It may be added that Aquinas and
many other early theologians held, not only that such intercourse
was a deadly sin, but that it engendered leprous and monstrous
children. Some later theologians, however, like Sanchez, argued
that the Mosaic enactments (such as Leviticus, Ch. XX, v. 18) no
longer hold good. Modern theologians--in part influenced by the
tolerant traditions of Liguori, and, in part, like Debreyne
(_Moechialogie_, pp. 275 et seq.) informed by medical science--no
longer prohibit intercourse during menstruation, or regard it as
only a venial sin.
We have here a remarkable, but not an isolated, example of the tendency of
the human mind in its development to rebel against the claims of primitive
nature. The whole of religion is a similar remolding of nature, a
repression of natural impulses, an effort to turn them into new channels.
Prohibition of intercourse during menstruation is a fundamental element of
savage ritual, an element which is universal merely because the conditions
which caused it are universal, and because--as is now beginning to be
generally recognized--the causes of human psychic evolution are everywhere
the same. A strictly analogous phenomenon, in the sexual sphere itself, is
the opposed attitude in barbarism and civilization toward the sexual
organs. Under barbaric conditions and among savages, when no
magico-religious ideas intervene, the sexual organs are beautiful and
pleasurable objects.
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