Chapter IV — The Revenge of Sexuality
The Demoniacal and the Obscene
In conclusion I will attempt to elucidate a group of phenomena which play a part, important though often ignored, in the emotional life of the present day. They are related to the subject under discussion, inasmuch as they, too, are the result of a lack of harmony between sensuousness and love. As long as sensuousness is felt and understood as a natural element, and one which does not under normal circumstances enter consciousness as a distinct principle, the emotional sphere which may be designated as demoniacal-sexual and obscene, does not exist. Not until sensuousness is confronted by a higher principle, a now solely acknowledged spiritual-divine principle, will natural life, and particularly normal sexuality, be stigmatised as low and ungodly, even as demoniacal. In proportion as the conception of God became more spiritual and divine, the conception of the devil became more horrible; the higher the soul soared, the deeper sank the body. This philosophy of pure spirituality was expressed by St. Bernard of Clairvaux in the following words: “Oh, soul, stamped with the image of God, adorned with His semblance, espoused to faith, endowed with His spirit, redeemed by His blood, the compeer of angels, invested with reason—what hast thou in common with the flesh, for which thou must suffer so much?... And yet it is thy dearest companion! Behold, there will come a day when it shall be a miserable, pallid corpse, food for worms! For however beautifully it may be adorned, yet it is nothing but flesh!” The man of the later Middle Ages, and especially the cleric, who was completely dominated by the contrast of the ascetic and the sexual, feared the devil more than he loved God, and regarded the sensual temptations which beset his excited, superstitious and eternally unsatisfied imagination as sent by the devil. The naïveté of sensuality had passed away for ever; as goodness was looked upon as divine and supernatural, nature and natural instincts were condemned. Man was torn asunder.
But the devil was not only feared, he was also worshipped. A devil-worship, the details of which have been little studied, existed from the tenth to the fourteenth century (when it reached its climax), side by side with the worship of God. The greater the dread of heresy and witchcraft, the greater became the number of men who, despairing of salvation, prostrated themselves before the devil, whom they seemed unable to escape (a single evil thought was sufficient to doom their souls to eternal damnation), in the hope that he would at least save their bodies from the stake and vouchsafe them the pleasures of this world. Satan promised his worshippers unlimited pleasure; he became the redeemer of those whom the clergy persecuted. It is asserted that his worship consisted in an obscene parody of the Mass; according to Michelet, the body of a female worshipper served as the altar on which a toad was consecrated and partaken of instead of the Host. The adept solemnly renounced Jesus and did homage to Satan by kissing his image.
Asceticism and libertinism always go hand in hand. They are convertible principles rending their victim. Temptation is the fundamental motif of this condition. The devil was believed to send out his servants to win new souls; monks were visited by demons in the shape of a voluptuous woman, the succubus; Satan himself, or one of his emissaries, disguised as a fashionable gentleman, the incubus, appeared to the nuns. Undoubtedly the dreams of over-excited men and women played a very important part in this connection; many hysterical women felt the devil’s kiss and embrace. All these women were themselves convinced of the truth of their hallucinations and imaginings, and once the belief in witchcraft was firmly established (in the thirteenth century) the obvious atonement for their hysteria was the stake.
The fear of witches, which existed parallel with the love of the Madonna, was typical of the declining Middle Ages. The first Christian centuries knew neither the Lady of Heaven in the later meaning of the word, nor did they know anything of witches. In the reign of Charlemagne the penalty for the belief in witchcraft was death. At all times man has exhibited a tendency to see in woman either a celestial or an infernal being, and nowhere was this tendency more strongly developed than in the soul of the mediaeval dualist: he created the beloved and adored Queen of Heaven, the mediator between God and humanity and, as her counterpart the witch, the despised and dreaded seducer, a being between man and devil. Powerless to effect a reconciliation between spiritual love and sensuous pleasure, he required two distinct female types as personifications of the two directions of his desire; love and the pleasure of the senses could have nothing in common, and once the highest value was realised in the spiritual love of woman, pleasure could not appear otherwise than degraded, sinful and diabolical. In this respect, also, woman submitted without a murmur to the dictates of male will.
Mary and the devil became more and more the real hostile powers of the thirteenth century; the classical time of woman-worship was also the climax of the fear of the devil and witchcraft. The Dominican monks who, above all other orders, contributed to the spread of the cult of Mary, proceeded, soon after the establishment of the Inquisition, against the witches, the enemies of Mary. In the second half of the thirteenth century the persecution of heresy gradually gave way to the persecution of witchcraft.
I will not go into these well-known details, for the psychical position is clear enough: to the man whose heart is filled with the love of good and the spiritual love of woman, sensuousness will appear as dangerous and perilous, and will have at the same time the glamour of the demoniacally-sexual. It is the diabolical element of dualistic consciousness in the sphere of eroticism. Many people of the present day will not be able to understand this feeling, for it pre-supposes a completely inharmonious emotional life.
The consciousness of the obscene is allied to the conception of the demoniacal; it accompanies modern synthetic love as its temptation and its shadow. In personal love sensuality and soul are no longer independent, contrasted principles; personality, taking the spiritual as its foundation, includes the sensuous. In this highest stage all eroticism not hallowed by mutual affection is felt as unpardonable. The purely sexual principle continues to exist, but whenever it appears in its impersonal and brutal crudity as an element hostile to personality, it creates the consciousness of the obscene. The obscene is, therefore, the purely sexual, not in its naïve normality, but as a force inimical to a value, as a rule to the value of personality. The obscene expresses scorn and hatred for personal love. It is the seduction of the primitive which is no longer something earlier, but something baser (for every age must gauge all things by its own standard). The aesthetic principle—in this connection the sense of the beauty of the human form—so powerful an element in naïve sensuality as well as in every other form of eroticism, is excluded, because in this particular condition the beauty of the human body is not objectively realised, but is looked upon with the eyes of the senses. The moment personality is acknowledged as the only decisive factor in erotic life, chaotic impersonal sensuality stands condemned. The obscene is the darker aspect of modern love, and without modern love it could not exist. Its essence is negative, is the tendency to caricature and mock the highest form of love. The photograph of a nude woman is not obscene; but if the face is hidden, and thus the personal moment intentionally eliminated in favour of the generic element, it approaches the obscene. This accounts for the widely felt pleasure in obscene pictures; the beholder is not personally engaged, he can enjoy these pictures without taking upon his shoulders any kind of responsibility. Even that minimum of respect which the very dregs of humanity may claim is not required of him. The picture is capable of affording pleasure without claiming a grain of human kindness. Thus it would seem that sensual pleasure is possible without any sacrifice of the inwardly professed higher eroticism, a sacrifice which might be a bar to a primitive relationship with a woman of flesh and blood. Actually, however, it is not possible, for with the surrender to the base source of enjoyment, the spiritual position is abandoned, and personally conceived humanity inwardly annihilated.
It follows from the foregoing that the fascination of the obscene can only be fully felt by one who has completely acknowledged the principle of personality in eroticism, and who has also latent within him the possibility of erotic dualism. The more highly evolved the emotional life of a man (all these considerations apply only to a man in whom the possibility of dualism is latent), the more will he realise the purely sexual, the emphasis of the element of pleasure, as something unseemly and disagreeable; something which he ought to deny himself, but which attracts him with the irresistible fascination of the obscene. The man who surrenders himself naïvely to sensuality does not realise it as obscene, but the man who, conscious of his higher concept, strives against it, experiences the reaction of sensuality with the full force of its perverse seduction. Even if only for a brief space, he annihilates the higher element and gives himself up to the pleasure of the base and degraded.
In this connection we are face to face with the strange but still logical fact, that a man who has completely attained to the third stage of love, feels even the purely spiritual love as odious in its incompleteness. It strikes him as unnatural and forced, a feeling which must, however, not be confused with the ordinary contempt of spiritual love.
Primitively constituted man knows only undifferentiated sexuality. He enjoys the nude, and sees no difference between a Venus by Titian and an ordinary photograph of a nude figure; the aesthete, and more especially the artist, can never understand that a work of art may be sensually stimulating. That it may be so will always be bluntly denied by an individual capable of enjoying a beautiful form, but to the uncultivated mind the picture of the female body will only evoke memories of pleasure. This feeling, however, is quite distinct from the obscene; it is neither hostile to the higher spiritual life, nor is it criminal; it is natural and harmonious. But the same feeling may become obscene if a man, aware of higher aesthetic values, ignores art and enjoys the picture merely as a representation of a nude figure. Here, too, the seduction lies in a demoniacal element, namely in the destruction of the aesthetic value. The destructive characteristic of the obscene wars against all higher conceptions; it is the revenge of chaotic sex deposed by a higher principle, and has the special charm of secret wrong-doing.
I might go even further, and maintain that because modern love does not admit pleasure as its foundation and content, and because the craving for pleasure is deeply rooted in human nature, love favours to a high degree the desire to reserve a sphere for pleasure distinct from personal love. This region is the obscene, and one might prophesy that it will grow in proportion as the principle of personal love acquires dominion; for pleasure will always need an undisturbed retreat untroubled by higher demands. This can only be found in the sphere of the obscene in which the element of personality is entirely eliminated.
Modern man is beset by another peculiar temptation. The beauty of woman, which in the days of the past was regarded as sacred, can be made a means of pleasure, and thus drawn from the realm of values into the realm of sensuality. This is a breach with the principle of personal love, for to the latter the beauty of a woman is so much part and parcel of the whole personality that it cannot be enjoyed separately, that indeed it can hardly be noticed as a distinct element. This cleavage has become so nearly universal that we are hardly conscious of its profound perversity. It is the arch-sin of all higher eroticism to realise beauty not as the undetachable and self-evident outward form of a beloved soul, but as a means of heightening pleasure. Although in its essence it is the same thing as the examination of a work of art merely for the sake of the pleasure it affords to the senses, the offence is here aggravated because personality is involved. This degradation of the higher values, whether of nature, art, beauty, knowledge, kindness, religion or the human soul, to serve the ends of sensual pleasure is the expression of a perversity which is possibly the most radical and characteristic of our age. To-day the soul of a woman has frequently the same effect on man as her physical beauty; he enjoys it as a subtile charm instead of respecting it as a mystery.
I can hardly expect to make my meaning quite clear to the multitude, but the tendency to enjoy beauty of form or soul as a distinct element represents a rupture with the principle of synthetic love, the love which does not separate but realises the personality of the beloved as an indivisible entity. The enjoyment of beauty as a separate element pre-supposes a conscious, spiritual division, not only of the beloved, but also of the lover, and is therefore the destruction of the principle of unity. Aesthete and libertine alike sink to the lower level of pleasure, and their emotions become obscene. There is no question of a division when Tristan in his vision of Isolde exclaims, “How beautiful thou art!” For great love can create the beauty of the beloved out of its own soul.
Prudery is based on a similar duality. It expresses a consciousness that the nude can only be alluring, obscene, “indecent,” and should therefore be feared and avoided. It is the defensive weapon of sexually excited, for the most part, slightly hysterical women, against the purely sexual, whose sphere they often extend amazingly. Prudery conceives sexuality as a distinct, restricted complex in consciousness. Such division is alien to woman and, where it exists, a hysterical condition, a condition of inner discord, is clearly indicated. We may take it that the obscene which affects normal men, affects only hysterical, inwardly discordant women who try to take shelter behind prudery. To the normal woman the obscene does not exist as a spiritual principle; she turns with a feeling of displeasure from all the lower sexual manifestations, and even finds them absurd. The elimination of personality of eroticism, the charm of which is felt by even the most highly differentiated man, has always been foreign to woman—she lacks the duality of erotic emotion which man is slowly and laboriously striving to overcome—a still further proof of the unbroken, synthetic emotion of woman.