"Already, however, in a rudimentary form appeared contrary tendencies [strictly speaking they were not contrary, but related, tendencies]. Beneath the mystic passion which concealed it sexual desire was sometimes felt. At sixteen she experienced emotions which she could not master, when thinking of a priest who, she said, loved her. In spite of all remorse she would have been willing to have relations with him. Notwithstanding these passing weaknesses, the idea of purity always possessed her. The nuns, however, were concerned about her exaltation. She was sent away from the convent, became discouraged, and took a place as a servant, but her fervor continued. Her confessor inspired her with great affection; she sends him tender letters. She would be willing to have relations with him, even though she considers the desire a temptation of the devil. The ground was now prepared for the manifestation of hallucinations. 'One evening in May', she writes, 'after being absorbed in thoughts of my confessor, and feeling discouraged, as I thought that Jesus, whom I loved so much, would have nothing to do with me, "Mother," I cried out, "what must I do to win your son?" My eyes were fixed on the sky, and I remained in a state of mad expectation. It was absurd. I to become the mother of the World! My heart went on repeating: "Yes, he is coming; Jesus is coming!"' The psychic erethism, reverberating on the sensorial and sensory centres, led to genital, auditory, and visual hallucinations, which produced the sensation of sexual connection. 'For the first time I went to bed and was not alone. As soon as I felt that touch, I heard the words: "Fear not, it is I." I was lost in Him whom I loved. For many days I was cradled in a world of pleasure; I saw Him everywhere, overwhelming me with His chaste caresses.' On the following day at mass she seemed to see Calvary before her. 'Jesus was naked and surrounded by a thousand voluptuous imaginations; His arms were loosened from the cross, and he said to me: "Come!" I longed to fly to Him with my body, but could not make up my mind to show myself naked. However, I was carried away by a force I could not control, I threw myself on my Saviour's neck, and felt that all was over between the world and me.' From that day, 'by sheer reasoning,' she has understood everything. Previously she thought that the religious life was a renunciation of the joys of marriage and enjoyment generally; now she understands its object. Jesus Christ desires that she should have relations with a priest; he is himself incarnated in priests; just as St. Joseph was the guardian of the Virgin, so are priests the guardians of nuns. She has been impregnated by Jesus, and this imaginary pregnancy pre-occupies her in the highest degree. From this time she masturbated daily. She cannot even go to communion without experiencing voluptuous sensations. Her delusions having thus become systematized, nothing shakes her tenacity in seeking to carry them out; she attempts at all costs to have relations with her confessor, embraces him, throws herself at his knees, pursues him, and so becomes a cause of scandal. When brought to the asylum, there is intense sexual excitement, and she masturbates a dozen times a day, even when talking to the doctor. The sexual organs are normal, the vulva moist and red, the vagina is painful to touch; the contact of the finger causes erectile turgescence. She has had no rest, she says, since she has learned to love her Jesus. He desires her to have sexual relations with someone, and she cannot succeed; 'all my soul's strength is arrested by this constant endeavor.' Her new surroundings modify her behavior, and now it is the doctor whom she pursues with her obsessions. 'I expected everything from the charity of the priests I have known; I have not deserved what I wanted from them. But is not a doctor free to do everything for the good of the patients intrusted to him by Providence? Cannot a doctor thus devote himself? Since I have tasted the tree of life I am tormented by the desire to share it with a loving friend.' Then she falls in love with an employee, and makes the crudest advances to him, believing that she is thus executing the will of Jesus. 'Necessity makes laws,' she exclaims to him, 'the moments are pressing, I have been waiting too long.' She still speaks of her religious vocation which might be compromised by so long a delay. 'I do not want to get married.' Gradually a transformation took place; the love of God was effaced and earthly love became more intense than ever. 'Quitting the heights in which I wished to soar, I am coming so near to earth that I shall soon fix my desires there.' In a last letter Thérèse recognizes with terror the insanity to which the exaltation of her imagination had led her. 'Now I only believe in God and in suffering; I feel that it is necessary for me to get married.'"
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 Sœur 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 unchastity 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 Sœur Jeanne describes in detail how the demons assailed her at night, appearing in lascivious attitudes, 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; God 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 God 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 God I would fear those threats; I am consecrated to Him.' It was replied to me: 'You will not get much help from God; He will abandon you.' I replied: 'God 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 passed 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 passed whole nights defying my enemies to attack me, and assuring them that I was resolved to defend myself with the grace of God." 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 unchastity, 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 sexual desire in Sœur Jeanne (though its sting seems never to have quite disappeared) became transformed into passionate love of Jesus, and it is only in her later letters that we catch glimpses of the complete transmutation. 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 Sœur 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 sexual 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 sexual 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 sexual 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 associated with physical sexual 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 passionate 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 sex. (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 sexual emotions and the religious emotions. But this attitude 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 sexual and religious emotion are very intimate. The obscure promptings of the organism at puberty frequently assume on the psychic side a wholly religious character; the activity of the religious emotions sometimes tends to pass over into the sexual region; the suppression of the sexual emotions often furnishes a powerful reservoir of energy to the religious emotions; occasionally the suppressed sexual emotions break through all obstacles.