Sometimes I have permission to speak to our Lord with more
familiarity, calling Him my Love, interesting Him in all that I ask of
Him, as well for myself as for others."
The lives of all the great saints and mystics bear witness to operations
similar to those so vividly described by Soeur Jeanne des Anges, though it
is very rarely that any saint has so frankly presented the dynamic
mechanism of the auto-erotic process. The indications they give us,
however, are sufficiently clear. It is enough to refer to the special
affection which the mystics have ever borne toward the Song of
Songs,[405] and to note how the most earthly expressions of love in that
poem enter as a perpetual refrain into their writings.[406]
The courage of the early Christian martyrs, it is abundantly evident, was
in part supported by an exaltation which they frankly drew from the sexual
impulse. Felicula, we are told in the acts of Achilles and Nereus,[407]
preferred imprisonment, torture, and death to marriage or pagan
sacrifices. When on the rack she was bidden to deny Christianity, she
exclaimed: "_Ego non nego amatorem meum!_"--I will not deny my lover who
for my sake has eaten gall and drunk vinegar, crowned with thorns, and
fastened to the cross.
Christian mysticism and its sexual coloring was absorbed by the Islamic
world at a very early period and intensified. In the thirteenth century it
was reintroduced into Christendom in this intensified form by the genius
of Raymond Lull who had himself been born on the confines of Islam, and
his "Book of the Lover and the Friend" is a typical manifestation of
sexual mysticism which inspired the great Spanish school of mystics a few
centuries later.
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