[78] Senancour, De l’Amour, vol. ii, p. 233. Islam has placed much less stress on chastity than Christianity, but practically, it would appear, there is often more regard for chastity under Mohammedan rule than under Christian rule. Thus it is stated by “Viator” (Fortnightly Review, Dec., 1908) that formerly, under Turkish Moslem rule, it was impossible to buy the virtue of women in Bosnia, but that now, under the Christian rule of Austria, it is everywhere possible to buy women near the Austrian frontier.
[79] The basis of this feeling was strengthened when it was shown by scholars that the physical virtue of “virginity” had been masquerading under a false name. To remain a virgin seems to have meant at the first, among peoples of early Aryan culture, by no means to take a vow of chastity, but to refuse to submit to the yoke of patriarchal marriage. The women who preferred to stand outside marriage were “virgins,” even though mothers of large families, and AEschylus speaks of the Amazons as “virgins,” while in Greek the child of an unmarried girl was always “the virgin’s son.” The history of Artemis, the most primitive of Greek deities, is instructive from this point of view. She was originally only virginal in the sense that she rejected marriage, being the goddess of a nomadic and matriarchal hunting people who had not yet adopted marriage, and she was the goddess of childbirth, worshipped with orgiastic dances and phallic emblems. It was by a late transformation that Artemis became the goddess of chastity (Farnell, Cults of the Greek States, vol. ii, pp. 442 et seq.; Sir W.M. Ramsay, Cities of Phrygia, vol. i, p. 96; Paul Lafargue, “Les Mythes Historiques,” Revue des Idees, Dec., 1904).
[80] See, e.g., Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. iii, Ch. XIII.
[81] De Civitate Dei, lib. xv, cap. XX. A little further on (lib. xvi, cap. XXV) he refers to Abraham as a man able to use women as a man should, his wife temperately, his concubine compliantly, neither immoderately.
[82] Summa, Migne’s edition, vol. iii, qu. 154, art. I.
[83] See the Study of Modesty in the first volume of these Studies.
[84] The majority of chaste youths, remarks an acute critic of modern life (Hellpach, Nervositaet und Kultur, p. 175), are merely actuated by traditional principles, or by shyness, fear of venereal infections, lack of self-confidence, want of money, very seldom by any consideration for a future wife, and that indeed would be a tragi-comic error, for a woman lays no importance on intact masculinity. Moreover, he adds, the chaste man is unable to choose a wife wisely, and it is among teachers and clergymen—the chastest class—that most unhappy marriages are made. Milton had already made this fact an argument for facility of divorce.
[85] “In eating,” said Hinton, “we have achieved the task of combining pleasure with an absence of ‘lust.’ The problem for man and woman is so to use and possess the sexual passion as to make it the minister to higher things, with no restraint on it but that. It is essentially connected with things of the spiritual order, and would naturally revolve round them. To think of it as merely bodily is a mistake.”