Sexual life in ancient Greece : with thirty-two full-page plates

CHAPTER VI RELIGION AND EROTIC?!

Any one who is entirely a biased supporter of the Jewish-Christian view that the moral ideal of man consists in the ‘“‘ mortification of the flesh ”’, that a lasting communion in eternal blessedness, with the angels imagined as sexless, beckons to the pious as the highest reward after earthly death, will only with difficulty be able to understand the idea that there exists any connection at all between erotics and religion. And yet this connection exists, and is certainly a very intimate one. The Protestant church with its dull, foggy-grey northern frame of mind has indeed in its external forms known how to separate sensuality and religion. That the majority of those who profess the Protestant religion are no longer conscious in any way of the erotic undertone of their religiosity does not at all mean that in their subconsciousness erotic vibrations are altogether absent, or that these vibrations, though not easily observable, are any less effective on that account. But anyone who has familiarized himself with Catholic usages in Catholic countries, can see that many of these usages, if not indeed most of them, are based upon the natural and therefore sound sense of man, are indeed rooted in great part in erotics: which certainly does not enter the consciousness of most of those who profess the Catholic religion, but yet catches the eye of the expert observer much more easily than in the case of Protestantism. One may affirm, without exaggeration, that religious need and the

1 For the connection between Religion and Erotic, see W. Achelis, Die Deutung Augustins, analyse seines geistigen Schaffens auf Grund

seiner erotischen Struktur; James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) ; Starbuck, Psychology of Religion (1899).

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