Unfortunately, it must be said, St. Augustine--another North African, but of Roman Carthage and not of Greek Alexandria--thought that he had a convincing answer to the kind of argument which Clement presented, and so great was the force of his passionate and potent genius that he was able in the end to make his answer prevail. For Augustine sin was hereditary, and sin had its special seat and symbol in the sexual organs; the fact of sin has modified the original divine act of creation, and we cannot treat sex and its organs as though there had been no inherited sin. Our sexual organs, he declares, have become shameful because, through sin, they are now moved by lust. At the same time Augustine by no means takes up the mediæval ascetic position of contemptuous hatred towards the body. Nothing can be further from Odo of Cluny than Augustine's enthusiasm about the body, even about the exquisite harmony of the parts beneath the skin. "I believe it may be concluded," he even says, "that in the creation of the human body beauty was more regarded than necessity. In truth, necessity is a transitory thing, and the time is coming when we shall be able to enjoy one another's beauty without any lust."[54] Even in the sphere of sex he would be willing to admit purity and beauty, apart from the inherited influence of Adam's sin. In Paradise, he says, had Paradise continued, the act of generation would have been as simple and free from shame as the act of the hand in scattering seed on to the earth. "Sexual conjugation would have been under the control of the will without any sexual desire. The semen would be injected into the vagina in as simple a manner as the menstrual fluid is now ejected. There would not have been any words which could be called obscene, but all that might be said of these members would have been as pure as what is said of the other parts of the body."[55] That, however, for Augustine, is what might have been in Paradise where, as he believed, sexual desire had no existence. As things are, he held, we are right to be ashamed, we do well to blush. And it was natural that, as Clement of Alexandria mentions, many heretics should have gone further on this road and believed that while God made man down to the navel, the rest was made by another power; such heretics have their descendants among us even to-day.
Alike in the Eastern and Western Churches, however, both before and after Augustine, though not so often after, great Fathers and teachers have uttered opinions which recall those of Clement rather than of Augustine. We cannot lay very much weight on the utterance of the extravagant and often contradictory Tertullian, but it is worth noting that, while he declared that woman is the gate of hell, he also said that we must approach Nature with reverence and not with blushes. "Natura veneranda est, non erubescenda." "No Christian author," it has indeed been said, "has so energetically spoken against the heretical contempt of the body as Tertullian. Soul and body, according to Tertullian, are in the closest association. The soul is the life-principle of the body, but there is no activity of the soul which is not manifested and conditioned by the flesh."[56] More weight attaches to Rufinus Tyrannius, the friend and fellow-student of St. Jerome, in the fourth century, who wrote a commentary on the Apostles' Creed, which was greatly esteemed by the early and mediæval Church, and is indeed still valued even to-day. Here, in answer to those who declared that there was obscenity in the fact of Christ's birth through the sexual organs of a woman, Rufinus replies that God created the sexual organs, and that "it is not Nature but merely human opinion which teaches that these parts are obscene. For the rest, all the parts of the body are made from the same clay, whatever differences there may be in their uses and functions."[57] He looks at the matter, we see, piously indeed, but naturally and simply, like Clement, and not, like Augustine, through the distorting medium of a theological system. Athanasius, in the Eastern Church, spoke in the same sense as Rufinus in the Western Church. A certain monk named Amun had been much grieved by the occurrence of seminal emissions during sleep, and he wrote to Athanasius to inquire if such emissions are a sin. In the letter he wrote in reply, Athanasius seeks to reassure Amun. "All things," he tells him, "are pure to the pure. For what, I ask, dear and pious friend, can there be sinful or naturally impure in excrement? Man is the handwork of God. There is certainly nothing in us that is impure."[58] We feel as we read these utterances that the seeds of prudery and pruriency are already alive in the popular mind, but yet we see also that some of the most distinguished thinkers of the early Christian Church, in striking contrast to the more morbid and narrow-minded mediæval ascetics, clearly stood aside from the popular movement. On the whole, they were submerged because Christianity, like Buddhism, had in it from the first a germ that lent itself to ascetic renunciation, and the sexual life is always the first impulse to be sacrificed to the passion for renunciation. But there were other germs also in Christianity, and Luther, who in his own plebeian way asserted the rights of the body, although he broke with mediæval asceticism, by no means thereby cast himself off from the traditions of the early Christian Church.
I have thought it worth while to bring forward this evidence, although I am perfectly well aware that the facts of Nature gain no additional support from the authority of the Fathers or even of the Bible. Nature and humanity existed before the Bible and would continue to exist although the Bible should be forgotten. But the attitude of Christianity on this point has so often been unreservedly condemned that it seems as well to point out that at its finest moments, when it was a young and growing power in the world, the utterances of Christianity were often at one with those of Nature and reason. There are many, it may be added, who find it a matter of consolation that in following the natural and rational path in this matter they are not thereby altogether breaking with the religious traditions of their race.
It is scarcely necessary to remark that when we turn from Christianity to the other great world-religions, we do not usually meet with so ambiguous an attitude towards sex. The Mahommedans were as emphatic in asserting the sanctity of sex as they were in asserting physical cleanliness; they were prepared to carry the functions of sex into the future life, and were never worried, as Luther and so many other Christians have been, concerning the lack of occupation in Heaven. In India, although India is the home of the most extreme forms of religious asceticism, sexual love has been sanctified and divinized to a greater extent than in any other part of the world. "It seems never to have entered into the heads of the Hindu legislators," said Sir William Jones long since (_Works_, vol. ii, p. 311), "that anything natural could be offensively obscene, a singularity which pervades all their writings, but is no proof of the depravity of their morals." The sexual act has often had a religious significance in India, and the minutest details of the sexual life and its variations are discussed in Indian erotic treatises in a spirit of gravity, while nowhere else have the anatomical and physiological sexual characters of women been studied with such minute and adoring reverence. "Love in India, both as regards theory and practice," remarks Richard Schmidt (_Beiträge zur Indischen Erotik_, p. 2) "possesses an importance which it is impossible for us even to conceive."
In Protestant countries the influence of the Reformation, by rehabilitating sex as natural, indirectly tended to substitute in popular feeling towards sex the opprobrium of sinfulness by the opprobrium of animality. Henceforth the sexual impulse must be disguised or adorned to become respectably human. This may be illustrated by a passage in Pepys's _Diary_ in the seventeenth century. On the morning after the wedding day it was customary to call up new married couples by music; the absence of this music on one occasion (in 1667) seemed to Pepys "as if they had married like dog and bitch." We no longer insist on the music, but the same feeling still exists in the craving for other disguises and adornments for the sexual impulse. We do not always realize that love brings its own sanctity with it.
Nowadays indeed, whenever the repugnance to the sexual side of life manifests itself, the assertion nearly always made is not so much that it is "sinful" as that it is "beastly." It is regarded as that part of man which most closely allies him to the lower animals. It should scarcely be necessary to point out that this is a mistake. On whichever side, indeed, we approach it, the implication that sex in man and animals is identical cannot be borne out. From the point of view of those who accept this identity it would be much more correct to say that men are inferior, rather than on a level with animals, for in animals under natural conditions the sexual instinct is strictly subordinated to reproduction and very little susceptible to deviation, so that from the standpoint of those who wish to minimize sex, animals are nearer to the ideal, and such persons must say with Woods Hutchinson: "Take it altogether, our animal ancestors have quite as good reason to be ashamed of us as we of them." But if we look at the matter from a wider biological standpoint of development, our conclusion must be very different.
So far from being animal-like, the human impulses of sex are among the least animal-like acquisitions of man. The human sphere of sex differs from the animal sphere of sex to a singularly great extent.[59] Breathing is an animal function and here we cannot compete with birds; locomotion is an animal function and here we cannot equal quadrupeds; we have made no notable advance in our circulatory, digestive, renal, or hepatic functions. Even as regards vision and hearing, there are many animals that are more keen-sighted than man, and many that are capable of hearing sounds that to him are inaudible. But there are no animals in whom the sexual instinct is so sensitive, so highly developed, so varied in its manifestations, so constantly alert, so capable of irradiating the highest and remotest parts of the organism. The sexual activities of man and woman belong not to that lower part of our nature which degrades us to the level of the "brute," but to the higher part which raises us towards all the finest activities and ideals we are capable of. It is true that it is chiefly in the mouths of a few ignorant and ill-bred women that we find sex referred to as "bestial" or "the animal part of our nature."[60] But since women are the mothers and teachers of the human race this is a piece of ignorance and ill-breeding which cannot be too swiftly eradicated.
There are some who seem to think that they have held the balance evenly, and finally stated the matter, if they admit that sexual love may be either beautiful or disgusting, and that either view is equally normal and legitimate. "Listen in turn," Tarde remarks, "to two men who, one cold, the other ardent, one chaste, the other in love, both equally educated and large-minded, are estimating the same thing: one judges as disgusting, odious, revolting, and bestial what the other judges to be delicious, exquisite, ineffable, divine. What, for one, is in Christian phraseology, an unforgivable sin, is, for the other, the state of true grace. Acts that for one seem a sad and occasional necessity, stains that must be carefully effaced by long intervals of continence, are for the other the golden nails from which all the rest of conduct and existence is suspended, the things that alone give human life its value."[61] Yet we may well doubt whether both these persons are "equally well-educated and broad-minded." The savage feels that sex is perilous, and he is right. But the person who feels that the sexual impulse is bad, or even low and vulgar, is an absurdity in the universe, an anomaly. He is like those persons in our insane asylums, who feel that the instinct of nutrition is evil and so proceed to starve themselves. They are alike spiritual outcasts in the universe whose children they are. It is another matter when a man declares that, personally, in his own case, he cherishes an ascetic ideal which leads him to restrain, so far as possible, either or both impulses. The man, who is sanely ascetic seeks a discipline which aids the ideal he has personally set before himself. He may still remain theoretically in harmony with the universe to which he belongs. But to pour contempt on the sexual life, to throw the veil of "impurity" over it, is, as Nietzsche declared, the unpardonable sin against the Holy Ghost of Life.
There are many who seek to conciliate prejudice and reason in their valuation of sex by drawing a sharp distinction between "lust" and "love," rejecting the one and accepting the other. It is quite proper to make such a distinction, but the manner in which it is made will by no means usually bear examination. We have to define what we mean by "lust" and what we mean by "love," and this is not easy if they are regarded as mutually exclusive. It is sometimes said that "lust" must be understood as meaning a reckless indulgence of the sexual impulse without regard to other considerations. So understood, we are quite safe in rejecting it. But that is an entirely arbitrary definition of the word. "Lust" is really a very ambiguous term; it is a good word that has changed its moral values, and therefore we need to define it very carefully before we venture to use it. Properly speaking, "lust" is an entirely colorless word[62] and merely means desire in general and sexual desire in particular; it corresponds to "hunger" or "thirst"; to use it in an offensive sense is much the same as though we should always assume that the word "hungry" had the offensive meaning of "greedy." The result has been that sensitive minds indignantly reject the term "lust" in connection with love.[63] In the early use of our language, "lust," "lusty," and "lustful" conveyed the sense of wholesome and normal sexual vigor; now, with the partial exception of "lusty," they have been so completely degraded to a lower sense that although it would be very convenient to restore them to their original and proper place, which still remains vacant, the attempt at such a restoration scarcely seems a hopeful task. We have so deeply poisoned the springs of feeling in these matters with mediæval ascetic crudities that all our words of sex tend soon to become bespattered with filth; we may pick them up from the mud into which they have fallen and seek to purify them, but to many eyes they will still seem dirty. One result of this tendency is that we have no simple, precise, natural word for the love of the sexes, and are compelled to fall back on the general term, which is so extensive in its range that in English and French and most of the other leading languages of Europe, it is equally correct to "love" God or to "love" eating.
Love, in the sexual sense, is, summarily considered, a synthesis of lust (in the primitive and uncolored sense of sexual emotion) and friendship. It is incorrect to apply the term "love" in the sexual sense to elementary and uncomplicated sexual desire; it is equally incorrect to apply it to any variety or combination of varieties of friendship. There can be no sexual love without lust; but, on the other hand, until the currents of lust in the organism have been so irradiated as to affect other parts of the psychic organism--at the least the affections and the social feelings--it is not yet sexual love. Lust, the specific sexual impulse, is indeed the primary and essential element in this synthesis, for it alone is adequate to the end of reproduction, not only in animals but in men. But it is not until lust is expanded and irradiated that it develops into the exquisite and enthralling flower of love. We may call to mind what happens among plants: on the one hand we have the lower organisms in which sex is carried on summarily and cryptogamically, never shedding any shower of gorgeous blossoms on the world, and on the other hand the higher plants among whom sex has become phanersgamous and expanded enormously into form and color and fragrance.
While "lust" is, of course, known all over the world, and there are everywhere words to designate it, "love" is not universally known, and in many languages there are no words for "love." The failures to find love are often remarkable and unexpected. We may find it where we least expect it. Sexual desire became idealized (as Sergi has pointed out) even by some animals, especially birds, for when a bird pines to death for the loss of its mate this cannot be due to the uncomplicated instinct of sex, but must involve the interweaving of that instinct with the other elements of life to a degree which is rare even among the most civilized men. Some savage races seem to have no fundamental notion of love, and (like the American Nahuas) no primary word for it, while, on the other hand, in Quichua, the language of the ancient Peruvians, there are nearly six hundred combinations of the verb _munay_, to love. Among some peoples love seems to be confined to the women. Letourneau (_L'Evolution Littéraire_, p. 529) points out that in various parts of the world women have taken a leading part in creating erotic poetry. It may be mentioned in this connection that suicide from erotic motives among primitive peoples occurs chiefly among women (_Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft_, 1899, p. 578). Not a few savages possess love-poems, as, for instance, the Suahali (Velten, in his _Prosa und Poesie der Suahali_, devotes a section to love-poems reproduced in the Suahali language). D.G. Brinton, in an interesting paper on "The Conception of Love in Some American Languages" (_Proceedings American Philosophical Society_, vol. xxiii, p. 546, 1886) states that the words for love in these languages reveal four main ways of expressing the conception: (1) inarticulate cries of emotion; (2) assertions of sameness or similarity; (3) assertions of conjunction or union; (4) assertions of a wish, desire, a longing. Brinton adds that "these same notions are those which underlie the majority of the words of love in the great Aryan family of languages." The remarkable fact emerges, however, that the peoples of Aryan tongue were slow in developing their conception of sexual love. Brinton remarks that the American Mayas must be placed above the peoples of early Aryan culture, in that they possessed a radical word for the joy of love which was in significance purely psychical, referring strictly to a mental state, and neither to similarity nor desire. Even the Greeks were late in developing any ideal of sexual love.
This has been well brought out by E.F.M. Benecke in his _Antimachus of Colophon and the Position of Women in Greek Poetry_, a book which contains some hazardous assertions, but is highly instructive from the present point of view. The Greek lyric poets wrote practically no love poems at all to women before Anacreon, and his were only written in old age. True love for the Greeks was nearly always homosexual. The Ionian lyric poets of early Greece regarded woman as only an instrument of pleasure and the founder of the family. Theognis compares marriage to cattle-breeding; Alcman, when he wishes to be complimentary to the Spartan girls, speaks of them as his "female boy-friends." Æschylus makes even a father assume that his daughters will misbehave if left to themselves. There is no sexual love in Sophocles, and in Euripides it is only the women who fall in love. Benecke concludes (p. 67) that in Greece sexual love, down to a comparatively later period, was looked down on, and held to be unworthy of public discussion and representation. It was in Magna Græcia rather than in Greece itself that men took interest in women, and it was not until the Alexandrian period, and notably in Asclepiades, Benecke maintains, that the love of women was regarded as a matter of life and death. Thereafter the conception of sexual love, in its romantic aspects, appears in European life. With the Celtic story of Tristram, as Gaston Paris remarks, it finally appears in the Christian European world of poetry as the chief point in human life, the great motive force of conduct.
Romantic love failed, however, to penetrate the masses in Europe. In the sixteenth century, or whenever it was that the ballad of "Glasgerion" was written, we see it is assumed that a churl's relation to his mistress is confined to the mere act of sexual intercourse; he fails to kiss her on arriving or departing; it is only the knight, the man of upper class, who would think of offering that tender civility. And at the present day in, for instance, the region between East Friesland and the Alps, Bloch states (_Sexualleben unserer Zeit_, p. 29), following E.H. Meyer, that the word "love" is unknown among the masses, and only its coarse counterpart recognized.
On the other side of the world, in Japan, sexual love seems to be in as great disrepute as it was in ancient Greece; thus Miss Tsuda, a Japanese head-mistress, and herself a Christian, remarks (as quoted by Mrs. Eraser in _World's Work and Play_, Dec., 1906): "That word 'love' has been hitherto a word unknown among our girls, in the foreign sense. Duty, submission, kindness--these were the sentiments which a girl was expected to bring to the husband who had been chosen for her--and many happy, harmonious marriages were the result. Now, your dear sentimental foreign women say to our girls: 'It is wicked to marry without love; the obedience to parents in such a case is an outrage against nature and Christianity. If you love a man you must sacrifice everything to marry him.'"
When, however, love is fully developed it becomes an enormously extended, highly complex emotion, and lust, even in the best sense of that word, becomes merely a coördinated element among many other elements. Herbert Spencer, in an interesting passage of his _Principles of Psychology_ (Part IV, Ch. VIII), has analyzed love into as many as nine distinct and important elements: (1) the physical impulse of sex; (2) the feeling for beauty; (3) affection; (4) admiration and respect; (5) love of approbation; (6) self-esteem; (7) proprietary feeling; (8) extended liberty of action from the absence of personal barriers; (9) exaltation of the sympathies. "This passion," he concludes, "fuses into one immense aggregate most of the elementary excitations of which we are capable."
It is scarcely necessary to say that to define sexual love, or even to analyze its components, is by no means to explain its mystery. We seek to satisfy our intelligence by means of a coherent picture of love, but the gulf between that picture and the emotional reality must always be incommensurable and impassable. "There is no word more often pronounced than that of love," wrote Bonstetten many years ago, "yet there is no subject more mysterious. Of that which touches us most nearly we know least. We measure the march of the stars and we do not know how we love." And however expert we have become in detecting and analyzing the causes, the concomitants, and the results of love, we must still make the same confession to-day. We may, as some have done, attempt to explain love as a form of hunger and thirst, or as a force analogous to electricity, or as a kind of magnetism, or as a variety of chemical affinity, or as a vital tropism, but these explanations are nothing more than ways of expressing to ourselves the magnitude of the phenomenon we are in the presence of.
What has always baffled men in the contemplation of sexual love is the seeming inadequacy of its cause, the immense discrepancy between the necessarily circumscribed region of mucous membrane which is the final goal of such love and the sea of world-embracing emotions to which it seems as the door, so that, as Remy de Gourmont has said, "the mucous membranes, by an ineffable mystery, enclose in their obscure folds all the riches of the infinite." It is a mystery before which the thinker and the artist are alike overcome. Donnay, in his play _L'Escalade_, makes a cold and stern man of science, who regards love as a mere mental disorder which can be cured like other disorders, at last fall desperately in love himself. He forces his way into the girl's room, by a ladder, at dead of night, and breaks into a long and passionate speech: "Everything that touches you becomes to me mysterious and sacred. Ah! to think that a thing so well known as a woman's body, which sculptors have modelled, which poets have sung of, which men of science like myself have dissected, that such a thing should suddenly become an unknown mystery and an infinite joy merely because it is the body of one particular woman--what insanity! And yet that is what I feel."[64] 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.