The real etiology of homosexuality must remain unknown, until we know the etiology of sex-attraction, and the knowledge of the “whence” and “why” of sex-attraction is homoiousious, not to say homoousious with the knowledge of the Supreme Cause. Sex-attraction or love is an energizing power, akin to the other great forces of nature or destiny, working to develop the soul of man, and it is futile to pick out one attribute of the divine creative power and speculate over it without the knowledge of the nature of the divinity itself. It is the same mistake Job of old has made.
In this oldest Hebrew drama, the spectators or audience, at the two scenes in Heaven, know that all the calamities, miseries and sufferings of Job were inflicted upon the great sufferer, who represents mankind, to try the constancy of his piety. According to human justice Job is innocent. This is Job’s claim. His friends try to convince him that he is not innocent, that even by the principles of human justice his sufferings are not unmerited. But they are silenced by Job’s arguments. Even the youthful Busite (Cap. xxxii.), emphasizing God’s greatness, who must have discovered some hidden sin in Job, although he is not answered by the latter, fails to convince us, for we know about the stipulations between Jehova and Satan.
Then Jehova himself answers from the whirlwind. He does not really answer, he rather asks some pertinent questions. “Have you been present when the foundations of the Earth were laid, when the Stars were born?” If not, how can he, the insignificant pigmy, dare question divine justice. Since you, Job, have no idea of the nature of the divinity (or God, the author fears to mention the word God lest he may offend the delicate susceptibilities of his atheistic friends who fly into a rage when seeing this word as a bull when seeing a red cloth), how can you know the causes or reasons for his attributes? Divine justice is an attribute of the divinity, and if the nature of the divinity is veiled in mystery, divine justice must of necessity remain unknown to mortal creatures, just as human justice is beyond the conception of the amoeba or of the lion. Divine justice can not be compared at all with human justice, just as the sense of justice of the amoeba or of the lion differs from that of man.
Now, the same questions may still be asked to-day. We must still recognize the incapacity of the human intellect to penetrate the divine plan of the universe. With all our scientific attainments we still are in ignorance about the sources of light. The length of its waves, its celerity is known to science, but where does the Sun come from? When was he born? Who gave birth to him? Science has traced the synthetic nature of the plant, the analytic nature of the animal, but tell us, Job, whence gets the seed the faculty to begin its synthetic work as soon as it is placed in favorable soil?
Here we are silenced like Job of yore and refuse to answer. And we are right. The “whence” and the “why” of things do not lie in the realm of science. Science investigates the “how” and leaves the investigation of the “whence” and the “why” to metaphysics or rather to religion. Even the latter has not yet succeeded to give humanity the irrefutable answer. From the Hindu trinity of Brahm’s Trimurti to the Hebrew unity of Jehovah back to the Christian Logos of John, they all tried to answer the question of the “whence” of things, and they must have failed. Otherwise humanity of all climes and of all ages would have had only one religion instead of being divided into innumerable creeds.
As far as the “how” is concerned, such an explanation as “anima muliebris in corpore virili inclusa” is quite a good enough working theory. Inversion would thus be a degenerative phenomenon, the invert representing the sport or the variation.
[BD] Some of our hyperaesthetic sexologists, who see sex everywhere, try to construe the friendship between David and Jonathan as homosexual love. They find their inspiration in David’s lament over Jonathan: “Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.” (II Samuel i, 26.) Whoever can see in this poetical expression homosexuality has very little sense for poetry and a good deal for sex. The Vulgata translates the verse: “Decore nimis et amabilis super amorem mulierum,” and then adds: “Sicut mater unicum amat filium suum ita ego te diligebam.” This word “diligebam” surely does not sound like homosexuality. Nor does the word ἀγαπή used by the Septuaginta, denote sex.
[BE] This infatuation of a normal woman with a woman, disguised as a man, shows that sexual attraction is not always based upon erotic chemotropismus between the ova and the spermatozoa.
[BF] The cases were first published by the author in the New York Medical Journal, Feb. 21, 1914.
[BG] The wail and cry of the patient that the common herd does not understand him are well known. It is the old feminine protest that men do not understand women. It is the familiar catch-phrase which a flattering yellow journalism and mediocre literature are continually dishing out to their women readers. Men will never understand women, is preached in and out of season, insinuating a certain depth in and mystery about her psyche. Most certainly, the man does not understand woman’s psyche. He does not understand his own, neither does she understand her own. The experiments in psychological laboratories are dealing only with the relations between the sensations and perceptions, not with the “whence,” “how” and the “why” of the mechanism of the mind. The mechanism by which a material fluid, cell, or electron turns into a thought, whether in the male or the female brain, is yet unknown, neither is there any prospect that it ever will be. Still the workings of the human mind are subject to observation, and we know by experience that woman’s psyche changes with the change of her dress. The mind of a man born in poverty and brought up in humble surroundings will always remain humble, even when he becomes a millionaire. He adapts himself with great difficulty to changed conditions. Woman’s adaptation to new surroundings is phenomenal. Dress her as a queen and she is a queen, clad in rags, she acts the beggar. Normal men do not understand the nature of such a mind that can be so influenced by outward appearance. Neither does man understand the wonderful instinct of the hymenopter. Yet the insect seems to be less proud of its mystery than our patient of his or the female of the species of hers.