In the preceding chapter we have been concerned with the various ways in
which the phenomena attendant on the sexual life of man and woman become
associated with religious beliefs. As a force that arises in the life of
each individual, and intrudes, as it were, into consciousness, the
phenomena of sex fill primitive man with an amazement that is not
unmixed with terror. In strict accord with primitive psychology sexual
phenomena are conceived as more or less connected with the supernatural
world, and becoming thus entwined with religious convictions are made
the nucleus of a number of superstitious ceremonies. The connection is
close and obvious so long as we restrict our survey to uncivilised
humanity. The only room for doubt or discussion is the exact meaning of
certain ceremonies, or the order of certain phases of development. It is
when we take man in a more advanced stage that obscurity gathers and
difficulties arise. The sexual life is no longer lived, as it were,
openly. Symbolism and mysticism develop; a more complex social life
provides disguised outlets for primitive and indestructible feelings.
Sexualism, instead of being something to be glorified, and, so to speak,
annotated by religious ceremonies, becomes something to be hidden or
decried. Ignored it may be. Decried it may be; but it will not be
denied. That is a practical impossibility in the case of so powerful and
so pervasive a fact as sex. We may disguise its expression, but only too
often the disguise is the equivalent of undesirable and unhealthy
manifestations.
The modern history of religion offers a melancholy illustration of the
truth of the last sentence, and it is quite clearly exhibited in the
history of Christianity itself. From the beginning it strove to suppress
the power of sexual feeling. It was an enemy against whom one had to be
always on guard, one that had to be crushed, or at least kept in
subjection in the interests of spiritual development. And yet the very
intensity of the efforts at suppression defeated the object aimed at.
With some of the leaders of early Christianity sex became an obsession.
Long dwelling upon its power made them unduly and unhealthily conscious
of its presence. Instead of sex taking its place as one of the facts of
life, which like most other facts might be good or bad as circumstances
determined, it was so much dwelt upon as to often dwarf everything else.
Asceticism is, after all, mainly a reversed sensualism, or at least
confesses the existence of a sensualism that must not be allowed
expression lest its manifestation becomes overpowering. Mortification
confesses the supremacy of sense as surely as gratification. Moreover,
mortification of sense as preached by the great ascetics does not
prevent that most dangerous of all forms of gratification, the
sensualism of the imagination. That remains, and is apt to gain in
strength since the fundamentally healthful energies are denied
legitimate and natural modes of expression. Thus it is that we find
developing social life not always providing a healthy outlet for the
sexual life, and thus it is that the intense striving of religious
leaders against the power of the sexual impulse has often forced it into
strange and harmful forms of expression. So we find throughout the
history of religion, not only that a deal of what has passed for
supernatural illumination to have undoubtedly had its origin in
perverted sexual feeling, but the constant emergence of curious
religio-erotic sects whose strange mingling of eroticism and religion
has scandalised many, and offered a lesson to all had they but possessed
the wit to discern it.
Although there is an understandable disinclination, amounting with some
to positive revulsion, to recognise the sexual origin of much that
passes for religious fervour, the fact is well known to competent
medical observers, as the following citations will show. More than a
generation since a well-known medical authority said:--
"I know of no fact in pathology more striking and more terrifying than
the way in which the phenomena of the ecstatic--which have often been
seized upon by sentimental theorisers as proofs of spiritual
exaltation--may be plainly seen to bridge the gulf between the innocent
foolery of ordinary hypnotic patients and the degraded and repulsive
phenomena of nymphomania and satyriasis."[93]