perhaps, to those partic.i.p.ating-- satisfaction to feelings that are very frequently imperious in their demands, and are at all times astonishingly pervasive in their influence.