Studies in the Psychology of Sex Volume I Part 25

Mariani[402] has very fully described a case of erotico-religious insanity (climacteric paranoia on an hysterical basis) in a married woman of 44. During the early stages of her disorder she inflicted all sorts of penances upon herself (fasting, constant prayer, drinking her own urine, cleaning dirty plates with her tongue, etc.). Finally she felt that by her penances she had obtained forgiveness of her sins, and then began a stage of joy and satisfaction during which she believed that she had entered into a state of the most intimate personal relationship with Jesus. She finally recovered. Mariani shows how closely this history corresponds with the histories of the saints, and that all the acts and emotions of this woman can be exactly paralleled in the lives of famous saints.[403]

The justice of these comparisons becomes manifest when we turn to the records that have been left by holy persons. A most instructive record from this point of view is the autobiography of Sur Jeanne des Anges, superior of the Ursulines of Loudun in the seventeenth century.[404] She was clever, beautiful, ambitious, fond of pleasure, still more of power. With this, as sometimes happens, she was highly hysterical, and in the early years of her religious life was possessed by various demons of unchast.i.ty and blasphemy with whom for many years she was in constant struggle. She fell in love with a priest of Loudun, Grandier, a man whom she had never even seen, only knowing of him as a powerful and fascinating personality at whose feet all women fell, and she imagined that she and the other nuns of her convent were possessed through his influence. She was thus the cause of the trial and execution of Grandier, a famous case in the annals of witchcraft. In her autobiography Sur Jeanne describes in detail how the demons a.s.sailed her at night, appearing in lascivious att.i.tudes, making indecent proposals, raising the bed-clothes, touching all parts of her body, imploring her to yield to them, and she tells how strong her temptation was to yield. On one night, for instance, she writes: "I seemed to feel someone's breath, and I heard a voice saying: 'The time for resistance has gone by, you must no longer rebel; by putting off your consent to what has been proposed you will be injured; you cannot persist in this resistance; G.o.d has subjected you to the demands of a nature which you must satisfy on occasions so urgent.' Then I felt impure impressions in my imagination and disordered movements in my body. I persisted in saying at the bottom of my heart that I would do nothing. I turned to G.o.d and asked Him for strength in this extraordinary struggle. Then there was a loud noise in my room, and I felt as if someone had approached me and put his hand into my bed and touched me; and having perceived this I rose, in a state of restlessness, which lasted for a long time afterward. Some days later, at midnight, I began to tremble all over my body as I lay in bed, and to experience much mental anxiety without knowing the cause. After this had lasted for some time I heard noises in various parts of my room; the sheet was twice pulled without entirely uncovering me; the oratory close to my bed was upset. I heard a voice on the left side, toward which I was lying. I was asked if I had thought over the advantageous offer that had been made to me. It was added: 'I have come to know your reply; I will keep my promise if you will give your consent; if, on the contrary, you refuse, you will be the most miserable girl in the world, and all sorts of mischances will happen to you.' I replied: 'If there were no G.o.d I would fear those threats; I am consecrated to Him.' It was replied to me: 'You will not get much help from G.o.d; He will abandon you.' I replied: 'G.o.d is my father; He will take care of me; I have resolved to be faithful to Him.' He said: 'I will give you three days to think over it.' I rose and went to the Holy Sacrament with an anxious mind. Having returned to my room, and being seated on a chair, it was drawn from under me so that I fell on the floor. Then the same things happened again. I heard a man's voice saying lascivious and pleasant things to seduce me; he pressed me to give him room in my bed; he tried to touch me in an indecent way; I resisted and prevented him, calling the nuns who were near my room; the window had been open, it was closed; I felt strong movements of love for a certain person, and improper desire for dishonorable things."

She writes again, at a later period: "These impurities and the fire of concupiscence which the evil spirit caused me to feel, beyond all that I can say, forced me to throw myself on to braziers of hot coal, where I would remain for half an hour at a time, in order to extinguish that other fire, so that half my body was quite burnt. At other times, in the depth of winter, I have sometimes pa.s.sed part of the night entirely naked in the snow, or in tubs of icy water. I have besides often gone among thorns so that I have been torn by them; at other times I have rolled in nettles, and I have pa.s.sed whole nights defying my enemies to attack me, and a.s.suring them that I was resolved to defend myself with the grace of G.o.d." With her confessor's permission, she also had an iron girdle made, with spikes, and wore this day and night for nearly six months until the spikes so entered her flesh that the girdle could only be removed with difficulty. By means of these austerities she succeeded in almost exorcising the demons of unchast.i.ty, and a little later, after a severe illness, of which she believed that she was miraculously cured by St. Joseph, she appeared before the world almost as a saint, herself possessing a miraculous power of healing; she traveled through France, bringing healing wherever she went; the king, the queen, and Cardinal Richelieu were at her feet, and so great became the fame of her holiness that her tomb was a shrine for pilgrims for more than a century after her death. It was not until late in life, and after her autobiography terminates, that s.e.xual desire in Sur Jeanne (though its sting seems never to have quite disappeared) became transformed into pa.s.sionate love of Jesus, and it is only in her later letters that we catch glimpses of the complete trans.m.u.tation. Thus, in one of her later letters we read: "I cried with ardor, 'Lord! join me to Thyself, transform Thyself into me!' It seemed to me that that lovable Spouse was reposing in my heart as on His throne. What makes me almost swoon with love and admiration is a certain pleasure which it seems to me that He takes when all my being flows into His, restoring to Him with respect and love all that He has given to me. Sometimes I have permission to speak to our Lord with more familiarity, calling Him my Love, interesting Him in all that I ask of Him, as well for myself as for others."

The lives of all the great saints and mystics bear witness to operations similar to those so vividly described by Sur Jeanne des Anges, though it is very rarely that any saint has so frankly presented the dynamic mechanism of the auto-erotic process. The indications they give us, however, are sufficiently clear. It is enough to refer to the special affection which the mystics have ever borne toward the Song of Songs,[405] and to note how the most earthly expressions of love in that poem enter as a perpetual refrain into their writings.[406]

The courage of the early Christian martyrs, it is abundantly evident, was in part supported by an exaltation which they frankly drew from the s.e.xual impulse. Felicula, we are told in the acts of Achilles and Nereus,[407] preferred imprisonment, torture, and death to marriage or pagan sacrifices. When on the rack she was bidden to deny Christianity, she exclaimed: "Ego non nego amatorem meum!"-I will not deny my lover who for my sake has eaten gall and drunk vinegar, crowned with thorns, and fastened to the cross.

Christian mysticism and its s.e.xual coloring was absorbed by the Islamic world at a very early period and intensified. In the thirteenth century it was reintroduced into Christendom in this intensified form by the genius of Raymond Lull who had himself been born on the confines of Islam, and his "Book of the Lover and the Friend" is a typical manifestation of s.e.xual mysticism which inspired the great Spanish school of mystics a few centuries later. The "delicious agony" the "sweet martyrdom," the strongly combined pleasure and pain experienced by St. Theresa were certainly a.s.sociated with physical s.e.xual sensations.[408]

The case of Marguerite-Marie Alacoque is typical. Jesus, as her autobiography shows, was always her lover, her husband, her dear master; she is betrothed to Him, He is the most pa.s.sionate of lovers, nothing can be sweeter than His caresses, they are so excessive she is beside herself with the delight of them. The central imagination of the mystic consists essentially, as Ribot remarks, in a love romance.[409]

If we turn to the most popular devotional work that was ever written, The Imitation of Christ, we shall find that the "love" there expressed is precisely and exactly the love that finds its motive power in the emotions aroused by a person of the other s.e.x. (A very intellectual woman once remarked to me that the book seemed to her "a sort of religious aphrodisiac.") If we read, for instance, Book III, Chapter V, of this work ("De Mirabili affectu Divini amoris"), we shall find in the eloquence of this solitary monk in the Low Countries neither more nor less than the emotions of every human lover at their highest limit of exaltation. "Nothing is sweeter than love, nothing stronger, nothing higher, nothing broader, nothing pleasanter, nothing fuller nor better in heaven or in earth. He who loves, flies, runs, and rejoices; he is free and cannot be held. He gives all in exchange for all, and possesses all in all. He looks not at gifts, but turns to the giver above all good things. Love knows no measure, but is fervent beyond all measure. Love feels no burden, thinks nothing of labor, strives beyond its force, reckons not of impossibility, for it judges that all things are possible. Therefore it attempts all things, and therefore it effects much when he who is not a lover fails and falls.... My Love! thou all mine, and I all thine."

There is a certain natural disinclination in many quarters to recognize any special connection between the s.e.xual emotions and the religious emotions. But this att.i.tude is not reasonable. A man who is swayed by religious emotions cannot be held responsible for the indirect emotional results of his condition; he can be held responsible for their control. Nothing is gained by refusing to face the possibility that such control may be necessary, and much is lost. There is certainly, as I have tried to indicate, good reason to think that the action and interaction between the spheres of s.e.xual and religious emotion are very intimate. The obscure promptings of the organism at p.u.b.erty frequently a.s.sume on the psychic side a wholly religious character; the activity of the religious emotions sometimes tends to pa.s.s over into the s.e.xual region; the suppression of the s.e.xual emotions often furnishes a powerful reservoir of energy to the religious emotions; occasionally the suppressed s.e.xual emotions break through all obstacles.

[385]

Starbuck, The Psychology of Religion, 1899. Also, A. H. Daniels, "The New Life," American Journal of Psychology, vol. vi, 1893. Cf. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience.

[386]

Ed. Hahn, Demeter und Baubo, 1896, pp. 50-51. Hahn is arguing for the religious origin of the plough, as a generative implement, drawn by a sacred and castrated animal, the ox. G. Herman, in his Genesis, develops the idea that modern religious rites have arisen out of s.e.xual feasts and mysteries.

[387]

Bloch (Beitrage zur aetiologie der Psychopathia s.e.xualis, Bd. I, p. 98) points out the great interest taken by the saints and ascetics in s.e.x matters.

[388]

This omission was made by the original publisher of the "Discourse;" several of the most important pa.s.sages throughout have been similarly cut out.

[389]

Rev. J. M. Wilson, Journal of Education, 1881. At about the same period (1882) Spurgeon pointed out in one of his sermons that by a strange, yet natural law, excess of spirituality is next door to sensuality. Theodore Schroeder has recently brought together a number of opinions of religious teachers, from Henry More the Platonist to Baring Gould, concerning the close relationship between s.e.xual pa.s.sion and religious pa.s.sion, American Journal of Religious Psychology, 1908.

[390]

W. Thomas, "The s.e.xual Element in Sensibility," Psychological Review, Jan., 1904.

[391]

System der gerichtlichen Psychologie, second edition, 1842, pp. 266-68; and more at length in his Allgemeine Diagnostik der psychischen Krankheiten, second edition, 1832, pp. 247-51.

[392]

Handboek van de Pathologie en Therapie der Krankzinnigheid, 1863, p. 139 of English edition.

[393]

Manuel pratique de Medecine mentale, 1892, p. 31.

[394]

Text-book of Mental Diseases, p. 393.

[395]

G. H. Savage, Insanity, 1886.

[396]

American Journal of Insanity, April, 1895.

[397]

"Des Psychoses Religieuses," Archives de Neurologie, 1897.

[398]

"Erotopathia," Alienist and Neurologist, October, 1893.

[399]

Reference may be specially made to the interesting chapter on "Delire Religieux" in Icard's La Femme pendant la Periode Menstruelle, pp. 211-234.

[400]

Psychopathia s.e.xualis, eighth edition, pp. 8 and 11. Gannouchkine ("La Volupte, la Cruante et la Religion," Annales Medico-Psychologique, 1901, No. 3) has further emphasized this convertibility.

[401]

E. Murisier, "Le Sentiment Religieux dans l'Extase," Revue Philosophique, November, 1898. Starbuck, again (Psychology of Religion, Chapter x.x.x), in a brief discussion of this point, concludes that "the s.e.xual life, although it has left its impress on fully developed religion, seems to have originally given the psychic impulse which called out the latent possibilities of developments, rather than to have furnished the raw material out of which religion was constructed."

[402]

"Una Santa," Archivio di Psichiatria, vol. xix, pp. 438-47, 1898.

[403]

With regard to the s.e.xual element in the worship of the Virgin, see "Ueber den Mariencultus," L. Feuerbach's Sammtliche Werke, Bd. I, 1846.

[404]

Published for the first time (with a Preface by Charcot) in a volume of the Bibliotheque Diabolique, 1886.

[405]

The Hebrews, themselves, used the same word for the love of woman and for the Divine love (Northcote, Christianity and s.e.x Problems, p. 140).

[406]

Thus, in St. Theresa's Conceptos del Amor de Dios, the words "Beseme con el beso de su boca,"-Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth-constantly recur.

[407]

Acta Sanctorum, May 12th.

[408]

Leuba and Montmorand, in their valuable and detailed studies of Christian mysticism, though differing from each other in some points, are agreed on this; H. Leuba, "Les Tendances Religieuses chez les Mystiques Chretiens," Revue Philosophique, July and Nov., 1902; B. de Montmorand, "L'Erotomanie des Mystiques Chretiens," id., Oct., 1903. Montmorand points out that physical s.e.xual manifestations were sometimes recognized and frankly accepted by mystics. He quotes from Molinos, a pa.s.sage in which the famous Spanish quietist states that there is no reason to be disquieted even at the occurrence of pollutions or masturbation, et etiam pejora.

[409]

Ribot, La Logique des Sentiments, p. 174.