"The existence of that evil, which, knowing the constitution of man, we
should expect to find prevalent in mysticism, the experience of all ages
has shown following, dogging its steps inevitably. So slight is the film
that separates religion from sensual passion, that uncontrolled
spiritual fervour roars readily into a blaze of licentiousness."[100]
No useful purpose would be served by lengthening this list of citations.
Enough has been said to show that the point of view expressed is one
endorsed by many sober, competent, and responsible observers. There
exists among them a general, and one may add a growing, recognition of
the important truth that the connection between religious and sexual
feeling is of the closest character, and that one is very often mistaken
for the other. Asceticism, usually taken as evidence to the reverse, is
on the contrary, confirmative. The ascetic often presents us with a
flagrant case of eroto-mania, expressing itself in terms of religion.
It is highly significant that the biographies of Christian saints should
furnish so many cases of men and women of strong sensual passions, and
whose ascetic devotion was only the reaction from almost unbridled
sensualism. No wonder that in the temptations experienced by the monks
the figures of nude women so often appeared before their heated
imaginations. Sexual feeling suppressed in one direction broke out in
another. Feelings, in themselves perfectly normal, became, as a
consequence of repression and misdirection, pathologic. And one
consequence of this was that many of the early Christian writers brought
to the consideration of the subject of sex a concentration of mind that
resulted in disquisitions of such a nature that it is impossible to do
more than refer to them. The sexual relation instead of being refined
was coarsened. Marriage was viewed in its lowest form, more as a
concession to the weakness of the flesh than as a desirable state for
all men and women. Nor can it be said, after many centuries, that these
ideas are quite eradicated from present-day life.
A field of investigation that yields much illuminating information is
the biographies of the saints and of other religious characters. In many
of these cases the acceptance of sexual feeling for religious
illumination is very clear. Thus of St. Gertrude, a Benedictine nun of
the thirteenth century, we read:--
"One day at chapel she heard supernaturally sung the words, '_Sanctus,
Sanctus, Sanctus_.' The Son of God, leaning towards her like a sweet
lover, and giving to her soul the softest kiss, said to her at the
second _Sanctus_, 'In the _Sanctus_ addressed to My person, receive with
this all the sanctity of My divinity and of My humanity.'... And the
following Sunday, while she was thanking God for this favour, behold the
Son of God, more beauteous than thousands of angels, takes her to His
arms as if He were proud of her, and presents her to God the Father, and
in that perfection of sanctity with which He had endowed her."[101]
Of Juliana of Norwich, who was granted a revelation in 1373, we are told
that she had for long 'ardently desired' a bodily sight of the Lord upon
the cross; and that finally Jesus appeared to her and said, "I love thee
and thou lovest Me, and our love shall never be disparted in two."[102]
So, again, in the case of Sister Jeanne des Anges, Superior of the
Convent of Ursulines of Loudun, and the principal character in the
famous Grandier witchcraft case, we have a detailed account, in her own
words, of the lascivious dreams, unclean suggestions, etc.--all
attributed to Satan--and alternating with impressions of bodily union
with Jesus.[103] Marie de L'Incarnation addresses Jesus as follows:--
"Oh, my love, when shall I embrace you? Have you no pity on the torments
that I suffer? Alas! alas! My love! My beauty! My life! Instead of
healing my pain, you take pleasure in it. Come, let me embrace you, and
die in your sacred arms."[104]
Veronica Juliani, beatified by Pope Pius II., took a real lamb to bed
with her, kissed it, and suckled it at her breasts. St. Catherine of
Genoa threw herself on the ground to cool herself, crying out, "Love,
love, I can bear it no longer." She also confessed to a peculiar
longing towards her confessor.[105]
The blessed Mary Alacoque, foundress of the Sacred Heart, was subject
from early life to a number of complaints--rheumatism, palsy, pains in
the side, ulceration of the legs--and experienced visions early in her
career. As a child she had so vivid a sense of modesty that the mere
sight of a man offended her. At seventeen she took to wearing a knotted
cord drawn so tightly that she could neither eat nor breathe without
pain. She compressed her arms so tightly with iron chains that she could
not remove them without anguish. "I made," she says, "a bed of
potsherds, on which I slept with extreme pleasure." She fasted and
tortured herself in a variety of ways, and the more her physical
disorders increased the more numerous became her visions. Before she was
eighteen years of age, in 1671, she entered a nunnery. From the time she
donned the habit of a novice she was 'blessed' with visions. "Our Lord
showed me that that day was the day of our spiritual wedding; He
forthwith gave me to understand that He wished to make me taste all the
sweetness of the caresses of His love. In reality, those divine caresses
were from that moment so excessive, that they often put me out of
myself." "Once," says one of her biographers, "having retired into her
chamber, she threw off the clothes with which she had bedecked herself
during the day, when the Son of God showed Himself to her in the state
in which He was after His cruel flagellation--that is, with His body all
wounded, torn, gory--and He said to her that it was her vanities that
had brought Him into that condition." In one of these visions Jesus
took the head of Mary, pressed it to His bosom, spoke to her in
passionate words, opened her side and took out her heart, plunged it
into His own, and then replaced it. He then explained His design of
founding the Order of the Sacred Heart. Ever after, Mary was conscious
of a pain in her side and a burning sensation in her chest--two plain
symptoms of hysteria.[106]
Santa Teresa, who died at the early age of thirty-three, and in whose
family more than one case of well-developed neurasthenia can be traced,
was favoured with 'messages' at a very early age. She believed some of
these were temptations from the devil suggesting an 'honourable
alliance.' A nervous breakdown followed directly after entrance into a
convent. She was then twenty years of age, was subject to fainting fits
and longed for illness as a sign of divine favour. She was subject to
convulsions, and soon after taking the veil fell into a cataleptic
trance, which lasted three days. She was thought to be dead, but at the
end of the time sat up and told those around that she had visited both
heaven and hell, and seen the joys of the blessed and the torments of
the damned. It is at least suggestive that, in spite of the longing for
personal communion with Jesus, her first experience of the ecstasy of
divine love was experienced after discovering a 'very realistic' picture
of a martyred saint--St. Joseph. The significance of the intense
contemplation of a tortured body--possibly made by one whose sexual
nature was undergoing a process of suppression--is unmistakable.[107]
On these and similar cases Professor William James makes the following
comment:--
"To the medical mind these ecstasies signify nothing but suggested
hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of superstition, and a
corporeal one of degeneration and hysteria. Undoubtedly these
pathological conditions have existed in many and possibly in all the
cases, but that fact tells us nothing about the value for knowledge of
the consciousness which they induce. To pass a spiritual judgment upon
these states, we must not content ourselves with superficial medical
talk, but enquire into their fruits for life."[108]
Now the question is really not what these ecstasies suggest to the
'medical mind,' as though that were a type of mind quite unfitted to
pass judgment. It is a question of what the facts suggest to any mind
judging the behaviour of a person under the influence of strong
religious emotion exactly as it would judge anyone under any other
strong emotional pressure. And if it be possible to explain these states
in terms of known physiological and mental action, what warranty have we
for rejecting this and preferring in its stead an explanation that is
both unprovable and unnecessary? And one would be excused for thinking
that cases which certainly involve some sort of abnormal nervous action
are precisely those in which the medical mind should be called on to
express an opinion. What is meant by passing 'a spiritual judgment'
upon these states is not exactly clear, unless it means judging them in
terms of the historic supernatural interpretation. But that is precisely
the interpretation which is challenged by the 'medical mind.'
I do not see how any enquiry "into their fruits for life" can affect a
rational estimate of the nature of these mystical states. Mysticism adds
nothing to the native disposition of a person. It merely gives their
energies a new turn, a new direction. What they were before the
experience they remain, substantially, afterwards. That is why we find
religious mystics of every variety. Some energetically practical; others
dreamily unpractical. Professor James admits this in saying that "the
other-worldliness encouraged by the mystical consciousness makes this
over-abstraction from practical life peculiarly liable to befall mystics
in whom the character is naturally passive and the intellect feeble; but
in natively strong minds and characters we find quite opposite
results."[109] And when it is further admitted that "the mystical
feeling of enlargement, union, and emancipation has no specific
intellectual content whatever of its own," but "is capable of forming
matrimonial alliances with material furnished by the most diverse
philosophies and theologies, provided only they can find a place in
their framework for its peculiar emotional mood," mysticism seems
reduced to an emotional development on all fours with emotional
development in other directions. It is not peculiar to religious minds
because "it has no specific intellectual content." It is amorphous, so
to speak. And it may form diverse 'matrimonial alliances' precisely
because it does not point to a hidden world of reality, but is merely
indicative of tense emotional moods. In the face of nature the
non-theistic Richard Jeffries experiences all the feelings of mental
enlargement and emotional transports that Mary Alacoque or Santa Teresa
experienced in their visions of the 'Risen Christ.'
It is idle, then, to sneer at 'medical materialism,' and stigmatise it
as superficial. Many people are constitutionally afraid of words, and
there is nothing that arouses prejudice so quickly as a name. But it is
really not a question of materialism, medical or non-medical. It is a
mere matter of applying knowledge and common sense to the cases before
us. Are we to take the subject's explanation of his or her mental states
as authoritative, so far as their nature is concerned; or are we to
treat them as symptoms demanding the skilled analysis of the specialist?
If the former, how can we differentiate between the mystic and the
admittedly hysterical patient? If the latter, what ground is there for
placing the mystic in a category of his own? Rational and scientific
analysis will certainly take far more notice of the nature of the
feelings excited than of the object towards which they are directed.
Here is the case of a young lady, given by Dr. Moreau, in his _Morbid
Psychology_:--
"During my long hours of sleeplessness in the night my beloved Saviour
began to make Himself manifest to me. Pondering over the meditations of
St. François de Sales on the _Song of Songs_, I seemed to feel all my
faculties suspended, and crossing my arms upon my chest, I awaited in a
sort of dread what might be revealed to me.... I saw the Redeemer
veritably in the flesh.... He extended Himself beside me, pressed me so
closely that I could feel His crown of thorns, and the nails in His feet
and hands, while He pressed His lips over mine, giving me the most
ravishing kiss of a divine Spouse, and sending a delicious thrill
through my entire body."[110]
Get rid of the narcotising effect of theological associations by
eliminating the name of Jesus and other religious terms from this case,
and from the others already cited, and no one would have the least doubt
as to their real nature. Given a condition of physical health in these
cases, with conditions that favoured social activity, healthy
intercourse with the opposite sex, culminating in marriage and
parenthood, can there be any doubt that this species of religious
ecstasy would have been non-existent? If, as Tylor says, the refectory
door would many a time have closed the gates of heaven, happy family
life would in a vast number of cases have prevented those religio-erotic
trances which have played so powerful a part in the history of
supernaturalism. Most people will agree with Dr. Maudsley:--
"The ecstatic trances of such saintly women as Catherine Sienne and St.
Theresa, in which they believed themselves to be visited by their
Saviour and to be received as veritable spouses into His bosom, were,
though they knew it not, little better than vicarious sexual orgasm; a
condition of things which the intense contemplation of the naked male
figure, carved or sculptured in all its proportions on a cross, is more
fitted to produce in young women of susceptible nervous temperament than
people are apt to consider. Every experienced physician must have met
with instances of single and childless women who have devoted
themselves with extraordinary zeal to habitual religious exercises, and
who, having gone insane as a culmination of their emotional fervour,
have straightway exhibited the saddest mixture of religious and erotic
symptoms--a boiling over of lust in voice, face, gestures, under the
pitiful degradation of disease.... The fanatical religious sects, such
as the Shakers and the like, which spring up from time to time in
communities and disgust them by the offensive way in which they mingle
love and religion, are inspired in great measure by sexual feeling; on
the one hand, there is probably the cunning of a hypocritical knave, or
the self-deception of a half-insane one, using the weaknesses of weak
women to minister to his vanity or his lust under a religious guise; on
the other hand, there is an exaggerated self-feeling, often rooted in
the sexual passion, which is unwittingly fostered under the cloak of
religious emotion, and which is apt to conduct to madness or to sin. In
such cases the holy kiss owes its warmth to the sexual impulse, which
inspires it, consciously or unconsciously, and the mystical religious
union of the sexes is fitted to issue in a less spiritual union."[111]
Many manuals of devotion will be found to furnish the same kind of
evidence as biographical narratives concerning the intimate relations
that exists between sexuality and religious feeling. What has just been
said may be repeated here, namely, that if the religious associations
were dispelled, there would be no mistaking the nature of feelings that
originated much of this class of writing, or the feelings to which they
appeal. The serious fact is that the appeal is there whether we
recognise it or not, and it is a question worthy of serious
consideration whether the unwary imagination of the young may be not as
surely debauched by certain books of devotion as by a frankly erotic
production. It is not without reason that d'Israeli the elder, in an
essay omitted from all editions of his book after the first, remarked
that "poets are amorous, lovers are poetical, but saints are both."[112]
Take, for example, the following from a collection of old English
homilies, dating from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries:--
"Jesus, my holy love, my sure sweetness! Jesus, my heart, my joy, my
soul-heal! Jesus, sweet Jesus, my darling, my life, my light, my balm,
my honey-drop!... Kindle me with the blaze of Thy enlightening love. Let
me be Thy leman, and teach me to love Thee.... Oh, that I might behold
how Thou stretchedst Thyself for me on the cross. Oh, that I might cast
myself between those same arms, so very wide outspread.... Oh, that I
were in Thy arms, in Thy arms so stretchedst and outspread on the
cross."