“Whilst in the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, as those well acquainted with the state of morals during this period can all confirm, a most unbounded freedom was dominant in sexual relations, the State and the Church were desirous of compelling the people to keep better order by the use of actual force, and by religious compulsion. So forced a transformation in so vital a matter necessarily resulted in a reaction of the worst kind, and forced into secret channels the impulse which it had attempted to suppress. This reaction occurred, moreover, with an elemental force. There resulted widespread sexual violence and seduction, hesitating at nothing, often insanely daring, in which everywhere the devil was supposed to help; every one’s head was turned in this way, the uncontrolled lust of debauchees found vent in secret bacchanalian associations and orgies, wherein many, with or without masquerade, played the part of Satan; shameful deeds were perpetrated by excited women and by procuresses and prostitutes ready for any kind of immoral abomination; add to these sexual orgies the most widely diffused web of a completely developed theory of witchcraft, and the systematic strengthening by the clergy of the widely prevalent belief in the devil—all these things woven in a labyrinthine connexion, made it possible for thousands upon thousands to be murdered by a disordered justice and to be sacrificed to delusion.”
The study of the witch-trials of the middle ages and of recent times—for it is well known that in the seventies of the nineteenth century (!) such trials still occurred[65]—would without doubt afford valuable contributions to the doctrine of psychopathia sexualis, and at the same time would throw a remarkable light upon the origin of sexual aberrations.
What a large amount of sexual abnormality arises even to-day from this common, human, obscure, superstitious impulse dependent upon the intermixture of religious mysticism and sexual desire, and which in the medieval belief in witches attained such astonishing development!
As Michelet proved in his great work on “Sorcery,” it was the religious imagination straying into sexual by-paths, which for the most part animated the belief in witchcraft, and thus led to the most horrible aberrations, principally of a sadistic nature.
Like superstition, so also the sexual-religious obsession of the middle ages, still persists in many persons, even at the present day, and gives rise to sexual anomalies.
Apart from asceticism and the belief in witchcraft, theological literature offers numerous instances of the relationship between religion and sexuality.
In an essay published six years ago,[66] I showed the important part which sexual questions have played in the so-called pastoral medicine—that is to say, in those theological writings in which the individual facts and problems of medicine are studied from the theological standpoint, and their relation to dogma is determined. We find here theological casuistry carried to its extreme limits, in relation to all possible problems of the vita sexualis. The experiences of the confessional are employed in a remarkable manner, the religious imagination wandering, in a peculiar combination of scholasticism and sensuality, in the obscure fields of human aberration.
The ostensible inducement to the theological consideration of sexual problems is in part offered by the statements of perverse individuals in the confessional, and in part by public scandals. In both cases casuistry endeavours, from the religious standpoint, to formulate certain normal rules for the judgment of the various matters relating to the sexual life. This would, however, have been impossible, had there not existed an intimate connexion between sexuality and religion.
Only in this way is it possible to explain the origin of the gigantic literature of sexual casuistry in theology, and especially in pastoral medicine. A comprehension of these facts has led certain writers to launch bitter invectives against the system of which the confessional formed so essential a part. This is a narrow and prejudiced view, which we mention only to condemn. There is, however, ample justification for the representations of physicians and anthropologists, who are able to observe matters in the great connexion sketched above, and who have recognized the relations between religion and the sexual life to be something common to all humanity, not the artificial products of any particular spiritual tendency. It is precisely the frequent endeavours of the Catholic Church to overcome the worst outgrowths in this direction, which teach us, notwithstanding their failure to eradicate sexual aberrations, that these relationships depend upon the very nature of religion.
There is not a single sexual problem which has not been discussed in the most subtle manner by the theological casuists,[67] so that their writings offer us a most instructive picture of imaginative activity in the sexual sphere.