Early religious rites were largely sexual and orgiastic because
they were largely an appeal to the generative forces of Nature to exhibit
a beneficial productiveness. Among happily married people, as Hahn
remarks, the sexual emotions rapidly give place to the cares and anxieties
involved in supporting children; but when the exercise of the sexual
function is prevented by celibacy, or even by castration, the most
complete form of celibacy, the sexual emotions may pass into the psychical
sphere to take on a more pronounced shape.[386] The early Christians
adopted the traditional Eastern association between religion and celibacy,
and, as the writings of the Fathers amply show, they expended on sexual
matters a concentrated fervor of thought rarely known to the Greek and
Roman writers of the best period.[387] As Christian theology developed,
the minute inquisition into sexual things sometimes became almost an
obsession. So far as I am aware, however (I cannot profess to have made
any special investigation), it was not until the late Middle Ages that
there is any clear recognition of the fact that, between the religious
emotions and the sexual emotions, there is not only a superficial
antagonism, but an underlying relationship. At this time so great a
theologian and philosopher as Aquinas said that it is especially on the
days when a man is seeking to make himself pleasing to God that the Devil
troubles him by polluting him with seminal emissions.
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