Studies in the Psychology of Sex Volume Vi Part 9

The influence of Nietzsche, direct and indirect, has been on the side of the virtue of chast.i.ty in its modern sense. The command: "Be hard," as Nietzsche used it, was not so much an injunction to an unfeeling indifference towards others as an appeal for a more strenuous att.i.tude towards one's self, the cultivation of a self-control able to gather up and hold in the forces of the soul for expenditure on deliberately accepted ends. "A relative chast.i.ty," he wrote, "a fundamental and wise foresight in the face of erotic things, even in thought, is part of a fine reasonableness in life, even in richly endowed and complete natures."[88] In this matter Nietzsche is a typical representative of the modern movement for the restoration of chast.i.ty to its proper place as a real and beneficial virtue, and not a mere empty convention. Such a movement could not fail to make itself felt, for all that favors facility and luxurious softness in s.e.xual matters is quickly felt to degrade character as well as to diminish the finest erotic satisfaction. For erotic satisfaction, in its highest planes, is only possible when we have secured for the s.e.xual impulse a high degree of what Colin Scott calls "irradiation," that is to say a wide diffusion through the whole of the psychic organism. And that can only be attained by placing impediments in the way of the swift and direct gratification of s.e.xual desire, by compelling it to increase its force, to take long circuits, to charge the whole organism so highly that the final climax of gratified love is not the trivial detumescence of a petty desire but the immense consummation of a longing in which the whole soul as well as the whole body has its part. "Only the chaste can be really obscene," said Huysmans. And on a higher plane, only the chaste can really love.

"Physical purity," remarks Hans Menjago ("Die Ueberschatzung der Physischen Reinheit," Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, vol. ii, Part VIII) "was originally valued as a sign of greater strength of will and firmness of character, and it marked a rise above primitive conditions. This purity was difficult to preserve in those unsure days; it was rare and unusual. From this rarity rose the superst.i.tion of supernatural power residing in the virgin. But this has no meaning as soon as such purity becomes general and a specially conspicuous degree of firmness of character is no longer needed to maintain it.... Physical purity can only possess value when it is the result of individual strength of character, and not when it is the result of compulsory rules of morality."

Konrad Holler, who has given special attention to the s.e.xual question in schools, remarks in relation to physical exercise: "The greatest advantage of physical exercises, however, is not the development of the active and pa.s.sive strength of the body and its skill, but the establishment and fortification of the authority of the will over the body and its needs, so much given up to indolence. He who has learnt to endure and overcome, for the sake of a definite aim, hunger and thirst and fatigue, will be the better able to withstand s.e.xual impulses and the temptation to gratify them, when better insight and aesthetic feeling have made clear to him, as one used to maintain authority over his body, that to yield would be injurious or disgraceful" (K. Holler, "Die Aufgabe der Volksschule," s.e.xualpadagogik, p. 70). Professor Schafenacker (id., p. 102), who also emphasizes the importance of self-control and self-restraint, thinks a youth must bear in mind his future mission, as citizen and father of a family.

A subtle and penetrative thinker of to-day, Jules de Gaultier, writing on morals without reference to this specific question, has discussed what new internal inhibitory motives we can appeal to in replacing the old external inhibition of authority and belief which is now decayed. He answers that the state of feeling on which old faiths were based still persists. "May not," he asks, "the desire for a thing that we love and wish for beneficently replace the belief that a thing is by divine will, or in the nature of things? Will not the presence of a bridle on the frenzy of instinct reveal itself as a useful att.i.tude adopted by instinct itself for its own conservation, as a symptom of the force and health of instinct? Is not empire over oneself, the power of regulating one's acts, a mark of superiority and a motive for self-esteem? Will not this joy of pride have the same authority in preserving the instincts as was once possessed by religious fear and the pretended imperatives of reason?" (Jules de Gaultier, La Dependance de la Morale et l'Independance des Murs, p. 153.)

H. G. Wells (in A Modern Utopia), pointing out the importance of chast.i.ty, though rejecting celibacy, invokes, like Jules de Gaultier, the motive of pride. "Civilization has developed far more rapidly than man has modified. Under the unnatural perfection of security, liberty, and abundance our civilization has attained, the normal untrained human being is disposed to excess in almost every direction; he tends to eat too much and too elaborately, to drink too much, to become lazy faster than his work can be reduced, to waste his interest upon displays, and to make love too much and too elaborately. He gets out of training, and concentrates upon egoistic or erotic broodings. Our founders organized motives from all sorts of sources, but I think the chief force to give men self-control is pride. Pride may not be the n.o.blest thing in the soul, but it is the best king there, for all that. They looked to it to keep a man clean and sound and sane. In this matter, as in all matters of natural desire, they held no appet.i.te must be glutted, no appet.i.te must have artificial whets, and also and equally that no appet.i.te should be starved. A man must come from the table satisfied, but not replete. And, in the matter of love, a straight and clean desire for a clean and straight fellow-creature was our founders' ideal. They enjoined marriage between equals as the duty to the race, and they framed directions of the precisest sort to prevent that uxorious inseparableness, that connubiality, that sometimes reduces a couple of people to something jointly less than either."

With regard to chast.i.ty as an element of erotic satisfaction, Edward Carpenter writes (Love's Coming of Age, p. 11): "There is a kind of illusion about physical desire similar to that which a child suffers from when, seeing a beautiful flower, it instantly s.n.a.t.c.hes the same, and destroys in a few moments the form and fragrance which attracted it. He only gets the full glory who holds himself back a little, and truly possesses, who is willing, if need be, not to possess. He is indeed a master of life who, accepting the grosser desires as they come to his body, and not refusing them, knows how to transform them at will into the most rare and fragrant flowers of human emotion."

Beyond its functions in building up character, in heightening and enn.o.bling the erotic life, and in subserving the adequate fulfilment of family and social duties, chast.i.ty has a more special value for those who cultivate the arts. We may not always be inclined to believe the writers who have declared that their verse alone is wanton, but their lives chaste. It is certainly true, however, that a relationship of this kind tends to occur. The stuff of the s.e.xual life, as Nietzsche says, is the stuff of art; if it is expended in one channel it is lost for the other. The masters of all the more intensely emotional arts have frequently cultivated a high degree of chast.i.ty. This is notably the case as regards music; one thinks of Mozart,[89] of Beethoven, of Schubert, and many lesser men. In the case of poets and novelists chast.i.ty may usually seem to be less prevalent but it is frequently well-marked, and is not seldom disguised by the resounding reverberations which even the slightest love-episode often exerts on the poetic organism. Goethe's life seems, at a first glance, to be a long series of continuous love-episodes. Yet when we remember that it was the very long life of a man whose vigor remained until the end, that his attachments long and profoundly affected his emotional life and his work, and that with most of the women he has immortalized he never had actual s.e.xual relationships at all, and when we realize, moreover, that, throughout, he accomplished an almost inconceivably vast amount of work, we shall probably conclude that s.e.xual indulgence had a very much smaller part in Goethe's life than in that of many an average man on whom it leaves no obvious emotional or intellectual trace whatever. Sterne, again, declared that he must always have a Dulcinea dancing in his head, yet the amount of his intimate relations with women appears to have been small. Balzac spent his life toiling at his desk and carrying on during many years a love correspondence with a woman he scarcely ever saw and at the end only spent a few months of married life with. The like experience has befallen many artistic creators. For, in the words of Landor, "absence is the invisible and incorporeal mother of ideal beauty."

We do well to remember that, while the auto-erotic manifestations through the brain are of infinite variety and importance, the brain and the s.e.xual organs are yet the great rivals in using up bodily energy, and that there is an antagonism between extreme brain vigor and extreme s.e.xual vigor, even although they may sometimes both appear at different periods in the same individual.[90] In this sense there is no paradox in the saying of Ramon Correa that potency is impotence and impotence potency, for a high degree of energy, whether in athletics or in intellect or in s.e.xual activity, is unfavorable to the display of energy in other directions. Every high degree of potency has its related impotencies.

It may be added that we may find a curiously inconsistent proof of the excessive importance attached to s.e.xual function by a society which systematically tries to depreciate s.e.x, in the disgrace which is attributed to the lack of "virile" potency. Although civilized life offers immense scope for the activities of s.e.xually impotent persons, the impotent man is made to feel that, while he need not be greatly concerned if he suffers from nervous disturbances of digestion, if he should suffer just as innocently from nervous disturbances of the s.e.xual impulse, it is almost a crime. A striking example of this was shown, a few years ago, when it was plausibly suggested that Carlyle's relations with his wife might best be explained by supposing that he suffered from some trouble of s.e.xual potency. At once admirers rushed forward to "defend" Carlyle from this "disgraceful" charge; they were more shocked than if it had been alleged that he was a syphilitic. Yet impotence is, at the most, an infirmity, whether due to some congenital anatomical defect or to a disturbance of nervous balance in the delicate s.e.xual mechanism, such as is apt to occur in men of abnormally sensitive temperament. It is no more disgraceful to suffer from it than from dyspepsia, with which, indeed, it may be a.s.sociated. Many men of genius and high moral character have been s.e.xually deformed. This was the case with Cowper (though this significant fact is suppressed by his biographers); Ruskin was divorced for a reason of this kind; and J. S. Mill, it is said, was s.e.xually of little more than infantile development.

Up to this point I have been considering the quality of chast.i.ty and the quality of asceticism in their most general sense and without any attempt at precise differentiation.[91] But if we are to accept these as modern virtues, valid to-day, it is necessary that we should be somewhat more precise in defining them. It seems most convenient, and most strictly accordant also with etymology, if we agree to mean by asceticism or ascesis, the athlete quality of self-discipline, controlling, by no means necessarily for indefinitely prolonged periods, the gratification of the s.e.xual impulse. By chast.i.ty, which is primarily the quality of purity, and secondarily that of holiness, rather than of abstinence, we may best understand a due proportion between erotic claims and the other claims of life. "Chast.i.ty," as Ellen Key well says, "is harmony between body and soul in relation to love." Thus comprehended, asceticism is the virtue of control that leads up to erotic gratification, and chast.i.ty is the virtue which exerts its harmonizing influence in the erotic life itself.

It will be seen that asceticism by no means necessarily involves perpetual continence. Properly understood, asceticism is a discipline, a training, which has reference to an end not itself. If it is compulsorily perpetual, whether at the dictates of a religious dogma, or as a mere fetish, it is no longer on a natural basis, and it is no longer moral, for the restraint of a man who has spent his whole life in a prison is of no value for life. If it is to be natural and to be moral asceticism must have an end outside itself, it must subserve the ends of vital activity, which cannot be subserved by a person who is engaged in a perpetual struggle with his own natural instincts. A man may, indeed, as a matter of taste or preference, live his whole life in s.e.xual abstinence, freely and easily, but in that case he is not an ascetic, and his abstinence is neither a subject for applause nor for criticism.

In the same way chast.i.ty, far from involving s.e.xual abstinence, only has its value when it is brought within the erotic sphere. A purity that is ignorance, when the age of childish innocence is once pa.s.sed, is mere stupidity; it is nearer to vice than to virtue. Nor is purity consonant with effort and struggle; in that respect it differs from asceticism. "We conquer the bondage of s.e.x," Rosa Mayreder says, "by acceptance, not by denials, and men can only do this with the help of women." The would-be chast.i.ty of cold calculation is equally unbeautiful and unreal, and without any sort of value. A true and worthy chast.i.ty can only be supported by an ardent ideal, whether, as among the early Christians, this is the erotic ideal of a new romance, or, as among ourselves, a more humanly erotic ideal. "Only erotic idealism," says Ellen Key, "can arouse enthusiasm for chast.i.ty." Chast.i.ty in a healthily developed person can thus be beautifully exercised only in the actual erotic life; in part it is the natural instinct of dignity and temperance; in part it is the art of touching the things of s.e.x with hands that remember their aptness for all the fine ends of life. Upon the doorway of entrance to the inmost sanctuary of love there is thus the same inscription as on the doorway to the Epidaurian Sanctuary of Aesculapius: "None but the pure shall enter here."

It will be seen that the definition of chast.i.ty remains somewhat lacking in precision. That is inevitable. We cannot grasp purity tightly, for, like snow, it will merely melt in our hands. "Purity itself forbids too minute a system of rules for the observance of purity," well says Sidgwick (Methods of Ethics, Bk. iii, Ch. IX). Elsewhere (op. cit., Bk. iii, Ch. XI) he attempts to answer the question: What s.e.xual relations are essentially impure? and concludes that no answer is possible. "There appears to be no distinct principle, having any claim to self-evidence, upon which the question can be answered so as to command general a.s.sent." Even what is called "Free Love," he adds, "in so far as it is earnestly advocated as a means to a completer harmony of sentiment between men and women, cannot be condemned as impure, for it seems paradoxical to distinguish purity from impurity merely by less rapidity of transition."

Moll, from the standpoint of medical psychology, reaches the same conclusion as Sidgwick from that of ethics. In a report on the "Value of Chast.i.ty for Men," published as an appendix to the third edition (1899) of his Kontrare s.e.xualempfindung, the distinguished Berlin physician discusses the matter with much vigorous common sense, insisting that "chaste and unchaste are relative ideas." We must not, he states, as is so often done, identify "chaste" with "s.e.xually abstinent." He adds that we are not justified in describing all extra-marital s.e.xual intercourse as unchaste, for, if we do so, we shall be compelled to regard nearly all men, and some very estimable women, as unchaste. He rightly insists that in this matter we must apply the same rule to women as to men, and he points out that even when it involves what may be technically adultery s.e.xual intercourse is not necessarily unchaste. He takes the case of a girl who, at eighteen, when still mentally immature, is married to a man with whom she finds it impossible to live and a separation consequently occurs, although a divorce may be impossible to obtain. If she now falls pa.s.sionately in love with a man her love may be entirely chaste, though it involves what is technically adultery.

In thus understanding asceticism and chast.i.ty, and their beneficial functions in life, we see that they occupy a place midway between the artificially exaggerated position they once held and that to which they were degraded by the inevitable reaction of total indifference or actual hostility which followed. Asceticism and chast.i.ty are not rigid categorical imperatives; they are useful means to desirable ends; they are wise and beautiful arts. They demand our estimation, but not our over-estimation. For in over-estimating them, it is too often forgotten, we over-estimate the s.e.xual instinct. The instinct of s.e.x is indeed extremely important. Yet it has not that all-embracing and supereminent importance which some, even of those who fight against it, are accustomed to believe. That artificially magnified conception of the s.e.xual impulse is fortified by the artificial emphasis placed upon asceticism. We may learn the real place of the s.e.xual impulse in learning how we may reasonably and naturally view the restraints on that impulse.

[69]

For Blake and for Sh.e.l.ley, as well as, it may be added, for Hinton, chast.i.ty, as Todhunter remarks in his Study of Sh.e.l.ley, is "a type of submission to the actual, a renunciation of the infinite, and is therefore hated by them. The chaste man, i.e., the man of prudence and self-control, is the man who has lost the nakedness of his primitive innocence."

[70]

For evidence of the practices of savages in this matter, see Appendix A to the third volume of these Studies, "The s.e.xual Instinct in Savages." Cf. also Chs. IV and VII of Westermarck's History of Human Marriage, and also Chs. x.x.xVIII and XLI of the same author's Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, vol. ii; Frazer's Golden Bough contains much bearing on this subject, as also Crawley's Mystic Rose.

[71]

See, e.g., Westermarck, Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, vol. ii, pp. 412 et seq.

[72]

Thus an old Maori declared, a few years ago, that the decline of his race has been entirely due to the loss of the ancient religious faith in the tabu. "For," said he (I quote from an Auckland newspaper), "in the olden-time our tapu ramified the whole social system. The head, the hair, spots where apparitions appeared, places which the tohungas proclaimed as sacred, we have forgotten and disregarded. Who nowadays thinks of the sacredness of the head? See when the kettle boils, the young man jumps up, whips the cap off his head, and uses it for a kettle-holder. Who nowadays but looks on with indifference when the barber of the village, if he be near the fire, shakes the loose hair off his cloth into it, and the joke and the laughter goes on as if no sacred operation had just been concluded. Food is consumed on places which, in bygone days, it dared not even be carried over."

[73]

Thus, long before Christian monks arose, the ascetic life of the cloister on very similar lines existed in Egypt in the worship of Serapis (Dill, Roman Society, p. 79).

[74]

At night, in the baptistry, with lamps dimly burning, the women were stripped even of their tunics, plunged three times in the pool, then anointed, dressed in white, and kissed.

[75]

Thus Jerome, in his letter to Eustochium, refers to those couples who "share the same room, often even the same bed, and call us suspicious if we draw any conclusions," while Cyprian (Epistola, 86) is unable to approve of those men he hears of, one a deacon, who live in familiar intercourse with virgins, even sleeping in the same bed with them, for, he declares, the feminine s.e.x is weak and youth is wanton.

[76]

Perpetua (Acta Sanctorum, March 7) is termed by Hort and Mayor "that fairest flower in the garden of post-Apostolic Christendom." She was not, however, a virgin, but a young mother with a baby at her breast.

[77]

The strength of early Christian asceticism lay in its spontaneous and voluntary character. When, in the ninth century, the Carlovingians attempted to enforce monastic and clerical celibacy, the result was a great outburst of unchast.i.ty and crime; nunneries became brothels, nuns were frequently guilty of infanticide, monks committed unspeakable abominations, the regular clergy formed incestuous relations with their nearest female relatives (Lea, History of Sacerdotal Celibacy, vol. i, pp, 155 et seq.).

[78]

Senancour, De l'Amour, vol. ii, p. 233. Islam has placed much less stress on chast.i.ty than Christianity, but practically, it would appear, there is often more regard for chast.i.ty under Mohammedan rule than under Christian rule. Thus it is stated by "Viator" (Fortnightly Review, Dec., 1908) that formerly, under Turkish Moslem rule, it was impossible to buy the virtue of women in Bosnia, but that now, under the Christian rule of Austria, it is everywhere possible to buy women near the Austrian frontier.

[79]

The basis of this feeling was strengthened when it was shown by scholars that the physical virtue of "virginity" had been masquerading under a false name. To remain a virgin seems to have meant at the first, among peoples of early Aryan culture, by no means to take a vow of chast.i.ty, but to refuse to submit to the yoke of patriarchal marriage. The women who preferred to stand outside marriage were "virgins," even though mothers of large families, and aeschylus speaks of the Amazons as "virgins," while in Greek the child of an unmarried girl was always "the virgin's son." The history of Artemis, the most primitive of Greek deities, is instructive from this point of view. She was originally only virginal in the sense that she rejected marriage, being the G.o.ddess of a nomadic and matriarchal hunting people who had not yet adopted marriage, and she was the G.o.ddess of childbirth, worshipped with orgiastic dances and phallic emblems. It was by a late transformation that Artemis became the G.o.ddess of chast.i.ty (Farnell, Cults of the Greek States, vol. ii, pp. 442 et seq.; Sir W. M. Ramsay, Cities of Phrygia, vol. i, p. 96; Paul Lafargue, "Les Mythes Historiques," Revue des Idees, Dec., 1904).

[80]

See, e.g., Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. iii, Ch. XIII.

[81]

De Civitate Dei, lib. xv, cap. XX. A little further on (lib. xvi, cap. XXV) he refers to Abraham as a man able to use women as a man should, his wife temperately, his concubine compliantly, neither immoderately.

[82]

Summa, Migne's edition, vol. iii, qu. 154, art. I.

[83]

See the Study of Modesty in the first volume of these Studies.

[84]

The majority of chaste youths, remarks an acute critic of modern life (h.e.l.lpach, Nervositat und Kultur, p. 175), are merely actuated by traditional principles, or by shyness, fear of venereal infections, lack of self-confidence, want of money, very seldom by any consideration for a future wife, and that indeed would be a tragi-comic error, for a woman lays no importance on intact masculinity. Moreover, he adds, the chaste man is unable to choose a wife wisely, and it is among teachers and clergymen-the chastest cla.s.s-that most unhappy marriages are made. Milton had already made this fact an argument for facility of divorce.

[85]

"In eating," said Hinton, "we have achieved the task of combining pleasure with an absence of 'l.u.s.t.' The problem for man and woman is so to use and possess the s.e.xual pa.s.sion as to make it the minister to higher things, with no restraint on it but that. It is essentially connected with things of the spiritual order, and would naturally revolve round them. To think of it as merely bodily is a mistake."

[86]

See "a.n.a.lysis of the s.e.xual Impulse," and Appendix, "The s.e.xual Instinct in Savages," in vol. iii of these Studies.

[87]

I have elsewhere discussed more at length the need in modern civilized life of a natural and sincere asceticism (see Affirmations, 1898) "St. Francis and Others."

[88]

Der Wille zur Macht, p. 392.

[89]

At the age of twenty-five, when he had already produced much fine work, Mozart wrote in his letters that he had never touched a woman, though he longed for love and marriage. He could not afford to marry, he would not seduce an innocent girl, a venial relation was repulsive to him.

[90]

Reibmayr, Die Entwicklungsgeschichte des Talentes und Genies., Bd. i, p. 437.

[91]

We may exclude altogether, it is scarcely necessary to repeat, the quality of virginity-that is to say, the possession of an intact hymen-since this is a merely physical quality with no necessary ethical relationships. The demand for virginity in women is, for the most part, either the demand for a better marketable article, or for a more powerful stimulant to masculine desire. Virginity involves no moral qualities in its possessor. Chast.i.ty and asceticism, on the other hand, are meaningless terms, except as demands made by the spirit on itself or on the body it controls.

CHAPTER VI.