Even when there is absolute physical suppression on the sexual side, it seems probable that thereby a greater intensity of spiritual fervor is caused. Many eminent thinkers seem to have been without sexual desire.
It is a noteworthy and significant fact that the age of love is also the age of conversion. Starbuck, for instance, in his very elaborate study of the psychology of conversion shows that the majority of conversions take place during the period of adolescence; that is, from the age of puberty to about 24 or 25.[[385]]
It would be easy to bring forward a long series of observations, from the most various points of view, to show the wide recognition of this close affinity between the sexual and the religious emotions. It is probable, as Hahn points out, that the connection between sexual suppression and religious rites, which we may trace at the very beginning of culture, was due to an instinctive impulse to heighten rather than abolish the sexual element. Early religious rites were largely sexual and orgiastic because they were largely an appeal to the generative forces of Nature to exhibit a beneficial productiveness. Among happily married people, as Hahn remarks, the sexual emotions rapidly give place to the cares and anxieties involved in supporting children; but when the exercise of the sexual function is prevented by celibacy, or even by castration, the most complete form of celibacy, the sexual emotions may pass into the psychical sphere to take on a more pronounced shape.[[386]] The early Christians adopted the traditional Eastern association between religion and celibacy, and, as the writings of the Fathers amply show, they expended on sexual matters a concentrated fervor of thought rarely known to the Greek and Roman writers of the best period.[[387]] As Christian theology developed, the minute inquisition into sexual things sometimes became almost an obsession. So far as I am aware, however (I cannot profess to have made any special investigation), it was not until the late Middle Ages that there is any clear recognition of the fact that, between the religious emotions and the sexual emotions, there is not only a superficial antagonism, but an underlying relationship. At this time so great a theologian and philosopher as Aquinas said that it is especially on the days when a man is seeking to make himself pleasing to God that the Devil troubles him by polluting him with seminal emissions. With somewhat more psychological insight, the wise old Knight of the Tower, Landry, in the fourteenth century, tells his daughters that "no young woman, in love, can ever serve her God with that unfeignedness which she did aforetime. For I have heard it argued by many who, in their young days, had been in love that, when they were in the church, the condition and the pleasing melancholy in which they found themselves would infallibly set them brooding over all their tender love-sick longings and all their amorous passages, when they should have been attending to the service which was going on at the time. And such is the property of this mystery of love that it is ever at the moment when the priest is holding our Saviour upon the altar that the most enticing emotions come." After narrating the history of two queens beyond the seas who indulged in amours even on Holy Thursday and Good Friday, at midnight in their oratories, when the lights were put out, he concludes: "Every woman in love is more liable to fall in church or at her devotion than at any other time."
The connection between religious emotion and sexual emotion was very clearly set forth by Swift about the end of the seventeenth century, in a passage which it may be worth while to quote from his "Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit." After mentioning that he was informed by a very eminent physician that when the Quakers first appeared he was seldom without female Quaker patients affected with nymphomania, Swift continues: "Persons of a visionary devotion, either men or women, are, in their complexion, of all others the most amorous. For zeal is frequently kindled from the same spark with other fires, and from inflaming brotherly love will proceed to raise that of a gallant. If we inspect into the usual process of modern courtship, we shall find it to consist in a devout turn of the eyes, called ogling; an artificial form of canting and whining, by rote, every interval, for want of other matter, made up with a shrug, or a hum; a sigh or a groan; the style compact of insignificant words, incoherences, and repetitions. These I take to be the most accomplished rules of address to a mistress; and where are these performed with more dexterity than by the saints? Nay, to bring this argument yet closer, I have been informed by certain sanguine brethren of the first class, that in the height and orgasmus of their spiritual exercise, it has been frequent with them[[388]]; ... immediately after which, they found the spirit to relax and flag of a sudden with the nerves, and they were forced to hasten to a conclusion. This may be farther strengthened by observing with wonder how unaccountably all females are attracted by visionary or enthusiastic preachers, though never so contemptible in their outward mien; which is usually supposed to be done upon considerations purely spiritual, without any carnal regards at all. But I have reason to think, the sex hath certain characteristics, by which they form a truer judgment of human abilities and performings than we ourselves can possibly do of each other. Let that be as it will, thus much is certain, that however spiritual intrigues begin, they generally conclude like all others; they may branch upwards toward heaven, but the root is in the earth. Too intense a contemplation is not the business of flesh and blood; it must, by the necessary course of things, in a little time let go its hold, and fall into matter. Lovers for the sake of celestial converse, are but another sort of Platonics, who pretend to see stars and heaven in ladies' eyes, and to look or think no lower; but the same pit is provided for both."
To come down to recent times, in the last century the head-master of Clifton College, when discussing the sexual vices of boyhood, remarked that the boys whose temperament exposes them to these faults are usually far from destitute of religious feelings; that there is, and always has been, an undoubted co-existence of religion and animalism; that emotional appeals and revivals are far from rooting out carnal sin; and that in some places, as is well known, they seem actually to stimulate, even at the present day, to increased licentiousness.[[389]]
It is not difficult to see how, even in technique, the method of the revivalist is a quasi-sexual method, and resembles the attempt of the male to overcome the sexual shyness of the female. "In each case," as W. Thomas remarks, "the will has to be set aside, and strong suggestive means are used; and in both cases the appeal is not of the conflict type, but of an intimate, sympathetic and pleading kind. In the effort to make a moral adjustment it consequently turns out that a technique is used which was derived originally from sexual life, and the use, so to speak, of the sexual machinery for a moral adjustment involves, in some cases, the carrying over into the general process of some sexual manifestations."[[390]]
The relationship of the sexual and the religious emotions—like so many other of the essential characters of human nature—is seen in its nakedest shape by the alienist. Esquirol referred to this relationship, and, many years ago, J. B. Friedreich, a German alienist of wide outlook and considerable insight, emphasized the connection between the sexual and the religious emotions, and brought forward illustrative cases.[[391]] Schroeder van der Kolk also remarked: "I venture to express my conviction that we should rarely err if, in a case of religious melancholy, we assumed the sexual apparatus to be implicated."[[392]] Régis, in France, lays it down that "there exists a close connection between mystic ideas and erotic ideas, and most often these two orders of conception are associated in insanity."[[393]] Berthier considered that erotic forms of insanity are those most frequently found in convents. Bevan-Lewis points out how frequently religious exaltation occurs at puberty in women, and religious depression at the climacteric, the period of sexual decline.[[394]] "Religion is very closely allied to love," remarks Savage, "and the love of woman and the worship of God are constantly sources of trouble in unstable youth; it is very interesting to note the frequency with which these two deep feelings are associated."[[395]] "Closely connected with salacity, particularly in women," remarks Conolly Norman, when discussing mania (Tuke's Dictionary of Psychological Medicine), "is religious excitement.... Ecstasy, as we see in cases of acute mental disease, is probably always connected with sexual excitement, if not with sexual depravity. The same association is constantly seen in less extreme cases, and one of the commonest features in the conversation of an acutely maniacal woman is the intermingling of erotic and religious ideas." "Patients who believe," remarks Clara Barrus, "that they are the Virgin Mary, the bride of Christ, the Church, 'God's wife,' and 'Raphael's consort,' are sure, sooner or later, to disclose symptoms which show that they are some way or other sexually depraved."[[396]] Forel, who devotes a chapter of his book Die Sexuelle Frage, to the subject, argues that the strongest feelings of religious emotion are often unconsciously rooted in erotic emotion or represent a transformation of such emotion; and, in an interesting discussion (Ch. VI) of this question in his Sexualleben unserer Zeit, Bloch states that "in a certain sense we may describe the history of religions as the history of a special manifestation of the human sexual instinct." Ball, Brouardel, Morselli, Vallon and Marie,[[397]] C. H. Hughes,[[398]] to mention but a few names among many, have emphasized the same point.[[399]] Krafft-Ebing deals briefly with the connection between holiness and the sexual emotion, and the special liability of the saints to sexual temptations; he thus states his own conclusions: "Religious and sexual emotional states at the height of their development exhibit a harmony in quantity and quality of excitement, and can thus in certain circumstances act vicariously. Both," he adds, "can be converted into cruelty under pathological conditions."[[400]]
After quoting these opinions it is, perhaps, not unnecessary to point out that, while sexual emotion constitutes the main reservoir of energy on which religion can draw, it is far from constituting either the whole content of religion or its root. Murisier, in an able study of the psychology of religious ecstasy, justly protests against too crude an explanation of its nature, though at the same time he admits that "the passion of the religious ecstatic lacks nothing of what goes to make up sexual love, not even jealousy."[[401]]
Sérieux, in his little work, Recherches Cliniques sur les Anomalies de l'Instinct Sexuel, valuable on account of its instructive cases, records in detail a case which so admirably illustrates this phase of auto-erotism on the borderland between ordinary erotic day-dreaming and religious mysticism, the phenomena for a time reaching an insane degree of intensity, that I summarize it. "Thérèse M., aged 24, shows physical stigmata of degeneration. The heredity is also bad; the father is a man of reckless and irregular conduct; the mother was at one time in a lunatic asylum. The patient was brought up in an orphanage, and was a troublesome, volatile child; she treated household occupations with contempt, but was fond of study. Even at an early age her lively imagination attracted attention, and the pleasure which she took in building castles in the air. From the age of seven to ten she masturbated. At her first communion she felt that Jesus would for ever be the one master of her heart. At thirteen, after the death of her mother, she seemed to see her, and to hear her say that she was watching over her child. Shortly afterward she was overwhelmed by a new grief, the death of a teacher for whom she cherished great affection on account of her pure character. On the following day she seemed to see and hear this teacher, and would not leave the house where the body lay. Tendencies to melancholy appeared. Saddened by the funeral ceremonies, exhorted by nuns, fed on mystic revery, she passed from the orphanage to a convent. She devoted herself solely to the worship of Jesus; to be like Jesus, to be near Jesus, became her constant pre-occupations. The Virgin's name was rarely seen in her writings, God's name never. 'I wanted', she said, 'to love Jesus more than any of the nuns I saw, and I even thought that he had a partiality for me.' She was also haunted by the idea of preserving her purity. She avoided frivolous conversation, and left the room when marriage was discussed, such a union being incompatible with a pure life; 'it was my fixed idea for two years to make my soul ever more pure in order to be agreeable to Him; the Beloved is well pleased among the lilies.'