That love is a natural insanity, a temporary delusion which the individual

is compelled to suffer for the sake of the race, is indeed an explanation

that has suggested itself to many who have been baffled by this mystery.

That, as we know, was the explanation offered by Schopenhauer. When a

youth and a girl fall into each other's arms in the ecstacy of love they

imagine that they are seeking their own happiness. But it is not so, said

Schopenhauer; they are deluded by the genius of the race into the belief

that they are seeking a personal end in order that they may be induced to

effect a far greater impersonal end: the creation of the future race. The

intensity of their passion is not the measure of the personal happiness

they will secure but the measure of their aptitude for producing

offspring. In accepting passion and renouncing the counsels of cautious

prudence the youth and the girl are really sacrificing their chances of

selfish happiness and fulfilling the larger ends of Nature. As

Schopenhauer saw the matter, there was here no vulgar illusion. The lovers

thought that they were reaching towards a boundlessly immense personal

happiness; they were probably deceived. But they were deceived not because

the reality was less than their imagination, but because it was more;

instead of pursuing, as they thought, a merely personal end they were

carrying on the creative work of the world, a task better left undone, as

Schopenhauer viewed it, but a task whose magnitude he fully

recognized.[65]

It must be remembered that in the lower sense of deception, love may be,

and frequently is, a delusion. A man may deceive himself, or be deceived

by the object of his attraction, concerning the qualities that she

possesses or fails to possess. In first love, occurring in youth, such

deception is perhaps entirely normal, and in certain suggestible and

inflammable types of people it is peculiarly apt to occur. This kind of

deception, although far more frequent and conspicuous in matters of

love--and more serious because of the tightness of the marriage bond--is

liable to occur in any relation of life. For most people, however, and

those not the least sane or the least wise, the memory of the exaltation

of love, even when the period of that exaltation is over, still remains

as, at the least, the memory of one of the most real and essential facts

of life.[66]

Some writers seem to confuse the liability in matters of love to

deception or disappointment with the larger question of a

metaphysical illusion in Schopenhauer's sense. To some extent

this confusion perhaps exists in the discussion of love by

Renouvier and Prat in _La Nouvelle Monadologie_ (pp. 216 _et

seq._). In considering whether love is or is not a delusion, they

answer that it is or is not according as we are, or are not,

dominated by selfishness and injustice. "It was not an essential

error which presided over the creation of the _idol_, for the

idol is only what in all things the _ideal_ is. But to realize

the ideal in love two persons are needed, and therein is the

great difficulty. We are never justified," they conclude, "in

casting contempt on our love, or even on its object, for if it is

true that we have not gained possession of the sovereign beauty

of the world it is equally true that we have not attained a

degree of perfection that would have entitled us justly to claim

so great a prize." And perhaps most of us, it may be added, must

admit in the end, if we are honest with ourselves, that the

prizes of love we have gained in the world, whatever their flaws,

are far greater than we deserved.

We may well agree that in a certain sense not love alone but all the

passions and desires of men are illusions. In that sense the Gospel of

Buddha is justified, and we may recognize the inspiration of Shakespeare

(in the _Tempest_) and of Calderon (in _La Vida es Sueño_), who felt that

ultimately the whole world is an insubstantial dream. But short of that

large and ultimate vision we cannot accept illusion; we cannot admit that

love is a delusion in some special and peculiar sense that men's other

cravings and aspirations escape. On the contrary, it is the most solid of

realities. All the progressive forms of life are built up on the

attraction of sex. If we admit the action of sexual selection--as we can

scarcely fail to do if we purge it from its unessential

accretions[67]--love has moulded the precise shape and color, the

essential beauty, alike of animal and human life.

If we further reflect that, as many investigators believe, not only the

physical structure of life but also its spiritual structure--our social

feelings, our morality, our religion, our poetry and art--are, in some

degree at least, also built up on the impulse of sex, and would have been,

if not non-existent, certainly altogether different had other than sexual

methods of propagation prevailed in the world, we may easily realize that

we can only fall into confusion by dismissing love as a delusion. The

whole edifice of life topples down, for as the idealist Schiller long

since said, it is entirely built up on hunger and on love. To look upon

love as in any special sense a delusion is merely to fall into the trap of

a shallow cynicism. Love is only a delusion in so far as the whole of life

is a delusion, and if we accept the fact of life it is unphilosophical to

refuse to accept the fact of love.

It is unnecessary here to magnify the functions of love in the

world; it is sufficient to investigate its workings in its own

proper sphere. It may, however, be worth while to quote a few

expressions of thinkers, belonging to various schools, who have

pointed out what seemed to them the far-ranging significance of

the sexual emotions for the moral life. "The passions are the

heavenly fire which gives life to the moral world," wrote

Helvétius long since in _De l'Esprit_. "The activity of the mind

depends on the activity of the passions, and it is at the period

of the passions, from the age of twenty-five to thirty-five or

forty that men are capable of the greatest efforts of virtue or

of genius." "What touches sex," wrote Zola, "touches the centre

of social life." Even our regard for the praise and blame of

others has a sexual origin, Professor Thomas argues

(_Psychological Review_, Jan., 1904, pp. 61-67), and it is love

which is the source of susceptibility generally and of the

altruistic side of life. "The appearance of sex," Professor Woods

Hutchinson attempts to show ("Love as a Factor in Evolution,"

_Monist_, 1898), "the development of maleness and femaleness, was

not only the birthplace of affection, the well-spring of all

morality, but an enormous economic advantage to the race and an

absolute necessity of progress. In it first we find any conscious

longing for or active impulse toward a fellow creature." "Were

man robbed of the instinct of procreation, and of all that

spiritually springs therefrom," exclaimed Maudsley in his

_Physiology of Mind_, "that moment would all poetry, and perhaps

also his whole moral sense, be obliterated from his life." "One

seems to oneself transfigured, stronger, richer, more complete;

one _is_ more complete," says Nietzsche (_Der Wille zur Macht_,

p. 389), "we find here art as an organic function: we find it

inlaid in the most angelic instinct of 'love:' we find it as the

greatest stimulant of life.... It is not merely that it changes

the feeling of values: the lover _is_ worth more, is stronger. In

animals this condition produces new weapons, pigments, colors,

and forms, above all new movements, new rhythms, a new seductive

music. It is not otherwise in man.... Even in art the door is

opened to him. If we subtract from lyrical work in words and

sounds the suggestions of that intestinal fever, what is left

over in poetry and music? _L'Art pour l'art_ perhaps, the

quacking virtuosity of cold frogs who perish in their marsh. All

the rest is created by love."

It would be easy to multiply citations tending to show how many

diverse thinkers have come to the conclusion that sexual love

(including therewith parental and especially maternal love) is

the source of the chief manifestations of life. How far they are

justified in that conclusion, it is not our business now to

inquire.

It is undoubtedly true that, as we have seen when discussing the erratic

and imperfect distribution of the conception of love, and even of words

for love, over the world, by no means all people are equally apt for

experiencing, even at any time in their lives, the emotions of sexual

exaltation. The difference between the knight and the churl still

subsists, and both may sometimes be found in all social strata. Even the

refinements of sexual enjoyment, it is unnecessary to insist, quite

commonly remain on a merely physical basis, and have little effect on the

intellectual and emotional nature.[68] But this is not the case with the

people who have most powerfully influenced the course of the world's

thought and feeling. The personal reality of love, its importance for the

individual life, are facts that have been testified to by some of the

greatest thinkers, after lives devoted to the attainment of intellectual

labor. The experience of Renan, who toward the end of his life set down in

his remarkable drama _L'Abbesse de Jouarre_, his conviction that, even

from the point of view of chastity, love is, after all, the supreme thing

in the world, is far from standing alone. "Love has always appeared as an

inferior mode of human music, ambition as the superior mode," wrote Tarde,

the distinguished sociologist, at the end of his life. "But will it always

be thus? Are there not reasons for thinking that the future perhaps

reserves for us the ineffable surprise of an inversion of that secular

order?" Laplace, half an hour before his death, took up a volume of his

own _Mécanique Celeste_, and said: "All that is only trifles, there is

nothing true but love." Comte, who had spent his life in building up a

Positive Philosophy which should be absolutely real, found (as indeed it

may be said the great English Positivist Mill also found) the culmination

of all his ideals in a woman, who was, he said, Egeria and Beatrice and

Laura in one, and he wrote: "There is nothing real in the world but love.

One grows tired of thinking, and even of acting; one never grows tired of

loving, nor of saying so. In the worst tortures of affection I have never

ceased to feel that the essential of happiness is that the heart should be

worthily filled--even with pain, yes, even with pain, the bitterest pain."

And Sophie Kowalewsky, after intellectual achievements which have placed

her among the most distinguished of her sex, pathetically wrote: "Why can

no one love me? I could give more than most women, and yet the most

insignificant women are loved and I am not." Love, they all seem to say,

is the one thing that is supremely worth while. The greatest and most

brilliant of the world's intellectual giants, in their moments of final

insight, thus reach the habitual level of the humble and almost anonymous

persons, cloistered from the world, who wrote _The Imitation of Christ_ or

_The Letters of a Portuguese Nun_. And how many others!

FOOTNOTES:

[45] _Meditationes Piissimæ de Cognitione Humanæ Conditionis_, Migne's

_Patrologia_, vol. clxxiv, p. 489, cap. III, "De Dignitate Animæ et

Vilitate Corporis." It may be worth while to quote more at length the

vigorous language of the original. "Si diligenter consideres quid per os

et nares cæterosque corporis meatus egrediatur, vilius sterquilinum

numquam vidisti.... Attende, homo, quid fuisti ante ortum, et quid es ab

ortu usque ad occasum, atque quid eris post hanc vitam. Profecto fuit

quand non eras: postea de vili materia factus, et vilissimo panno

involutus, menstruali sanguine in utero materno fuisti nutritus, et tunica

tua fuit pellis secundina. Nihil aliud est homo quam sperma fetidum,

saccus stercorum, cibus vermium.... Quid superbis, pulvis et cinis, cujus

conceptus cula, nasci miseria, vivere poena, mori angustia?"

[46] See (in Mignes' edition) _S. Odonis abbatis Cluniacensis

Collationes_, lib. ii, cap. IX.

[47] Dühren (_Neue Forshungen über die Marquis de Sade_, pp. 432 et seq.)

shows how the ascetic view of woman's body persisted, for instance, in

Schopenhauer and De Sade.

[48] In "The Evolution of Modesty," in the first volume of these

_Studies_, and again in the fifth volume in discussing urolagnia in the

study of "Erotic Symbolism," the mutual reactions of the sexual and

excretory centres were fully dealt with.

[49] "La Morale Sexuelle," _Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, Jan.,

1907.

[50] The above passage, now slightly modified, originally formed an

unpublished part of an essay on Walt Whitman in _The New Spirit_, first

issued in 1889.

[51] Even in the ninth century, however, when the monastic movement was

rapidly developing, there were some who withstood the tendencies of the

new ascetics. Thus, in 850, Ratramnus, the monk of Corbie, wrote a

treatise (_Liber de eo quod Christus ex Virgine natus est_) to prove that

Mary really gave birth to Jesus through her sexual organs, and not, as

some high-strung persons were beginning to think could alone be possible,

through the more conventionally decent breasts. The sexual organs were

sanctified. "Spiritus sanctus ... et thalamum tanto dignum sponso

sanctificavit et portam" (Achery, _Spicilegium_, vol. i, p. 55).

[52] _Pædagogus_, lib. ii, cap. X. Elsewhere (id., lib. ii, Ch. VI) he

makes a more detailed statement to the same effect.

[53] See, e.g., Wilhelm Capitaine, _Die Moral des Clemens von

Alexandrien_, pp. 112 et seq.

[54] _De Civitate Dei_, lib. xxii, cap. XXIV. "There is no need," he says

again (id., lib. xiv, cap. V) "that in our sins and vices we accuse the

nature of the flesh to the injury of the Creator, for in its own kind and

degree the flesh is good."

[55] St. Augustine, _De Civitate Dei_, lib. xiv, cap. XXIII-XXVI.

Chrysostom and Gregory, of Nyssa, thought that in Paradise human beings

would have multiplied by special creation, but such is not the accepted

Catholic doctrine.

[56] W. Capitaine, _Die Moral des Clemens von Alexandrien_, pp. 112 et

seq. Without the body, Tertullian declared, there could be no virginity

and no salvation. The soul itself is corporeal. He carries, indeed, his

idea of the omnipresence of the body to the absurd.

[57] Rufinus, _Commentarius in Symbolum Apostolorum_, cap. XII.

[58] Migne, _Patrologia Græca_, vol. xxvi, pp. 1170 et seq.

[59] Even in physical conformation the human sexual organs, when compared

with those of the lower animals, show marked differences (see "The

Mechanism of Detumescence," in the fifth volume of these _Studies_).

[60] It may perhaps be as well to point out, with Forel (_Die Sexuelle

Frage_, p. 208), that the word "bestial" is generally used quite

incorrectly in this connection. Indeed, not only for the higher, but also

for the lower manifestation of the sexual impulse, it would usually be

more correct to use instead the qualification "human."

[61] _Loc. cit._, _Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, Jan., 1907.

[62] It has, however, become colored and suspect from an early period in

the history of Christianity. St. Augustine (_De Civitate Dei_, lib. xiv,

cap. XV), while admitting that libido or lust is merely the generic name

for all desire, adds that, as specially applied to the sexual appetite, it

is justly and properly mixed up with ideas of shame.

[63] Hinton well illustrates this feeling. "We call by the name of lust,"

he declares in his MSS., "the most simple and natural desires. We might as

well term hunger and thirst 'lust' as so call sex-passion, when expressing

simply Nature's prompting. We miscall it 'lust,' cruelly libelling those

to whom we ascribe it, and introduce absolute disorder. For, by foolishly

confounding Nature's demands with lust, we insist upon restraint upon

her."

[64] Several centuries earlier another French writer, the distinguished

physician, A. Laurentius (Des Laurens) in his _Historia Anatomica Humani

Corporis_ (lib. viii, Quæstio vii) had likewise puzzled over "the

incredible desire of coitus," and asked how it was that "that divine

animal, full of reason and judgment, which we call Man, should be

attracted to those obscene parts of women, soiled with filth, which are

placed, like a sewer, in the lowest part of the body." It is noteworthy

that, from the first, and equally among men of religion, men of science,

and men of letters, the mystery of this problem has peculiarly appealed to

the French mind.

[65] Schopenhauer, _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_, vol. ii, pp. 608

et seq.

[66] "Perhaps there is scarcely a man," wrote Malthus, a clergyman as well

as one of the profoundest thinkers of his day (_Essay on the Principle of

Population_, 1798, Ch. XI), "who has once experienced the genuine delight

of virtuous love, however great his intellectual pleasures may have been,

that does not look back to the period as the sunny spot in his whole life,

where his imagination loves to bask, which he recollects and contemplates

with the fondest regrets, and which he would most wish to live over again.

The superiority of intellectual to sexual pleasures consists rather in

their filling up more time, in their having a larger range, and in their

being less liable to satiate, than in their being more real and

essential."

[67] The whole argument of the fourth volume of these _Studies_, on

"Sexual Selection in Man," points in this direction.

[68] "Perhaps most average men," Forel remarks (_Die Sexuelle Frage_, p.

307), "are but slightly receptive to the intoxication of love; they are at

most on the level of the _gourmet_, which is by no means necessarily an

immoral plane, but is certainly not that of poetry."

CHAPTER V.

THE FUNCTION OF CHASTITY.

Chastity Essential to the Dignity of Love--The Eighteenth Century Revolt

Against the Ideal of Chastity--Unnatural Forms of Chastity--The

Psychological Basis of Asceticism--Asceticism and Chastity as Savage

Virtues--The Significance of Tahiti--Chastity Among Barbarous

Peoples--Chastity Among the Early Christians--Struggles of the Saints with

the Flesh--The Romance of Christian Chastity--Its Decay in Mediæval

Times--_Aucassin et Nicolette_ and the new Romance of Chaste Love--The

Unchastity of the Northern Barbarians--The Penitentials--Influence of the

Renaissance and the Reformation--The Revolt Against Virginity as a

Virtue--The Modern Conception of Chastity as a Virtue--The Influences That

Favor the Virtue of Chastity--Chastity as a Discipline--The Value of

Chastity for the Artist--Potency and Impotence in Popular Estimation--The

Correct Definitions of Asceticism and Chastity.

The supreme importance of chastity, and even of asceticism, has never at

any time, or in any greatly vital human society, altogether failed of

recognition. Sometimes chastity has been exalted in human estimation,

sometimes it has been debased; it has frequently changed the nature of its

manifestations; but it has always been there. It is even a part of the

beautiful vision of all Nature. "The glory of the world is seen only by a

chaste mind," said Thoreau with his fine extravagance. "To whomsoever this

fact is not an awful but beautiful mystery there are no flowers in

Nature." Without chastity it is impossible to maintain the dignity of

sexual love. The society in which its estimation sinks to a minimum is in

the last stages of degeneration. Chastity has for sexual love an

importance which it can never lose, least of all to-day.

It is quite true that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many

men of high moral and intellectual distinction pronounced very decidedly

their condemnation of the ideal of chastity. The great Buffon refused to

recognize chastity as an ideal and referred scornfully to "that kind of

insanity which has turned a girl's virginity into a thing with a real

existence," while William Morris, in his downright manner, once declared

at a meeting of the Fellowship of the New Life, that asceticism is "the

most disgusting vice that afflicted human nature." Blake, though he seems

always to have been a strictly moral man in the most conventional sense,

felt nothing but contempt for chastity, and sometimes confers a kind of

religious solemnity on the idea of unchastity. Shelley, who may have been

unwise in sexual matters but can scarcely be called unchaste, also often

seems to associate religion and morality, not with chastity, but with

unchastity, and much the same may be said of James Hinton.[69]

But all these men--with other men of high character who have pronounced

similar opinions--were reacting against false, decayed, and conventional

forms of chastity. They were not rebelling against an ideal; they were

seeking to set up an ideal in a place where they realized that a

mischievous pretense was masquerading as a moral reality.

We cannot accept an ideal of chastity unless we ruthlessly cast aside all

the unnatural and empty forms of chastity. If chastity is merely a

fatiguing effort to emulate in the sexual sphere the exploits of

professional fasting men, an effort using up all the energies of the

organism and resulting in no achievement greater than the abstinence it

involves, then it is surely an unworthy ideal. If it is a feeble

submission to an external conventional law which there is no courage to

break, then it is not an ideal at all. If it is a rule of morality imposed

by one sex on the opposite sex, then it is an injustice and provocative of

revolt. If it is an abstinence from the usual forms of sexuality, replaced

by more abnormal or more secret forms, then it is simply an unreality

based on misconception. And if it is merely an external acceptance of

conventions without any further acceptance, even in act, then it is a

contemptible farce. These are the forms of chastity which during the past

two centuries many fine-souled men have vigorously rejected.

The fact that chastity, or asceticism, is a real virtue, with fine uses,

becomes evident when we realize that it has flourished at all times, in

connection with all kinds of religions and the most various moral codes.

We find it pronounced among savages, and the special virtues of

savagery--hardness, endurance, and bravery--are intimately connected with

the cultivation of chastity and asceticism.[70] It is true that savages

seldom have any ideal of chastity in the degraded modern sense, as a state

of permanent abstinence from sexual relationships having a merit of its

own apart from any use. They esteem chastity for its values, magical or

real, as a method of self-control which contributes towards the attainment

of important ends. The ability to bear pain and restraint is nearly always

a main element in the initiation of youths at puberty. The custom of

refraining from sexual intercourse before expeditions of war and hunting,

and other serious concerns involving great muscular and mental strain,

whatever the motives assigned, is a sagacious method of economizing

energy. The extremely widespread habit of avoiding intercourse during

pregnancy and suckling, again, is an admirable precaution in sexual

hygiene which it is extremely difficult to obtain the observance of in

civilization. Savages, also, are perfectly well aware how valuable sexual

continence is, in combination with fasting and solitude, to acquire the

aptitude for abnormal spiritual powers.

Thus C. Hill Tout (_Journal Anthropological Institute_,

Jan.-June, 1905, pp. 143-145) gives an interesting account of the

self-discipline undergone by those among the Salish Indians of

British Columbia, who seek to acquire shamanistic powers. The

psychic effects of such training on these men, says Hill Tout,

is undoubted. "It enables them to undertake and accomplish feats

of abnormal strength, agility, and endurance; and gives them at

times, besides a general exaltation of the senses, undoubted

clairvoyant and other supernormal mental and bodily powers." At

the other end of the world, as shown by the _Reports of the

Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_ (vol. v, p. 321),

closely analogous methods of obtaining supernatural powers are

also customary.

There are fundamental psychological reasons for the wide

prevalence of asceticism and for the remarkable manner in which

it involves self-mortification, even acute physical suffering.

Such pain is an actual psychic stimulant, more especially in

slightly neurotic persons. This is well illustrated by a young

woman, a patient of Janet's, who suffered from mental depression

and was accustomed to find relief by slightly burning her hands

and feet. She herself clearly understood the nature of her

actions. "I feel," she said, "that I make an effort when I hold

my hands on the stove, or when I pour boiling water on my feet;

it is a violent act and it awakens me: I feel that it is really

done by myself and not by another.... To make a mental effort by

itself is too difficult for me; I have to supplement it by

physical efforts. I have not succeeded in any other way; that is

all: when I brace myself up to burn myself I make my mind freer,

lighter and more active for several days. Why do you speak of my

desire for mortification? My parents believe that, but it is

absurd. It would be a mortification if it brought any suffering,

but I enjoy this suffering, it gives me back my mind; it prevents

my thoughts from stopping: what would one not do to attain such

happiness?" (P. Janet, "The Pathogenesis of Some Impulsions,"

_Journal of Abnormal Psychology_, April, 1906.) If we understand

this psychological process we may realize how it is that even in

the higher religions, however else they may differ, the practical

value of asceticism and mortification as the necessary door to

the most exalted religious state is almost universally

recognized, and with complete cheerfulness. "Asceticism and

ecstacy are inseparable," as Probst-Biraben remarks at the outset

of an interesting paper on Mahommedan mysticism ("L'Extase dans

le Mysticisme Musulman," _Revue Philosophique_, Nov., 1906).

Asceticism is the necessary ante-chamber to spiritual perfection.

It thus happens that savage peoples largely base their often admirable

enforcement of asceticism not on the practical grounds that would justify

it, but on religious grounds that with the growth of intelligence fall

into discredit.[71] Even, however, when the scrupulous observances of

savages, whether in sexual or in non-sexual matters, are without any

obviously sound basis it cannot be said that they are entirely useless if

they tend to encourage self-control and the sense of reverence.[72] The

would-be intelligent and practical peoples who cast aside primitive

observances because they seem baseless or even ridiculous, need a still

finer practical sense and still greater intelligence in order to realize

that, though the reasons for the observances have been wrong, yet the

observances themselves may have been necessary methods of attaining

personal and social efficiency. It constantly happens in the course of

civilization that we have to revive old observances and furnish them with

new reasons.

In considering the moral quality of chastity among savages, we

must carefully separate that chastity which among semi-primitive

peoples is exclusively imposed upon women. This has no moral

quality whatever, for it is not exercised as a useful discipline,

but merely enforced in order to heighten the economic and erotic

value of the women. Many authorities believe that the regard for

women as property furnishes the true reason for the widespread

insistence on virginity in brides. Thus A.B. Ellis, speaking of

the West Coast of Africa (_Yoruba-Speaking Peoples_, pp. 183 _et

seq._), says that girls of good class are betrothed as mere

children, and are carefully guarded from men, while girls of

lower class are seldom betrothed, and may lead any life they

choose. "In this custom of infant or child betrothals we probably

find the key to that curious regard for ante-nuptial chastity

found not only among the tribes of the Gold and Slave Coasts, but

also among many other uncivilized peoples in different parts of

the world." In a very different part of the world, in Northern

Siberia, "the Yakuts," Sieroshevski states (_Journal

Anthropological Institute_, Jan.-June, 1901, p. 96), "see

nothing immoral in illicit love, providing only that nobody

suffers material loss by it. It is true that parents will scold a

daughter if her conduct threatens to deprive them of their gain

from the bride-price; but if once they have lost hope of marrying

her off, or if the bride-price has been spent, they manifest

complete indifference to her conduct. Maidens who no longer

expect marriage are not restrained at all, if they observe

decorum it is only out of respect to custom." Westermarck

(_History of Human Marriage_, pp. 123 et seq.) also shows the

connection between the high estimates of virginity and the

conception of woman as property, and returning to the question in

his later work, _The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_

(vol. ii, Ch. XLII), after pointing out that "marriage by

purchase has thus raised the standard of female chastity," he

refers (p. 437) to the significant fact that the seduction of an

unmarried girl "is chiefly, if not exclusively, regarded as an

offense against the parents or family of the girl," and there is

no indication that it is ever held by savages that any wrong has

been done to the woman herself. Westermarck recognizes at the

same time that the preference given to virgins has also a

biological basis in the instinctive masculine feeling of jealousy

in regard to women who have had intercourse with other men, and

especially in the erotic charm for men of the emotional state of

shyness which accompanies virginity. (This point has been dealt

with in the discussion of Modesty in vol. i of these _Studies_.)

It is scarcely necessary to add that the insistence on the

virginity of brides is by no means confined, as A.B. Ellis seems

to imply, to uncivilized peoples, nor is it necessary that

wife-purchase should always accompany it. The preference still

persists, not only by virtue of its natural biological basis, but

as a refinement and extension of the idea of woman as property,

among those civilized peoples who, like ourselves, inherit a form

of marriage to some extent based on wife-purchase. Under such

conditions a woman's chastity has an important social function to

perform, being, as Mrs. Mona Caird has put it (_The Morality of

Marriage_, 1897, p. 88), the watch-dog of man's property. The

fact that no element of ideal morality enters into the question

is shown by the usual absence of any demand for ante-nuptial

chastity in the husband.

It must not be supposed that when, as is most usually the case,

there is no complete and permanent prohibition of extra-nuptial

intercourse, mere unrestrained license prevails. That has

probably never happened anywhere among uncontaminated savages.

The rule probably is that, as among the tribes at Torres Straits

(_Reports Cambridge Anthropological Expedition_, vol. v, p. 275),

there is no complete continence before marriage, but neither is

there any unbridled license.

The example of Tahiti is instructive as regards the prevalence of

chastity among peoples of what we generally consider low grades

of civilization. Tahiti, according to all who have visited it,

from the earliest explorers down to that distinguished American

surgeon, the late Dr. Nicholas Senn, is an island possessing

qualities of natural beauty and climatic excellence, which it is

impossible to rate too highly. "I seemed to be transported into

the garden of Eden," said Bougainville in 1768. But, mainly under

the influence of the early English missionaries who held ideas of

theoretical morality totally alien to those of the inhabitants of

the islands, the Tahitians have become the stock example of a

population given over to licentiousness and all its awful

results. Thus, in his valuable _Polynesian Researches_ (second

edition, 1832, vol. i, Ch. IX) William Ellis says that the

Tahitians practiced "the worst pollutions of which it was

possible for man to be guilty," though not specifying them. When,

however, we carefully examine the narratives of the early

visitors to Tahiti, before the population became contaminated by

contact with Europeans, it becomes clear that this view needs

serious modification. "The great plenty of good and nourishing

food," wrote an early explorer, J.R. Forster (_Observations Made

on a Voyage Round the World_, 1778, pp. 231, 409, 422), "together

with the fine climate, the beauty and unreserved behavior of

their females, invite them powerfully to the enjoyments and

pleasures of love. They begin very early to abandon themselves to

the most libidinous scenes. Their songs, their dances, and

dramatic performances, breathe a spirit of luxury." Yet he is

over and over again impelled to set down facts which bear

testimony to the virtues of these people. Though rather

effeminate in build, they are athletic, he says. Moreover, in

their wars they fight with great bravery and valor. They are, for

the rest, hospitable. He remarks that they treat their married

women with great respect, and that women generally are nearly the

equals of men, both in intelligence and in social position; he

gives a charming description of the women. "In short, their

character," Forster concludes, "is as amiable as that of any

nation that ever came unimproved out of the hands of Nature," and

he remarks that, as was felt by the South Sea peoples generally,

"whenever we came to this happy island we could evidently

perceive the opulence and happiness of its inhabitants." It is

noteworthy also, that, notwithstanding the high importance which

the Tahitians attached to the erotic side of life, they were not

deficient in regard for chastity. When Cook, who visited Tahiti

many times, was among "this benevolent humane" people, he noted

their esteem for chastity, and found that not only were betrothed

girls strictly guarded before marriage, but that men also who had

refrained from sexual intercourse for some time before marriage

were believed to pass at death immediately into the abode of the

blessed. "Their behavior, on all occasions, seems to indicate a

great openness and generosity of disposition. I never saw them,

in any misfortune, labor under the appearance of anxiety, after

the critical moment was past. Neither does care ever seem to

wrinkle their brow. On the contrary, even the approach of death

does not appear to alter their usual vivacity" (_Third Voyage of

Discovery_, 1776-1780). Turnbull visited Tahiti at a later period

(_A Voyage Round the World in 1800_, etc., pp. 374-5), but while

finding all sorts of vices among them, he is yet compelled to

admit their virtues: "Their manner of addressing strangers, from

the king to the meanest subject, is courteous and affable in the

extreme.... They certainly live amongst each other in more

harmony than is usual amongst Europeans. During the whole time I

was amongst them I never saw such a thing as a battle.... I never

remember to have seen an Otaheitean out of temper. They jest upon

each other with greater freedom than the Europeans, but these

jests are never taken in ill part.... With regard to food, it is,

I believe, an invariable law in Otaheite that whatever is

possessed by one is common to all." Thus we see that even among a

people who are commonly referred to as the supreme example of a

nation given up to uncontrolled licentiousness, the claims of

chastity were admitted, and many other virtues vigorously

flourished. The Tahitians were brave, hospitable,

self-controlled, courteous, considerate to the needs of others,

chivalrous to women, even appreciative of the advantages of

sexual restraint, to an extent which has rarely, if ever, been

known among those Christian nations which have looked down upon

them as abandoned to unspeakable vices.

As we turn from savages towards peoples in the barbarous and civilized

stages we find a general tendency for chastity, in so far as it is a

common possession of the common people, to be less regarded, or to be

retained only as a traditional convention no longer strictly observed. The

old grounds for chastity in primitive religions and _tabu_ have decayed

and no new grounds have been generally established. "Although the progress

of civilization," wrote Gibbon long ago, "has undoubtedly contributed to

assuage the fiercer passions of human nature, it seems to have been less

favorable to the virtue of chastity," and Westermarck concludes that

"irregular connections between the sexes have, on the whole, exhibited a

tendency to increase along with the progress of civilization."

The main difference in the social function of chastity as we pass from

savagery to higher stages of culture seems to be that it ceases to exist

as a general hygienic measure or a general ceremonial observance, and, for

the most part, becomes confined to special philosophic or religious sects

which cultivate it to an extreme degree in a more or less professional

way. This state of things is well illustrated by the Roman Empire during

the early centuries of the Christian era.[73] Christianity itself was at

first one of these sects enamored of the ideal of chastity; but by its

superior vitality it replaced all the others and finally imposed its

ideals, though by no means its primitive practices, on European society

generally.

Chastity manifested itself in primitive Christianity in two different

though not necessarily opposed ways. On the one hand it took a stern and

practical form in vigorous men and women who, after being brought up in a

society permitting a high degree of sexual indulgence, suddenly found

themselves convinced of the sin of such indulgence. The battle with the

society they had been born into, and with their own old impulses and

habits, became so severe that they often found themselves compelled to

retire from the world altogether. Thus it was that the parched solitudes

of Egypt were peopled with hermits largely occupied with the problem of

subduing their own flesh. Their pre-occupation, and indeed the

pre-occupation of much early Christian literature, with sexual matters,

may be said to be vastly greater than was the case with the pagan society

they had left. Paganism accepted sexual indulgence and was then able to

dismiss it, so that in classic literature we find very little insistence

on sexual details except in writers like Martial, Juvenal and Petronius

who introduce them mainly for satirical ends. But the Christians could not

thus escape from the obsession of sex; it was ever with them. We catch

interesting glimpses of their struggles, for the most part barren

struggles, in the Epistles of St. Jerome, who had himself been an athlete

in these ascetic contests.

"Oh, how many times," wrote St. Jerome to Eustochium, the virgin

to whom he addressed one of the longest and most interesting of

his letters, "when in the desert, in that vast solitude which,

burnt up by the heart of the sun, offers but a horrible dwelling

to monks, I imagined myself among the delights of Rome! I was

alone, for my soul was full of bitterness. My limbs were covered

by a wretched sack and my skin was as black as an Ethiopian's.

Every day I wept and groaned, and if I was unwillingly overcome

by sleep my lean body lay on the bare earth. I say nothing of my

food and drink, for in the desert even invalids have no drink but

cold water, and cooked food is regarded as a luxury. Well, I,

who, out of fear of hell, had condemned myself to this prison,

companion of scorpions and wild beasts, often seemed in

imagination among bands of girls. My face was pale with fasting

and my mind within my frigid body was burning with desire; the

fires of lust would still flare up in a body that already seemed

to be dead. Then, deprived of all help, I threw myself at the

feet of Jesus, washing them with my tears and drying them with my

hair, subjugating my rebellious flesh by long fasts. I remember

that more than once I passed the night uttering cries and

striking my breast until God sent me peace." "Our century," wrote

St. Chrysostom in his _Discourse to Those Who Keep Virgins in

Their Houses_, "has seen many men who have bound their bodies

with chains, clothed themselves in sacks, retired to the summits

of mountains where they have lived in constant vigil and fasting,

giving the example of the most austere discipline and forbidding

all women to cross the thresholds of their humble dwellings; and

yet, in spite of all the severities they have exercised on

themselves, it was with difficulty they could repress the fury of

their passions." Hilarion, says Jerome, saw visions of naked

women when he lay down on his solitary couch and delicious meats

when he sat down to his frugal table. Such experiences rendered

the early saints very scrupulous. "They used to say," we are told

in an interesting history of the Egyptian anchorites, Palladius's

_Paradise of the Holy Fathers_, belonging to the fourth century

(A.W. Budge, _The Paradise_, vol. ii, p. 129), "that Abbâ Isaac

went out and found the footprint of a woman on the road, and he

thought about it in his mind and destroyed it saying, 'If a

brother seeth it he may fall.'" Similarly, according to the rules

of St. Cæsarius of Aries for nuns, no male clothing was to be

taken into the convent for the purpose of washing or mending.

Even in old age, a certain anxiety about chastity still remained.

One of the brothers, we are told in _The Paradise_ (p. 132) said

to Abbâ Zeno, "Behold thou hast grown old, how is the matter of

fornication?" The venerable saint replied, "It knocketh, but it

passeth on."

As the centuries went by the same strenuous anxiety to guard

chastity still remained, and the old struggle constantly

reappeared (see, e.g., Migne's _Dictionnaire d'Ascétisme_, art.

"Démon, Tentation du"). Some saints, it is true, like Luigi di

Gonzaga, were so angelically natured that they never felt the

sting of sexual desire. These seem to have been the exception.

St. Benedict and St. Francis experienced the difficulty of

subduing the flesh. St. Magdalena de Pozzi, in order to dispel

sexual desires, would roll on thorny bushes till the blood came.

Some saints kept a special cask of cold water in their cells to

stand in (Lea, _Sacerdotal Celibacy_, vol. i, p. 124). On the

other hand, the Blessed Angela de Fulginio tells us in her

_Visiones_ (cap. XIX) that, until forbidden by her confessor, she

would place hot coals in her secret parts, hoping by material

fire to extinguish the fire of concupiscence. St. Aldhelm, the

holy Bishop of Sherborne, in the eighth century, also adopted a

homeopathic method of treatment, though of a more literal kind,

for William of Malmsbury states that when tempted by the flesh he

would have women to sit and lie by him until he grew calm again;

the method proved very successful, for the reason, it was

thought, that the Devil felt he had been made a fool of.

In time the Catholic practice and theory of asceticism became

more formalized and elaborated, and its beneficial effects were

held to extend beyond the individual himself. "Asceticism from

the Christian point of view," writes Brénier de Montmorand in an

interesting study ("Ascétisme et Mysticisme," _Revue

Philosophique_, March, 1904) "is nothing else than all the

therapeutic measures making for moral purification. The Christian

ascetic is an athlete struggling to transform his corrupt nature

and make a road to God through the obstacles due to his passions

and the world. He is not working in his own interests alone,

but--by virtue of the reversibility of merit which compensates

that of solidarity in error--for the good and for the salvation

of the whole of society."

This is the aspect of early Christian asceticism most often emphasized.

But there is another aspect which may be less familiar, but has been by no

means less important. Primitive Christian chastity was on one side a

strenuous discipline. On another side it was a romance, and this indeed

was its most specifically Christian side, for athletic asceticism has been

associated with the most various religious and philosophic beliefs. If,

indeed, it had not possessed the charm of a new sensation, of a delicious

freedom, of an unknown adventure, it would never have conquered the

European world. There are only a few in that world who have in them the

stuff of moral athletes; there are many who respond to the attraction of

romance.

The Christians rejected the grosser forms of sexual indulgence, but in

doing so they entered with a more delicate ardor into the more refined

forms of sexual intimacy. They cultivated a relationship of brothers and

sisters to each other, they kissed one another; at one time, in the

spiritual orgy of baptism, they were not ashamed to adopt complete

nakedness.[74]

A very instructive picture of the forms which chastity assumed among the

early Christians is given us in the treatise of Chrysostom _Against Those

who Keep Virgins in their Houses_. Our fathers, Chrysostom begins, only

knew two forms of sexual intimacy, marriage and fornication. Now a third

form has appeared: men introduce young girls into their houses and keep

them there permanently, respecting their virginity. "What," Chrysostom

asks, "is the reason? It seems to me that life in common with a woman is

sweet, even outside conjugal union and fleshly commerce. That is my

feeling; and perhaps it is not my feeling alone; it may also be that of

these men. They would not hold their honor so cheap nor give rise to such

scandals if this pleasure were not violent and tyrannical.... That there

should really be a pleasure in this which produces a love more ardent than

conjugal union may surprise you at first. But when I give you the proofs

you will agree that it is so." The absence of restraint to desire in

marriage, he continues, often leads to speedy disgust, and even apart from

this, sexual intercourse, pregnancy, delivery, lactation, the bringing up

of children, and all the pains and anxieties that accompany these things

soon destroy youth and dull the point of pleasure. The virgin is free from

these burdens. She retains her vigor and youthfulness, and even at the age

of forty may rival the young nubile girl. "A double ardor thus burns in

the heart of him who lives with her, and the gratification of desire never

extinguishes the bright flame which ever continues to increase in

strength." Chrysostom describes minutely all the little cares and

attentions which the modern girls of his time required, and which these

men delighted to expend on their virginal sweethearts whether in public or

in private. He cannot help thinking, however, that the man who lavishes

kisses and caresses on a woman whose virginity he retains is putting

himself somewhat in the position of Tantalus. But this new refinement of

tender chastity, which came as a delicious discovery to the early

Christians who had resolutely thrust away the licentiousness of the pagan

world, was deeply rooted, as we discover from the frequency with which the

grave Fathers of the Church, apprehensive of scandal, felt called upon to

reprove it, though their condemnation is sometimes not without a trace of

secret sympathy.[75]

There was one form in which the new Christian chastity flourished

exuberantly and unchecked: it conquered literature. The most charming,

and, we may be sure, the most popular literature of the early Church lay

in the innumerable romances of erotic chastity--to some extent, it may

well be, founded on fact--which are embodied to-day in the _Acta

Sanctorum_. We can see in even the most simple and non-miraculous early

Christian records of the martyrdom of women that the writers were fully

aware of the delicate charm of the heroine who, like Perpetua at Carthage,

tossed by wild cattle in the arena, rises to gather her torn garment

around her and to put up her disheveled hair.[76] It was an easy step to

the stories of romantic adventure. Among these delightful stories I may

refer especially to the legend of Thekla, which has been placed,

incorrectly it may be, as early as the first century, "The Bride and

Bridegroom of India" in _Judas Thomas's Acts_, "The Virgin of Antioch" as

narrated by St. Ambrose, the history of "Achilleus and Nereus," "Mygdonia

and Karish," and "Two Lovers of Auvergne" as told by Gregory of Tours.

Early Christian literature abounds in the stories of lovers who had indeed

preserved their chastity, and had yet discovered the most exquisite

secrets of love.

Thekla's day is the twenty-third of September. There is a very

good Syriac version (by Lipsius and others regarded as more

primitive than the Greek version) of the _Acts of Paul and

Thekla_ (see, e.g., Wright's _Apocryphal Acts_). These _Acts_

belong to the latter part of the second century. The story is

that Thekla, refusing to yield to the passion of the high priest

of Syria, was put, naked but for a girdle (_subligaculum_) into

the arena on the back of a lioness, which licked her feet and

fought for her against the other beasts, dying in her defense.

The other beasts, however, did her no harm, and she was finally

released. A queen loaded her with money, she modified her dress

to look like a man, travelled to meet Paul, and lived to old age.

Sir W.M. Ramsay has written an interesting study of these _Acts_

(_The Church in the Roman Empire_, Ch. XVI). He is of opinion

that the _Acts_ are based on a first century document, and is

able to disentangle many elements of truth from the story. He

states that it is the only evidence we possess of the ideas and

actions of women during the first century in Asia Minor, where

their position was so high and their influence so great. Thekla

represents the assertion of woman's rights, and she administered

the rite of baptism, though in the existing versions of the

_Acts_ these features are toned down or eliminated.

Some of the most typical of these early Christian romances are

described as Gnostical in origin, with something of the germs of

Manichæan dualism which were held in the rich and complex matrix

of Gnosticism, while the spirit of these romances is also largely

Montanist, with the combined chastity and ardor, the pronounced

feminine tone due to its origin in Asia Minor, which marked

Montanism. It cannot be denied, however, that they largely passed

into the main stream of Christian tradition, and form an

essential and important part of that tradition. (Renan, in his

_Marc-Aurèle_, Chs. IX and XV, insists on the immense debt of

Christianity to Gnostic and Montanist contributions). A

characteristic example is the story of "The Betrothed of India"

in _Judas Thomas's Acts_ (Wright's _Apocryphal Acts_). Judas

Thomas was sold by his master Jesus to an Indian merchant who

required a carpenter to go with him to India. On disembarking at

the city of Sandaruk they heard the sounds of music and singing,

and learnt that it was the wedding-feast of the King's daughter,

which all must attend, rich and poor, slaves and freemen,

strangers and citizens. Judas Thomas went, with his new master,

to the banquet and reclined with a garland of myrtle placed on

his head. When a Hebrew flute-player came and stood over him and

played, he sang the songs of Christ, and it was seen that he was

more beautiful than all that were there and the King sent for him

to bless the young couple in the bridal chamber. And when all

were gone out and the door of the bridal chamber closed, the

bridegroom approached the bride, and saw, as it were, Judas

Thomas still talking with her. But it was our Lord who said to

him, "I am not Judas, but his brother." And our Lord sat down on

the bed beside the young people and began to say to them:

"Remember, my children, what my brother spake with you, and know

to whom he committed you, and know that if ye preserve yourselves

from this filthy intercourse ye become pure temples, and are

saved from afflictions manifest and hidden, and from the heavy

care of children, the end whereof is bitter sorrow. For their

sakes ye will become oppressors and robbers, and ye will be

grievously tortured for their injuries. For children are the

cause of many pains; either the King falls upon them or a demon

lays hold of them, or paralysis befalls them. And if they be

healthy they come to ill, either by adultery, or theft, or

fornication, or covetousness, or vain-glory. But if ye will be

persuaded by me, and keep yourselves purely unto God, ye shall

have living children to whom not one of these blemishes and hurts

cometh nigh; and ye shall be without care and without grief and

without sorrow, and ye shall hope for the time when ye shall see

the true wedding-feast." The young couple were persuaded, and

refrained from lust, and our Lord vanished. And in the morning,

when it was dawn, the King had the table furnished early and

brought in before the bridegroom and bride. And he found them

sitting the one opposite the other, and the face of the bride was

uncovered and the bridegroom was very cheerful. The mother of the

bride saith to her: "Why art thou sitting thus, and art not

ashamed, but art as if, lo, thou wert married a long time, and

for many a day?" And her father, too, said; "Is it thy great love

for thy husband that prevents thee from even veiling thyself?"

And the bride answered and said: "Truly, my father, I am in great

love, and am praying to my Lord that I may continue in this love

which I have experienced this night. I am not veiled, because the

veil of corruption is taken from me, and I am not ashamed,

because the deed of shame has been removed far from me, and I am

cheerful and gay, and despise this deed of corruption and the

joys of this wedding-feast, because I am invited to the true

wedding-feast. I have not had intercourse with a husband, the end

whereof is bitter repentance, because I am betrothed to the true

Husband." The bridegroom answered also in the same spirit, very

naturally to the dismay of the King, who sent for the sorcerer

whom he had asked to bless his unlucky daughter. But Judas Thomas

had already left the city and at his inn the King's stewards

found only the flute-player, sitting and weeping because he had

not taken her with him. She was glad, however, when she heard

what had happened, and hastened to the young couple, and lived

with them ever afterwards. The King also was finally reconciled,

and all ended chastely, but happily.

In these same _Judas Thomas's Acts_, which are not later than the

fourth century, we find (eighth act) the story of Mygdonia and

Karish. Mygdonia, the wife of Karish, is converted by Thomas and

flees from her husband, naked save for the curtain of the chamber

door which she has wrapped around her, to her old nurse. With the

nurse she goes to Thomas, who pours holy oil over her head,

bidding the nurse to anoint her all over with it; then a cloth is

put round her loins and he baptizes her; then she is clothed and

he gives her the sacrament. The young rapture of chastity grows

lyrical at times, and Judas Thomas breaks out: "Purity is the

athlete who is not overcome. Purity is the truth that blencheth

not. Purity is worthy before God of being to Him a familiar

handmaiden. Purity is the messenger of concord which bringeth the

tidings of peace."

Another romance of chastity is furnished by the episode of

Drusiana in _The History of the Apostles_ traditionally

attributed to Abdias, Bishop of Babylon (Bk. v, Ch. IV, _et

seq._). Drusiana is the wife of Andronicus, and is so pious that

she will not have intercourse with him. The youth Callimachus

falls madly in love with her, and his amorous attempts involve

many exciting adventures, but the chastity of Drusiana is finally

triumphant.

A characteristic example of the literature we are here concerned

with is St. Ambrose's story of "The Virgin in the Brothel"

(narrated in his _De Virginibus_, Migne's edition of Ambrose's

Works, vols. iii-iv, p. 211). A certain virgin, St. Ambrose tells

us, who lately lived at Antioch, was condemned either to

sacrifice to the gods or to go to the brothel. She chose the

latter alternative. But the first man who came in to her was a

Christian soldier who called her "sister," and bade her have no

fear. He proposed that they should exchange clothes. This was

done and she escaped, while the soldier was led away to death. At

the place of execution, however, she ran up and exclaimed that it

was not death she feared but shame. He, however, maintained that

he had been condemned to death in her place. Finally the crown of

martyrdom for which they contended was adjudged to both.

We constantly observe in the early documents of this romantic

literature of chastity that chastity is insisted on by no means

chiefly because of its rewards after death, nor even because the

virgin who devotes herself to it secures in Christ an ever-young

lover whose golden-haired beauty is sometimes emphasized. Its

chief charm is represented as lying in its own joy and freedom

and the security it involves from all the troubles,

inconveniences and bondages of matrimony. This early Christian

movement of romantic chastity was clearly, in large measure, a

revolt of women against men and marriage. This is well brought

out in the instructive story, supposed to be of third century

origin, of the eunuchs Achilleus and Nereus, as narrated in the

_Acta Sanctorum_, May 12th. Achilleus and Nereus were Christian

eunuchs of the bedchamber to Domitia, a virgin of noble birth,

related to the Emperor Domitian and betrothed to Aurelian, son

of a Consul. One day, as their mistress was putting on her jewels

and her purple garments embroidered with gold, they began in turn

to talk to her about all the joys and advantages of virginity, as

compared to marriage with a mere man. The conversation is

developed at great length and with much eloquence. Domitia was

finally persuaded. She suffered much from Aurelian in

consequence, and when he obtained her banishment to an island she

went thither with Achilleus and Nereus, who were put to death.

Incidentally, the death of Felicula, another heroine of chastity,

is described. When elevated on the rack because she would not

marry, she constantly refused to deny Jesus, whom she called her

lover. "Ego non nego amatorem meum!"

A special department of this literature is concerned with stories

of the conversions or the penitence of courtesans. St.

Martinianus, for instance (Feb. 13), was tempted by the courtesan

Zoe, but converted her. The story of St. Margaret of Cortona

(Feb. 22), a penitent courtesan, is late, for she belongs to the

thirteenth century. The most delightful document in this

literature is probably the latest, the fourteenth century Italian

devotional romance called _The Life of Saint Mary Magdalen_,

commonly associated with the name of Frate Domenico Cavalca. (It

has been translated into English). It is the delicately and

deliciously told romance of the chaste and passionate love of the

sweet sinner, Mary Magdalene, for her beloved Master.

As time went on the insistence on the joys of chastity in this

life became less marked, and chastity is more and more regarded

as a state only to be fully rewarded in a future life. Even,

however, in Gregory of Tours's charming story of "The Two Lovers

of Auvergne," in which this attitude is clear, the pleasures of

chaste love in this life are brought out as clearly as in any of

the early romances (_Historia Francorum_, lib. i, cap. XLII). Two

senators of Auvergne each had an only child, and they betrothed

them to each other. When the wedding day came and the young

couple were placed in bed, the bride turned to the wall and wept

bitterly. The bridegroom implored her to tell him what was the

matter, and, turning towards him, she said that if she were to

weep all her days she could never wash away her grief for she had

resolved to give her little body immaculate to Christ, untouched

by men, and now instead of immortal roses she had only had on her

brow faded roses, which deformed rather than adorned it, and

instead of the dowry of Paradise which Christ had promised her

she had become the consort of a merely mortal man. She deplored

her sad fate at considerable length and with much gentle

eloquence. At length the bridegroom, overcome by her sweet words,

felt that eternal life had shone before him like a great light,

and declared that if she wished to abstain from carnal desires he

was of the same mind. She was grateful, and with clasped hands

they fell asleep. For many years they thus lived together,

chastely sharing the same bed. At length she died and was buried,

her lover restoring her immaculate to the hands of Christ. Soon

afterwards he died also, and was placed in a separate tomb. Then

a miracle happened which made manifest the magnitude of this

chaste love, for the two bodies were found mysteriously placed

together. To this day, Gregory concludes (writing in the sixth

century), the people of the place call them "The Two Lovers."

Although Renan (_Marc-Aurèle_, Ch. XV) briefly called attention

to the existence of this copious early Christian literature

setting forth the romance of chastity, it seems as yet to have

received little or no study. It is, however, of considerable

importance, not merely for its own sake, but on account of its

psychological significance in making clear the nature of the

motive forces which made chastity easy and charming to the people

of the early Christian world, even when it involved complete

abstinence from sexual intercourse. The early Church

anathematized the eroticism of the Pagan world, and exorcized it

in the most effectual way by setting up a new and more exquisite

eroticism of its own.

During the Middle Ages the primitive freshness of Christian chastity began

to lose its charm. No more romances of chastity were written, and in

actual life men no longer sought daring adventures in the field of

chastity. So far as the old ideals survived at all it was in the secular

field of chivalry. The last notable figure to emulate the achievements of

the early Christians was Robert of Arbrissel in Normandy.

Robert of Arbrissel, who founded, in the eleventh century, the

famous and distinguished Order of Fontevrault for women, was a

Breton. This Celtic origin is doubtless significant, for it may

explain his unfailing ardor and gaiety, and his enthusiastic

veneration for womanhood. Even those of his friends who

deprecated what they considered his scandalous conduct bear

testimony to his unfailing and cheerful temperament, his

alertness in action, his readiness for any deed of humanity, and

his entire freedom from severity. He attracted immense crowds of

people of all conditions, especially women, including

prostitutes, and his influence over women was great. Once he went

into a brothel to warm his feet, and, incidentally, converted all

the women there. "Who are you?" asked one of them, "I have been

here twenty-five years and nobody has ever come here to talk

about God." Robert's relation with his nuns at Fontevrault was

very intimate, and he would often sleep with them. This is set

forth precisely in letters written by friends of his, bishops and

abbots, one of whom remarks that Robert had "discovered a new

but fruitless form of martyrdom." A royal abbess of Fontevrault

in the seventeenth century, pretending that the venerated founder

of the order could not possibly have been guilty of such

scandalous conduct, and that the letters must therefore be

spurious, had the originals destroyed, so far as possible. The

Bollandists, in an unscholarly and incomplete account of the

matter (_Acta Sanctorum_, Feb. 25), adopted this view. J. von

Walter, however, in a recent and thorough study of Robert of

Arbrissel (_Die Ersten Wanderprediger Frankreichs_, Theil I),

shows that there is no reason whatever to doubt the authentic and

reliable character of the impugned letters.

The early Christian legends of chastity had, however, their successors.

_Aucassin et Nicolette_, which was probably written in Northern France

towards the end of the twelfth century, is above all the descendant of the

stories in the _Acta Sanctorum_ and elsewhere. It embodied their spirit

and carried it forward, uniting their delicate feeling for chastity and

purity with the ideal of monogamic love. _Aucassin et Nicolette_ was the

death-knell of the primitive Christian romance of chastity. It was the

discovery that the chaste refinements of delicacy and devotion were

possible within the strictly normal sphere of sexual love.

There were at least two causes which tended to extinguish the primitive

Christian attraction to chastity, even apart from the influence of the

Church authorities in repressing its romantic manifestations. In the first

place, the submergence of the old pagan world, with its practice and, to

some extent, ideal of sexual indulgence, removed the foil which had given

grace and delicacy to the tender freedom of the young Christians. In the

second place, the austerities which the early Christians had gladly

practised for the sake of their soul's health, were robbed of their charm

and spontaneity by being made a formal part of codes of punishment for

sin, first in the Penitentials and afterwards at the discretion of

confessors. This, it may be added, was rendered the more necessary because

the ideal of Christian chastity was no longer largely the possession of

refined people who had been rendered immune to Pagan license by being

brought up in its midst, and even themselves steeped in it. It was clearly

from the first a serious matter for the violent North Africans to maintain

the ideal of chastity, and when Christianity spread to Northern Europe it

seemed almost a hopeless task to acclimatize its ideals among the wild

Germans. Hereafter it became necessary for celibacy to be imposed on the

regular clergy by the stern force of ecclesiastical authority, while

voluntary celibacy was only kept alive by a succession of religious

enthusiasts perpetually founding new Orders. An asceticism thus enforced

could not always be accompanied by the ardent exaltation necessary to

maintain it, and in its artificial efforts at self-preservation it

frequently fell from its insecure heights to the depths of unrestrained

license.[77] This fatality of all hazardous efforts to overpass humanity's

normal limits begun to be realized after the Middle Ages were over by

clear-sighted thinkers. "Qui veut faire l'ange," said Pascal, pungently

summing up this view of the matter, "fait la bête." That had often been

illustrated in the history of the Church.

The Penitentials began to come into use in the seventh century,

and became of wide prevalence and authority during the ninth and

tenth centuries. They were bodies of law, partly spiritual and

partly secular, and were thrown into the form of catalogues of

offences with the exact measure of penance prescribed for each

offence. They represented the introduction of social order among

untamed barbarians, and were codes of criminal law much more than

part of a system of sacramental confession and penance. In France

and Spain, where order on a Christian basis already existed, they

were little needed. They had their origin in Ireland and England,

and especially flourished in Germany; Charlemagne supported them

(see, e.g., Lea, _History of Auricular Confession_, vol. ii, p.

96, also Ch. XVII; Hugh Williams, edition of Gildas, Part II,

Appendix 3; the chief Penitentials are reproduced in

Wasserschleben's _Bussordnungen_).

In 1216 the Lateran Council, under Innocent III, made confession

obligatory. The priestly prerogative of regulating the amount of

penance according to circumstances, with greater flexibility than

the rigid Penitentials admitted, was first absolutely asserted by

Peter of Poitiers. Then Alain de Lille threw aside the

Penitentials as obsolete, and declared that the priest himself

must inquire into the circumstances of each sin and weigh

precisely its guilt (Lea, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 171).

Long before this period, however, the ideals of chastity, so far

as they involved any considerable degree of continence, although

they had become firmly hardened into the conventional traditions

and ideals of the Christian Church, had ceased to have any great

charm or force for the people living in Christendom. Among the

Northern barbarians, with different traditions of a more vigorous

and natural order behind them, the demands of sex were often

frankly exhibited. The monk Ordericus Vitalis, in the eleventh

century, notes what he calls the "lasciviousness" of the wives of

the Norman conquerors of England who, when left alone at home,

sent messages that if their husbands failed to return speedily

they would take new ones. The celibacy of the clergy was only

established with the very greatest difficulty, and when it was

established, priests became unchaste. Archbishop Odo of Rouen, in

the thirteenth century, recorded in the diary of his diocesan

visitations that there was one unchaste priest in every five

parishes, and even as regards the Italy of the same period the

friar Salimbene in his remarkable autobiography shows how little

chastity was regarded in the religious life. Chastity could now

only be maintained by force, usually the moral force of

ecclesiastical authority, which was itself undermined by

unchastity, but sometimes even physical force. It was in the

thirteenth century, in the opinion of some, that the girdle of

chastity (_cingula castitatis_) first begins to appear, but the

chief authority, Caufeynon (_La Ceinture de Chasteté_, 1904)

believes it only dates from the Renaissance (Schultz, _Das

Höfische Leben zur Zeit der Minnesänger_, vol. i, p. 595; Dufour,

_Histoire de la Prostitution_, vol. v, p. 272; Krauss,

_Anthropophyteia_, vol. iii, p. 247). In the sixteenth century

convents were liable to become almost brothels, as we learn on

the unimpeachable authority of Burchard, a Pope's secretary, in

his _Diarium_, edited by Thuasne who brings together additional

authorities for this statement in a footnote (vol. ii, p. 79);

that they remained so in the eighteenth century we see clearly in

the pages of Casanova's _Mémoires_, and in many other documents

of the period.

The Renaissance and the rise of humanism undoubtedly affected the feeling

towards asceticism and chastity. On the one hand a new and ancient

sanction was found for the disregard of virtues which men began to look

upon as merely monkish, and on the other hand the finer spirits affected

by the new movement began to realize that chastity might be better

cultivated and observed by those who were free to do as they would than by

those who were under the compulsion of priestly authority. That is the

feeling that prevails in Montaigne, and that is the idea of Rabelais when

he made it the only rule of his Abbey of Thelème: "Fay ce que vouldras."

A little later this doctrine was repeated in varying tones by

many writers more or less tinged by the culture brought into

fashion by the Renaissance. "As long as Danae was free," remarks

Ferrand in his sixteenth century treatise, _De la Maladie

d'Amour_, "she was chaste." And Sir Kenelm Digby, the latest

representative of the Renaissance spirit, insists in his _Private

Memoirs_ that the liberty which Lycurgus, "the wisest human

law-maker that ever was," gave to women to communicate their

bodies to men to whom they were drawn by noble affection, and the

hope of generous offspring, was the true cause why "real chastity

flourished in Sparta more than in any other part of the world."

In Protestant countries the ascetic ideal of chastity was still further

discredited by the Reformation movement which was in considerable part a

revolt against compulsory celibacy. Religion was thus no longer placed on

the side of chastity. In the eighteenth century, if not earlier, the

authority of Nature also was commonly invoked against chastity. It has

thus happened that during the past two centuries serious opinion

concerning chastity has only been partially favorable to it. It began to

be felt that an unhappy and injurious mistake had been perpetrated by

attempting to maintain a lofty ideal which encouraged hypocrisy. "The

human race would gain much," as Sénancour wrote early in the nineteenth

century in his remarkable book on love, "if virtue were made less

laborious. The merit would not be so great, but what is the use of an

elevation which can rarely be sustained?"[78]

There can be no doubt that the undue discredit into which the idea of

chastity began to fall from the eighteenth century onwards was largely

due to the existence of that merely external and conventional physical

chastity which was arbitrarily enforced so far as it could be

enforced,--and is indeed in some degree still enforced, nominally or

really,--upon all respectable women outside marriage. The conception of

the physical virtue of virginity had degraded the conception of the

spiritual virtue of chastity. A mere routine, it was felt, prescribed to a

whole sex, whether they would or not, could never possess the beauty and

charm of a virtue. At the same time it began to be realized that, as a

matter of fact, the state of compulsory virginity is not only not a state

especially favorable to the cultivation of real virtues, but that it is

bound up with qualities which are no longer regarded as of high value.[79]

"How arbitrary, artificial, contrary to Nature, is the life now

imposed upon women in this matter of chastity!" wrote James

Hinton forty years ago. "Think of that line: 'A woman who

deliberates is lost.' We _make_ danger, making all womanhood hang

upon a point like this, and surrounding it with unnatural and

preternatural dangers. There is a wanton unreason embodied in the

life of woman now; the present 'virtue' is a morbid unhealthy

plant. Nature and God never poised the life of a woman upon such

a needle's point. The whole modern idea of chastity has in it

sensual exaggeration, surely, in part, remaining to us from other

times, with what was good in it in great part gone."

"The whole grace of virginity," wrote another philosopher,

Guyau, "is ignorance. Virginity, like certain fruits, can only

be preserved by a process of desiccation."

Mérimée pointed out the same desiccating influence of virginity.

In a letter dated 1859 he wrote: "I think that nowadays people

attach far too much importance to chastity. Not that I deny that

chastity is a virtue, but there are degrees in virtues just as

there are in vices. It seems to be absurd that a woman should be

banished from society for having had a lover, while a woman who

is miserly, double-faced and spiteful goes everywhere. The

morality of this age is assuredly not that which is taught in the

Gospel. In my opinion it is better to love too much than not

enough. Nowadays dry hearts are stuck up on a pinnacle" (_Revue

des Deux Mondes_, April, 1896).

Dr. H. Paul has developed an allied point. She writes: "There are

girls who, even as children, have prostituted themselves by

masturbation and lascivious thoughts. The purity of their souls

has long been lost and nothing remains unknown to them, but--they

have preserved their hymens! That is for the sake of the future

husband. Let no one dare to doubt their innocence with that

unimpeachable evidence! And if another girl, who has passed her

childhood in complete purity, now, with awakened senses and warm

impetuous womanliness, gives herself to a man in love or even

only in passion, they all stand up and scream that she is

'dishonored!' And, not least, the prostituted girl with the

hymen. It is she indeed who screams loudest and throws the

biggest stones. Yet the 'dishonored' woman, who is sound and

wholesome, need not fear to tell what she has done to the man who

desires her in marriage, speaking as one human being to another.

She has no need to blush, she has exercised her human rights, and

no reasonable man will on that account esteem her the less" (Dr.

H. Paul, "Die Ueberschätzung der Jungfernschaft," _Geschlecht und

Gesellschaft_, Bd. ii, p. 14, 1907).

In a similar spirit writes F. Erhard (_Geschlecht und

Gesellschaft_, Bd. i, p. 408): "Virginity in one sense has its

worth, but in the ordinary sense it is greatly overestimated.

Apart from the fact that a girl who possesses it may yet be

thoroughly perverted, this over-estimation of virginity leads to

the girl who is without it being despised, and has further

resulted in the development of a special industry for the

preparation, by means of a prudishly cloistral education, of

girls who will bring to their husbands the peculiar dainty of a

bride who knows nothing about anything. Naturally, this can only

be achieved at the expense of any rational education. What the

undeveloped little goose may turn into, no man can foresee."

Freud (_Sexual-Probleme_, March, 1908) also points out the evil

results of the education for marriage which is given to girls on

the basis of this ideal of virginity. "Education undertakes the

task of repressing the girl's sensuality until the time of

betrothal. It not only forbids sexual relations and sets a high

premium on innocence, but it also withdraws the ripening womanly

individuality from temptation, maintaining a state of ignorance

concerning the practical side of the part she is intended to play

in life, and enduring no stirring of love which cannot lead to

marriage. The result is that when she is suddenly permitted to

fall in love by the authority of her elders, the girl cannot

bring her psychic disposition to bear, and goes into marriage

uncertain of her own feelings. As a consequence of this

artificial retardation of the function of love she brings nothing

but deception to the husband who has set all his desires upon

her, and manifests frigidity in her physical relations with him."

Sénancour (_De l'Amour_, vol. i, p. 285) even believes that, when

it is possible to leave out of consideration the question of

offspring, not only will the law of chastity become equal for the

two sexes, but there will be a tendency for the situation of the

sexes to be, to some extent, changed. "Continence becomes a

counsel rather than a precept, and it is in women that the

voluptuous inclination will be regarded with most indulgence. Man

is made for work; he only meets pleasure in passing; he must be

content that women should occupy themselves with it more than he.

It is men whom it exhausts, and men must always, in part,

restrain their desires."

As, however, we liberate ourselves from the bondage of a compulsory

physical chastity, it becomes possible to rehabilitate chastity as a

virtue. At the present day it can no longer be said that there is on the

part of thinkers and moralists any active hostility to the idea of

chastity; there is, on the contrary, a tendency to recognize the value of

chastity. But this recognition has been accompanied by a return to the

older and sounder conception of chastity. The preservation of a rigid

sexual abstinence, an empty virginity, can only be regarded as a

pseudo-chastity. The only positive virtue which Aristotle could have

recognized in this field was a temperance involving restraint of the lower

impulses, a wise exercise and not a non-exercise.[80] The best thinkers of

the Christian Church adopted the same conception; St. Basil in his

important monastic rules laid no weight on self-discipline as an end in

itself, but regarded it as an instrument for enabling the spirit to gain

power over the flesh. St. Augustine declared that continence is only

excellent when practised in the faith of the highest good,[81] and he

regarded chastity as "an orderly movement of the soul subordinating lower

things to higher things, and specially to be manifested in conjugal

relationships"; Thomas Aquinas, defining chastity in much the same way,

defined impurity as the enjoyment of sexual pleasure not according to

right reason, whether as regards the object or the conditions.[82] But for

a time the voices of the great moralists were unheard. The virtue of

chastity was swamped in the popular Christian passion for the annihilation

of the flesh, and that view was, in the sixteenth century, finally

consecrated by the Council of Trent, which formally pronounced an anathema

upon anyone who should declare that the state of virginity and celibacy

was not better than the state of matrimony. Nowadays the pseudo-chastity

that was of value on the simple ground that any kind of continence is of

higher spiritual worth than any kind of sexual relationship belongs to the

past, except for those who adhere to ancient ascetic creeds. The mystic

value of virginity has gone; it seems only to arouse in the modern man's

mind the idea of a piquancy craved by the hardened rake;[83] it is men who

have themselves long passed the age of innocence who attach so much

importance to the innocence of their brides. The conception of life-long

continence as an ideal has also gone; at the best it is regarded as a mere

matter of personal preference. And the conventional simulation of

universal chastity, at the bidding of respectability, is coming to be

regarded as a hindrance rather than a help to the cultivation of any real

chastity.[84]

The chastity that is regarded by the moralist of to-day as a virtue has

its worth by no means in its abstinence. It is not, in St. Theresa's

words, the virtue of the tortoise which withdraws its limbs under its

carapace. It is a virtue because it is a discipline in self-control,

because it helps to fortify the character and will, and because it is

directly favorable to the cultivation of the most beautiful, exalted, and

effective sexual life. So viewed, chastity may be opposed to the demands

of debased mediæval Catholicism, but it is in harmony with the demands of

our civilized life to-day, and by no means at variance with the

requirements of Nature.

There is always an analogy between the instinct of reproduction and the

instinct of nutrition. In the matter of eating it is the influence of

science, of physiology, which has finally put aside an exaggerated

asceticism, and made eating "pure." The same process, as James Hinton well

pointed out, has been made possible in the sexual relationships; "science

has in its hands the key to purity."[85]

Many influences have, however, worked together to favor an insistence on

chastity. There has, in the first place, been an inevitable reaction

against the sexual facility which had come to be regarded as natural. Such

facility was found to have no moral value, for it tended to relaxation of

moral fibre and was unfavorable to the finest sexual satisfaction. It

could not even claim to be natural in any broad sense of the word, for, in

Nature generally, sexual gratification tends to be rare and difficult.[86]

Courtship is arduous and long, the season of love is strictly delimited,

pregnancy interrupts sexual relationships. Even among savages, so long as

they have been untainted by civilization, virility is usually maintained

by a fine asceticism; the endurance of hardship, self-control and

restraint, tempered by rare orgies, constitute a discipline which covers

the sexual as well as every other department of savage life. To preserve

the same virility in civilized life, it may well be felt, we must

deliberately cultivate a virtue which under savage conditions of life is

natural.[87]

The influence of Nietzsche, direct and indirect, has been on the side of

the virtue of chastity in its modern sense. The command: "Be hard," as

Nietzsche used it, was not so much an injunction to an unfeeling

indifference towards others as an appeal for a more strenuous attitude

towards one's self, the cultivation of a self-control able to gather up

and hold in the forces of the soul for expenditure on deliberately

accepted ends. "A relative chastity," he wrote, "a fundamental and wise

foresight in the face of erotic things, even in thought, is part of a fine

reasonableness in life, even in richly endowed and complete natures."[88]

In this matter Nietzsche is a typical representative of the modern

movement for the restoration of chastity to its proper place as a real and

beneficial virtue, and not a mere empty convention. Such a movement could

not fail to make itself felt, for all that favors facility and luxurious

softness in sexual matters is quickly felt to degrade character as well as

to diminish the finest erotic satisfaction. For erotic satisfaction, in

its highest planes, is only possible when we have secured for the sexual

impulse a high degree of what Colin Scott calls "irradiation," that is to

say a wide diffusion through the whole of the psychic organism. And that

can only be attained by placing impediments in the way of the swift and

direct gratification of sexual desire, by compelling it to increase its

force, to take long circuits, to charge the whole organism so highly that

the final climax of gratified love is not the trivial detumescence of a

petty desire but the immense consummation of a longing in which the whole

soul as well as the whole body has its part. "Only the chaste can be

really obscene," said Huysmans. And on a higher plane, only the chaste can

really love.

"Physical purity," remarks Hans Menjago ("Die Ueberschätzung der

Physischen Reinheit," _Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, vol. ii,

Part VIII) "was originally valued as a sign of greater strength

of will and firmness of character, and it marked a rise above

primitive conditions. This purity was difficult to preserve in

those unsure days; it was rare and unusual. From this rarity rose

the superstition of supernatural power residing in the virgin.

But this has no meaning as soon as such purity becomes general

and a specially conspicuous degree of firmness of character is no

longer needed to maintain it.... Physical purity can only possess

value when it is the result of individual strength of character,

and not when it is the result of compulsory rules of morality."

Konrad Höller, who has given special attention to the sexual

question in schools, remarks in relation to physical exercise:

"The greatest advantage of physical exercises, however, is not

the development of the active and passive strength of the body

and its skill, but the establishment and fortification of the

authority of the will over the body and its needs, so much given

up to indolence. He who has learnt to endure and overcome, for

the sake of a definite aim, hunger and thirst and fatigue, will

be the better able to withstand sexual impulses and the

temptation to gratify them, when better insight and æsthetic

feeling have made clear to him, as one used to maintain authority

over his body, that to yield would be injurious or disgraceful"

(K. Höller, "Die Aufgabe der Volksschule," _Sexualpädagogik_, p.

70). Professor Schäfenacker (id., p. 102), who also emphasizes

the importance of self-control and self-restraint, thinks a youth

must bear in mind his future mission, as citizen and father of a

family.

A subtle and penetrative thinker of to-day, Jules de Gaultier,

writing on morals without reference to this specific question,

has discussed what new internal inhibitory motives we can appeal

to in replacing the old external inhibition of authority and

belief which is now decayed. He answers that the state of feeling

on which old faiths were based still persists. "May not," he

asks, "the desire for a thing that we love and wish for

beneficently replace the belief that a thing is by divine will,

or in the nature of things? Will not the presence of a bridle on

the frenzy of instinct reveal itself as a useful attitude adopted

by instinct itself for its own conservation, as a symptom of the

force and health of instinct? Is not empire over oneself, the

power of regulating one's acts, a mark of superiority and a

motive for self-esteem? Will not this joy of pride have the same

authority in preserving the instincts as was once possessed by

religious fear and the pretended imperatives of reason?" (Jules

de Gaultier, _La Dépendance de la Morale et l'Indépendance des

Moeurs_, p. 153.)

H.G. Wells (in _A Modern Utopia_), pointing out the importance of

chastity, though rejecting celibacy, invokes, like Jules de

Gaultier, the motive of pride. "Civilization has developed far

more rapidly than man has modified. Under the unnatural

perfection of security, liberty, and abundance our civilization

has attained, the normal untrained human being is disposed to

excess in almost every direction; he tends to eat too much and

too elaborately, to drink too much, to become lazy faster than

his work can be reduced, to waste his interest upon displays, and

to make love too much and too elaborately. He gets out of

training, and concentrates upon egoistic or erotic broodings. Our

founders organized motives from all sorts of sources, but I think

the chief force to give men self-control is pride. Pride may not

be the noblest thing in the soul, but it is the best king there,

for all that. They looked to it to keep a man clean and sound and

sane. In this matter, as in all matters of natural desire, they

held no appetite must be glutted, no appetite must have

artificial whets, and also and equally that no appetite should be

starved. A man must come from the table satisfied, but not

replete. And, in the matter of love, a straight and clean desire

for a clean and straight fellow-creature was our founders' ideal.

They enjoined marriage between equals as the duty to the race,

and they framed directions of the precisest sort to prevent that

uxorious inseparableness, that connubiality, that sometimes

reduces a couple of people to something jointly less than

either."

With regard to chastity as an element of erotic satisfaction,

Edward Carpenter writes (_Love's Coming of Age_, p. 11): "There

is a kind of illusion about physical desire similar to that which

a child suffers from when, seeing a beautiful flower, it

instantly snatches the same, and destroys in a few moments the

form and fragrance which attracted it. He only gets the full

glory who holds himself back a little, and truly possesses, who

is willing, if need be, not to possess. He is indeed a master of

life who, accepting the grosser desires as they come to his body,

and not refusing them, knows how to transform them at will into

the most rare and fragrant flowers of human emotion."

Beyond its functions in building up character, in heightening and

ennobling the erotic life, and in subserving the adequate fulfilment of

family and social duties, chastity has a more special value for those who

cultivate the arts. We may not always be inclined to believe the writers

who have declared that their verse alone is wanton, but their lives

chaste. It is certainly true, however, that a relationship of this kind

tends to occur. The stuff of the sexual life, as Nietzsche says, is the

stuff of art; if it is expended in one channel it is lost for the other.

The masters of all the more intensely emotional arts have frequently

cultivated a high degree of chastity. This is notably the case as regards

music; one thinks of Mozart,[89] of Beethoven, of Schubert, and many

lesser men. In the case of poets and novelists chastity may usually seem

to be less prevalent but it is frequently well-marked, and is not seldom

disguised by the resounding reverberations which even the slightest

love-episode often exerts on the poetic organism. Goethe's life seems, at

a first glance, to be a long series of continuous love-episodes. Yet when

we remember that it was the very long life of a man whose vigor remained

until the end, that his attachments long and profoundly affected his

emotional life and his work, and that with most of the women he has

immortalized he never had actual sexual relationships at all, and when we

realize, moreover, that, throughout, he accomplished an almost

inconceivably vast amount of work, we shall probably conclude that sexual

indulgence had a very much smaller part in Goethe's life than in that of

many an average man on whom it leaves no obvious emotional or intellectual

trace whatever. Sterne, again, declared that he must always have a

Dulcinea dancing in his head, yet the amount of his intimate relations

with women appears to have been small. Balzac spent his life toiling at

his desk and carrying on during many years a love correspondence with a

woman he scarcely ever saw and at the end only spent a few months of

married life with. The like experience has befallen many artistic

creators. For, in the words of Landor, "absence is the invisible and

incorporeal mother of ideal beauty."

We do well to remember that, while the auto-erotic manifestations through

the brain are of infinite variety and importance, the brain and the

sexual organs are yet the great rivals in using up bodily energy, and that

there is an antagonism between extreme brain vigor and extreme sexual

vigor, even although they may sometimes both appear at different periods

in the same individual.[90] In this sense there is no paradox in the

saying of Ramon Correa that potency is impotence and impotence potency,

for a high degree of energy, whether in athletics or in intellect or in

sexual activity, is unfavorable to the display of energy in other

directions. Every high degree of potency has its related impotencies.

It may be added that we may find a curiously inconsistent proof

of the excessive importance attached to sexual function by a

society which systematically tries to depreciate sex, in the

disgrace which is attributed to the lack of "virile" potency.

Although civilized life offers immense scope for the activities

of sexually impotent persons, the impotent man is made to feel

that, while he need not be greatly concerned if he suffers from

nervous disturbances of digestion, if he should suffer just as

innocently from nervous disturbances of the sexual impulse, it is

almost a crime. A striking example of this was shown, a few years

ago, when it was plausibly suggested that Carlyle's relations

with his wife might best be explained by supposing that he

suffered from some trouble of sexual potency. At once admirers

rushed forward to "defend" Carlyle from this "disgraceful"

charge; they were more shocked than if it had been alleged that

he was a syphilitic. Yet impotence is, at the most, an infirmity,

whether due to some congenital anatomical defect or to a

disturbance of nervous balance in the delicate sexual mechanism,

such as is apt to occur in men of abnormally sensitive

temperament. It is no more disgraceful to suffer from it than

from dyspepsia, with which, indeed, it may be associated. Many

men of genius and high moral character have been sexually

deformed. This was the case with Cowper (though this significant

fact is suppressed by his biographers); Ruskin was divorced for a

reason of this kind; and J.S. Mill, it is said, was sexually of

little more than infantile development.

Up to this point I have been considering the quality of chastity and the

quality of asceticism in their most general sense and without any attempt

at precise differentiation.[91] But if we are to accept these as modern

virtues, valid to-day, it is necessary that we should be somewhat more

precise in defining them. It seems most convenient, and most strictly

accordant also with etymology, if we agree to mean by asceticism or

_ascesis_, the athlete quality of self-discipline, controlling, by no

means necessarily for indefinitely prolonged periods, the gratification of

the sexual impulse. By chastity, which is primarily the quality of purity,

and secondarily that of holiness, rather than of abstinence, we may best

understand a due proportion between erotic claims and the other claims of

life. "Chastity," as Ellen Key well says, "is harmony between body and

soul in relation to love." Thus comprehended, asceticism is the virtue of

control that leads up to erotic gratification, and chastity is the virtue

which exerts its harmonizing influence in the erotic life itself.

It will be seen that asceticism by no means necessarily involves perpetual

continence. Properly understood, asceticism is a discipline, a training,

which has reference to an end not itself. If it is compulsorily perpetual,

whether at the dictates of a religious dogma, or as a mere fetish, it is

no longer on a natural basis, and it is no longer moral, for the restraint

of a man who has spent his whole life in a prison is of no value for life.

If it is to be natural and to be moral asceticism must have an end outside

itself, it must subserve the ends of vital activity, which cannot be

subserved by a person who is engaged in a perpetual struggle with his own

natural instincts. A man may, indeed, as a matter of taste or preference,

live his whole life in sexual abstinence, freely and easily, but in that

case he is not an ascetic, and his abstinence is neither a subject for

applause nor for criticism.

In the same way chastity, far from involving sexual abstinence, only has

its value when it is brought within the erotic sphere. A purity that is

ignorance, when the age of childish innocence is once passed, is mere

stupidity; it is nearer to vice than to virtue. Nor is purity consonant

with effort and struggle; in that respect it differs from asceticism. "We

conquer the bondage of sex," Rosa Mayreder says, "by acceptance, not by

denials, and men can only do this with the help of women." The would-be

chastity of cold calculation is equally unbeautiful and unreal, and

without any sort of value. A true and worthy chastity can only be

supported by an ardent ideal, whether, as among the early Christians, this

is the erotic ideal of a new romance, or, as among ourselves, a more

humanly erotic ideal. "Only erotic idealism," says Ellen Key, "can arouse

enthusiasm for chastity." Chastity in a healthily developed person can

thus be beautifully exercised only in the actual erotic life; in part it

is the natural instinct of dignity and temperance; in part it is the art

of touching the things of sex with hands that remember their aptness for

all the fine ends of life. Upon the doorway of entrance to the inmost

sanctuary of love there is thus the same inscription as on the doorway to

the Epidaurian Sanctuary of Aesculapius: "None but the pure shall enter

here."

It will be seen that the definition of chastity remains somewhat

lacking in precision. That is inevitable. We cannot grasp purity

tightly, for, like snow, it will merely melt in our hands.

"Purity itself forbids too minute a system of rules for the

observance of purity," well says Sidgwick (_Methods of Ethics_,

Bk. iii, Ch. IX). Elsewhere (op. cit., Bk. iii, Ch. XI) he

attempts to answer the question: What sexual relations are

essentially impure? and concludes that no answer is possible.

"There appears to be no distinct principle, having any claim to

self-evidence, upon which the question can be answered so as to

command general assent." Even what is called "Free Love," he

adds, "in so far as it is earnestly advocated as a means to a

completer harmony of sentiment between men and women, cannot be

condemned as impure, for it seems paradoxical to distinguish

purity from impurity merely by less rapidity of transition."

Moll, from the standpoint of medical psychology, reaches the same

conclusion as Sidgwick from that of ethics. In a report on the

"Value of Chastity for Men," published as an appendix to the

third edition (1899) of his _Konträre Sexualempfindung_, the

distinguished Berlin physician discusses the matter with much

vigorous common sense, insisting that "chaste and unchaste are

_relative ideas_." We must not, he states, as is so often done,

identify "chaste" with "sexually abstinent." He adds that we are

not justified in describing all extra-marital sexual intercourse

as unchaste, for, if we do so, we shall be compelled to regard

nearly all men, and some very estimable women, as unchaste. He

rightly insists that in this matter we must apply the same rule

to women as to men, and he points out that even when it involves

what may be technically adultery sexual intercourse is not

necessarily unchaste. He takes the case of a girl who, at

eighteen, when still mentally immature, is married to a man with

whom she finds it impossible to live and a separation

consequently occurs, although a divorce may be impossible to

obtain. If she now falls passionately in love with a man her love

may be entirely chaste, though it involves what is technically

adultery.

In thus understanding asceticism and chastity, and their beneficial

functions in life, we see that they occupy a place midway between the

artificially exaggerated position they once held and that to which they

were degraded by the inevitable reaction of total indifference or actual

hostility which followed. Asceticism and chastity are not rigid

categorical imperatives; they are useful means to desirable ends; they are

wise and beautiful arts. They demand our estimation, but not our

over-estimation. For in over-estimating them, it is too often forgotten,

we over-estimate the sexual instinct. The instinct of sex is indeed

extremely important. Yet it has not that all-embracing and supereminent

importance which some, even of those who fight against it, are accustomed

to believe. That artificially magnified conception of the sexual impulse

is fortified by the artificial emphasis placed upon asceticism. We may

learn the real place of the sexual impulse in learning how we may

reasonably and naturally view the restraints on that impulse.

FOOTNOTES:

[69] For Blake and for Shelley, as well as, it may be added, for Hinton,

chastity, as Todhunter remarks in his _Study of Shelley_, is "a type of

submission to the actual, a renunciation of the infinite, and is therefore

hated by them. The chaste man, i.e., the man of prudence and self-control,

is the man who has lost the nakedness of his primitive innocence."

[70] For evidence of the practices of savages in this matter, see Appendix

_A_ to the third volume of these _Studies_, "The Sexual Instinct in

Savages." Cf. also Chs. IV and VII of Westermarck's _History of Human

Marriage_, and also Chs. XXXVIII and XLI of the same author's _Origin and

Development of the Moral Ideas_, vol. ii; Frazer's _Golden Bough_ contains

much bearing on this subject, as also Crawley's _Mystic Rose_.

[71] See, e.g., Westermarck, _Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_,

vol. ii, pp. 412 et seq.

[72] Thus an old Maori declared, a few years ago, that the decline of his

race has been entirely due to the loss of the ancient religious faith in

the _tabu_. "For," said he (I quote from an Auckland newspaper), "in the

olden-time our _tapu_ ramified the whole social system. The head, the

hair, spots where apparitions appeared, places which the _tohungas_

proclaimed as sacred, we have forgotten and disregarded. Who nowadays

thinks of the sacredness of the head? See when the kettle boils, the young

man jumps up, whips the cap off his head, and uses it for a kettle-holder.

Who nowadays but looks on with indifference when the barber of the

village, if he be near the fire, shakes the loose hair off his cloth into

it, and the joke and the laughter goes on as if no sacred operation had

just been concluded. Food is consumed on places which, in bygone days, it

dared not even be carried over."

[73] Thus, long before Christian monks arose, the ascetic life of the

cloister on very similar lines existed in Egypt in the worship of Serapis

(Dill, _Roman Society_, p. 79).

[74] At night, in the baptistry, with lamps dimly burning, the women were

stripped even of their tunics, plunged three times in the pool, then

anointed, dressed in white, and kissed.

[75] Thus Jerome, in his letter to Eustochium, refers to those couples who

"share the same room, often even the same bed, and call us suspicious if

we draw any conclusions," while Cyprian (_Epistola_, 86) is unable to

approve of those men he hears of, one a deacon, who live in familiar

intercourse with virgins, even sleeping in the same bed with them, for, he

declares, the feminine sex is weak and youth is wanton.

[76] Perpetua (_Acta Sanctorum_, March 7) is termed by Hort and Mayor

"that fairest flower in the garden of post-Apostolic Christendom." She was

not, however, a virgin, but a young mother with a baby at her breast.

[77] The strength of early Christian asceticism lay in its spontaneous and

voluntary character. When, in the ninth century, the Carlovingians

attempted to enforce monastic and clerical celibacy, the result was a

great outburst of unchastity and crime; nunneries became brothels, nuns

were frequently guilty of infanticide, monks committed unspeakable

abominations, the regular clergy formed incestuous relations with their

nearest female relatives (Lea, _History of Sacerdotal Celibacy_, vol. i,

pp, 155 et seq.).

[78] Sénancour, _De l'Amour_, vol. ii, p. 233. Islam has placed much less

stress on chastity than Christianity, but practically, it would appear,

there is often more regard for chastity under Mohammedan rule than under

Christian rule. Thus it is stated by "Viator" (_Fortnightly Review_, Dec.,

1908) that formerly, under Turkish Moslem rule, it was impossible to buy

the virtue of women in Bosnia, but that now, under the Christian rule of

Austria, it is everywhere possible to buy women near the Austrian

frontier.

[79] The basis of this feeling was strengthened when it was shown by

scholars that the physical virtue of "virginity" had been masquerading

under a false name. To remain a virgin seems to have meant at the first,

among peoples of early Aryan culture, by no means to take a vow of

chastity, but to refuse to submit to the yoke of patriarchal marriage. The

women who preferred to stand outside marriage were "virgins," even though

mothers of large families, and Æschylus speaks of the Amazons as

"virgins," while in Greek the child of an unmarried girl was always "the

virgin's son." The history of Artemis, the most primitive of Greek

deities, is instructive from this point of view. She was originally only

virginal in the sense that she rejected marriage, being the goddess of a

nomadic and matriarchal hunting people who had not yet adopted marriage,

and she was the goddess of childbirth, worshipped with orgiastic dances

and phallic emblems. It was by a late transformation that Artemis became

the goddess of chastity (Farnell, _Cults of the Greek States_, vol. ii,

pp. 442 et seq.; Sir W.M. Ramsay, _Cities of Phrygia_, vol. i, p. 96; Paul

Lafargue, "Les Mythes Historiques," _Revue des Idées_, Dec., 1904).

[80] See, e.g., Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. iii, Ch. XIII.

[81] _De Civitate Dei_, lib. xv, cap. XX. A little further on (lib. xvi,

cap. XXV) he refers to Abraham as a man able to use women as a man should,

his wife temperately, his concubine compliantly, neither immoderately.

[82] _Summa_, Migne's edition, vol. iii, qu. 154, art. I.

[83] See the Study of Modesty in the first volume of these _Studies_.

[84] The majority of chaste youths, remarks an acute critic of modern life

(Hellpach, _Nervosität und Kultur_, p. 175), are merely actuated by

traditional principles, or by shyness, fear of venereal infections, lack

of self-confidence, want of money, very seldom by any consideration for a

future wife, and that indeed would be a tragi-comic error, for a woman

lays no importance on intact masculinity. Moreover, he adds, the chaste

man is unable to choose a wife wisely, and it is among teachers and

clergymen--the chastest class--that most unhappy marriages are made.

Milton had already made this fact an argument for facility of divorce.

[85] "In eating," said Hinton, "we have achieved the task of combining

pleasure with an absence of 'lust.' The problem for man and woman is so to

use and possess the sexual passion as to make it the minister to higher

things, with no restraint on it but that. It is essentially connected with

things of the spiritual order, and would naturally revolve round them. To

think of it as merely bodily is a mistake."

[86] See "Analysis of the Sexual Impulse," and Appendix, "The Sexual

Instinct in Savages," in vol. iii of these _Studies_.

[87] I have elsewhere discussed more at length the need in modern

civilized life of a natural and sincere asceticism (see _Affirmations_,

1898) "St. Francis and Others."

[88] _Der Wille zur Macht_, p. 392.

[89] At the age of twenty-five, when he had already produced much fine

work, Mozart wrote in his letters that he had never touched a woman,

though he longed for love and marriage. He could not afford to marry, he

would not seduce an innocent girl, a venial relation was repulsive to him.

[90] Reibmayr, _Die Entwicklungsgeschichte des Talentes und Genies._, Bd.

i, p. 437.

[91] We may exclude altogether, it is scarcely necessary to repeat, the

quality of virginity--that is to say, the possession of an intact

hymen--since this is a merely physical quality with no necessary ethical

relationships. The demand for virginity in women is, for the most part,

either the demand for a better marketable article, or for a more powerful

stimulant to masculine desire. Virginity involves no moral qualities in

its possessor. Chastity and asceticism, on the other hand, are meaningless

terms, except as demands made by the spirit on itself or on the body it

controls.

CHAPTER VI.

THE PROBLEM OF SEXUAL ABSTINENCE.

The Influence of Tradition--The Theological Conception of Lust--Tendency

of These Influences to Degrade Sexual Morality--Their Result in Creating

the Problem of Sexual Abstinence--The Protests Against Sexual

Abstinence--Sexual Abstinence and Genius--Sexual Abstinence in Women--The

Advocates of Sexual Abstinence--Intermediate Attitude--Unsatisfactory

Nature of the Whole Discussion--Criticism of the Conception of Sexual

Abstinence--Sexual Abstinence as Compared to Abstinence from Food--No

Complete Analogy--The Morality of Sexual Abstinence Entirely Negative--Is

It the Physician's Duty to Advise Extra-Conjugal Sexual

Intercourse?--Opinions of Those Who Affirm or Deny This Duty--The

Conclusion Against Such Advice--The Physician Bound by the Social and

Moral Ideas of His Age--The Physician as Reformer--Sexual Abstinence and

Sexual Hygiene--Alcohol--The Influence of Physical and Mental

Exercise--The Inadequacy of Sexual Hygiene in This Field--The Unreal

Nature of the Conception of Sexual Abstinence--The Necessity of Replacing

It by a More Positive Ideal.

When we look at the matter from a purely abstract or even purely

biological point of view, it might seem that in deciding that asceticism

and chastity are of high value for the personal life we have said all that

is necessary to say. That, however, is very far from being the case. We

soon realize here, as at every point in the practical application of

sexual psychology, that it is not sufficient to determine the abstractly

right course along biological lines. We have to harmonize our biological

demands with social demands. We are ruled not only by natural instincts

but by inherited traditions, that in the far past were solidly based on

intelligible grounds, and that even still, by the mere fact of their

existence, exert a force which we cannot and ought not to ignore.

In discussing the valuation of the sexual impulse we found that we had

good ground for making a very high estimate of love. In discussing

chastity and asceticism we found that they also are highly to be valued.

And we found that, so far from any contradiction being here involved,

love and chastity are intertwined in all their finest developments, and

that there is thus a perfect harmony in apparent opposition. But when we

come to consider the matter in detail, in its particular personal

applications, we find that a new factor asserts itself. We find that our

inherited social and religious traditions exert a pressure, all on one

side, which makes it impossible to place the relations of love and

chastity simply on the basis of biology and reason. We are confronted at

the outset by our traditions. On the one side these traditions have

weighted the word "lust"--considered as expressing all the manifestations

of the sexual impulse which are outside marriage or which fail to have

marriage as their direct and ostentatious end--with deprecatory and

sinister meanings. And on the other side these traditions have created the

problem of "sexual abstinence," which has nothing to do with either

asceticism or chastity as these have been defined in the previous chapter,

but merely with the purely negative pressure on the sexual impulse,

exerted, independently of the individual's wishes, by his religious and

social environment.

The theological conception of "lust," or "libido," as sin, followed

logically the early Christian conception of "the flesh," and became

inevitable as soon as that conception was firmly established. Not only,

indeed, had early Christian ideals a degrading influence on the estimation

of sexual desire _per se_, but they tended to depreciate generally the

dignity of the sexual relationship. If a man made sexual advances to a

woman outside marriage, and thus brought her within the despised circle of

"lust," he was injuring her because he was impairing her religious and

moral value.[92] The only way he could repair the damage done was by

paying her money or by entering into a forced and therefore probably

unfortunate marriage with her. That is to say that sexual relationships

were, by the ecclesiastical traditions, placed on a pecuniary basis, on

the same level as prostitution. By its well-meant intentions to support

the theological morality which had developed on an ascetic basis, the

Church was thus really undermining even that form of sexual relationship

which it sanctified.

Gregory the Great ordered that the seducer of a virgin shall

marry her, or, in case of refusal, be severely punished

corporally and shut up in a monastery to perform penance.

According to other ecclesiastical rules, the seducer of a virgin,

though held to no responsibility by the civil forum, was required

to marry her, or to find a husband and furnish a dowry for her.

Such rules had their good side, and were especially equitable

when seduction had been accomplished by deceit. But they largely

tended in practice to subordinate all questions of sexual

morality to a money question. The reparation to the woman, also,

largely became necessary because the ecclesiastical conception of

lust caused her value to be depreciated by contact with lust, and

the reparation might be said to constitute a part of penance.

Aquinas held that lust, in however slight a degree, is a mortal

sin, and most of the more influential theologians took a view

nearly or quite as rigid. Some, however, held that a certain

degree of delectation is possible in these matters without mortal

sin, or asserted, for instance, that to feel the touch of a soft

and warm hand is not mortal sin so long as no sexual feeling is

thereby aroused. Others, however, held that such distinctions are

impossible, and that all pleasures of this kind are sinful. Tomás

Sanchez endeavored at much length to establish rules for the

complicated problems of delectation that thus arose, but he was

constrained to admit that no rules are really possible, and that

such matters must be left to the judgment of a prudent man. At

that point casuistry dissolves and the modern point of view

emerges (see, e.g., Lea, _History of Auricular Confession_, vol.

ii, pp. 57, 115, 246, etc.).

Even to-day the influence of the old traditions of the Church still

unconsciously survives among us. That is inevitable as regards religious

teachers, but it is found also in men of science, even in Protestant

countries. The result is that quite contradictory dogmas are found side by

side, even in the same writer. On the one hand, the manifestations of the

sexual impulse are emphatically condemned as both unnecessary and evil; on

the other hand, marriage, which is fundamentally (whatever else it may

also be) a manifestation of the sexual impulse, receives equally emphatic

approval as the only proper and moral form of living.[93] There can be no

reasonable doubt whatever that it is to the surviving and pervading

influence of the ancient traditional theological conception of _libido_

that we must largely attribute the sharp difference of opinions among

physicians on the question of sexual abstinence and the otherwise

unnecessary acrimony with which these opinions have sometimes been stated.

On the one side, we find the emphatic statement that sexual intercourse is

necessary and that health cannot be maintained unless the sexual

activities are regularly exercised.