Involuntarily, therefore, the sexual feelings of every prophet and founder of religion, even during a short period of his life only, influence more or less his religious system and consequently the laws of morality based on it, which remain after his death.
Hence it is that sentiments, as variable in different individuals as sexual sentiments, are obliged to submit to the constraint of fixed and tyrannical dogmas which martyrize for centuries, or even thousands of years, men who have other opinions than the founder of the religion or its interpreters who succeed him.
In religion we see everywhere idealized eroticism, and often idealism perfumed with eroticism. The Songs of Solomon, the original sense of which was very lay, like that of most religious matters, has been made allegorical and applied to the Christian Church, but it was and will always remain an erotic poem.
It is hardly necessary to add that natural eroticism very often leads the severe and ascetic preachers of morality to the grossest hypocrisy. Priests and other pious persons often preach an idealized asceticism, while in secret they commit the most disgusting sexual excesses.
We must not, however, judge such crying inconsistencies too severely; they are to a great extent unconscious and are the result of the shock of passion against the tyranny of dogma, prejudice, and public opinion. They are often also the result of mental anomalies. When science is allowed to enlighten sexual life freely and openly, the hypocrisy of normal people will cease, and that of the abnormal will be recognized in time and prevented from doing harm.
Transformation of Eroticism into Religious Sentiment.—In ordinary life we find everywhere traces of the mixture of religion with sexual sensations and images. The religious ceremonies of marriage among all peoples constitute a significant remnant thereof.
When we look for the causes of sudden and progressive religious exaltation we often discover that it is nothing else than compensation for disappointed love. I refer here to true and fervid exaltation, identified with the whole inner consciousness, and not to the religion of habit which the average man scarcely remembers in his daily life, and only observes on Sunday in the form of a conventional promenade, or a contribution to the church. This religion of habit is only an empty form, which awakes no sentiment, and consequently is associated with no sensation, even erotic, in its followers.
In other individuals it may be otherwise, and certainly was so formerly. Everything goes to prove that the exalted sentiments of sympathy from which our religion is to a great extent derived, such as the holy fervor, the devotional ardor and the delights of ecstasy which it has so often procured for its followers and still procures for some of them, whether their object be God, Allah, Jehovah, Jesus Christ, Buddha, Vishnu, the Virgin Mary, or the Saints, that these sentiments have to a great extent their roots in primary erotic sensations and sentiments, or represent the direct transformation of them.
It is needless to say that all this may take place quite unconsciously and with the purest intentions. I hasten to add that the majority of true religious sentiments come from quite a different source.
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 Holy Virgin with an amorous ardor which may be celestial, but appears in reality extremely terrestrial and human.