intercourse. The early Church
anathematized the eroticism of the Pagan world, and exorcized it
in the most effectual way by setting up a new and more exquisite
eroticism of its own.

During the Middle Ages the primitive freshness of Christian chastity began
to lose its charm. No more romances of chastity were written, and in
actual life men no longer sought daring adventures in the field of
chastity. So far as the old ideals survived at all it was in the secular
field of chivalry. The last notable figure to emulate the achievements of
the early Christians was Robert of Arbrissel in Normandy.

Robert of Arbrissel, who founded, in the eleventh century, the
famous and distinguished Order of Fontevrault for women, was a
Breton. This Celtic origin is doubtless significant, for it may
explain his unfailing ardor and gaiety, and his enthusiastic
veneration for womanhood. Even those of his friends who
deprecated what they considered his scandalous conduct bear
testimony to his unfailing and cheerful temperament, his
alertness in action, his readiness for any deed of humanity, and
his entire freedom from severity. He attracted immense crowds of
people of all conditions, especially women, including
prostitutes, and his influence over women was great. Once he went
into a brothel to warm his feet, and, incidentally, converted all
the women there. "Who are you?" asked one of them, "I have been
here twenty-five years and nobody has ever come here to talk
about God." Robert's relation with his nuns at Fontevrault was
very intimate, and he would often sleep with them. This is set
forth precisely in letters written by friends of his, bishops and
abbots, one of whom remarks that Robert had "discovered a new
but fruitless form of martyrdom." A royal abbess of Fontevrault
in the seventeenth century, pretending that the venerated founder
of the order could not possibly have been guilty of such
scandalous conduct, and that the letters must therefore be
spurious, had the originals destroyed, so far as possible. The
Bollandists, in an unscholarly and incomplete account of the
matter (_Acta Sanctorum_, Feb. 25), adopted this view. J. von
Walter, however, in a recent and thorough study of Robert of
Arbrissel (_Die Ersten Wanderprediger Frankreichs_, Theil I),
shows that there is no reason whatever to doubt the authentic