[399] Krafft-Ebing deals briefly with the connection
between holiness and the sexual emotion, and the special liability of the
saints to sexual temptations; he thus states his own conclusions:
"Religious and sexual emotional states at the height of their development
exhibit a harmony in quantity and quality of excitement, and can thus in
certain circumstances act vicariously. Both," he adds, "can be converted
into cruelty under pathological conditions."[400]
After quoting these opinions it is, perhaps, not unnecessary to point out
that, while sexual emotion constitutes the main reservoir of energy on
which religion can draw, it is far from constituting either the whole
content of religion or its root. Murisier, in an able study of the
psychology of religious ecstasy, justly protests against too crude an
explanation of its nature, though at the same time he admits that "the
passion of the religious ecstatic lacks nothing of what goes to make up
sexual love, not even jealousy."[401]
Serieux, in his little work, _Recherches Cliniques sur les Anomalies de
l'Instinct Sexuel_, valuable on account of its instructive cases, records
in detail a case which so admirably illustrates this phase of auto-erotism
on the borderland between ordinary erotic day-dreaming and religious
mysticism, the phenomena for a time reaching an insane degree of
intensity, that I summarize it. "Therese M., aged 24, shows physical
stigmata of degeneration.
Pages:
538
539
540
541
542
543
544
545
546
547
548
549
550
551
552
553
554
555
556
557
558
559
560
561
562