have borne to Him! What a terrible loss it would
have been if you had abandoned yourself to the lust of the flesh, had
borne, with travail, a few earthly children, while now, with joy, you
bear a great number of daughters for the kingdom of Heaven. You would
have remained a woman like all the rest, but now you are far exalted
even above men." This correspondence plainly reveals the tragedy of the
lacerated man of the Middle Ages, as compared to the never-varying
woman, emerging perfect from the hands of nature. A long and toilsome
road still stretches out before him; she had reached the goal, without a
struggle, at the outset. How strange is this cry of a mediaeval nun: "It
seems as if the world had grown old, as if all men and all living
creatures had lost their freshness, as if love had grown cold not in
many, but in all hearts."

What was really the final cause of the hostility to sensuousness
displayed by dualistic mediaeval Christianity? Was it not contained in
eroticism itself?

This hostility was based on the fact that the world knew as yet only
spiritual love and its antithesis, the sexuality which man shares with
the animals; the only salvation, not merely in the Christian sense, but
from the point of view of every lofty conception of civilisation, lay in
the victory over animalism. The contempt of and the struggle against
the lower form of eroticism animating the dualistic period was
absolutely consistent; asceticism represents the highest form of culture
attainable by that period. (The rejection of spiritual love was an
inconsistency on the part of the clergy.) The principle of personality
was the fundamental principle of Christianity; this is clearly expressed
by the fact that Christianity regarded the soul as the supreme value.
And what is the soul but the consciousness of human personality
conceived naively as substance? In the light of this higher intuition
sensuousness was bound to appear base and degrading.

It is therefore historically correct, though essentially an error, to
regard Christianity as the religion of asceticism, for the asceticism of
the Middle Ages was nothing but the immature stage of the principle of
personality. Directly spiritual love was no longer in opposition to
sexuality, directly a synthesis had been effected, Christianity should
have drawn the obvious conclusion from its fundamental principle and
acknowledged love, which united the hostile elements. Protestantism did
so, ha