Finally there is the famous Madame Guyon (1648-1717), who—­in addition to many other works—­wrote a very detailed autobiography.  She lived with her husband, whom she treated with coldness, finding her sole joy in her spiritual intercourse with God.  “I desire only the divine love which thrills the soul with inexpressible bliss, the love which seems to melt my whole being.”  God burns her with His fire and still trembling with delight, she says to Him:  “Oh, Lord!  The greatest libertine, if Thou didst make him experience Thy love as Thou didst make me experience it, would forswear carnal pleasure and strive only after Thy divine love.”  “I was like a person intoxicated with wine or love, unable to think of anything but my passion,” etc.  The fact that she sought in this love the pleasure of the senses is very apparent.

We are not concerned here with the problem of how far these women may be regarded as pathological cases; all of them were filled with a vague feminine desire for self-surrender, which they projected on a celestial being, either because they did not come into contact with a suitable terrestrial object, or because the impulse was abnormal from the beginning.  But their spiritual love never rose above empty sentimentality and hysterical rapture.  All of them, and some of them were highly gifted, were thrilled with the love of Jesus, they had visions of the “sweet wounds of the Saviour,” and so on; but their emotion did not kindle the smallest spark of creative power.  The Queen of Heaven, on the other hand, was a free creation of spiritually loving poets and monks.

The women imitated metaphysical love and distorted it; sexual impulse, arrogantly attempting to reach beyond the earth, reigned in the place of spiritual, deifying love.

I have included these phenomena not for their own sakes, but to indicate my boundary-line, for very frequently these women are cited as genuine mystics.  Even Schopenhauer mentions these “saints” in one breath with German mystics and Indian philosophers; he calls Madame Guyon “a great and beautiful soul whose memory I venerate.”  And yet there can be no doubt that it is not the fictitious object of love which is conclusive, but the emotion of the lover:  the sensualist can approach God and the Virgin with inflamed senses, but to the lover every woman is divine.

The result of this chapter is as far as our investigation is concerned, negative.  The deifying love of man has no parallel phenomenon in the emotional life of woman.

(b) SEXUAL MYSTICS.

Sexual mysticism is a contradiction in itself, because true mysticism has nothing whatever to do with sexuality.  But frequently suppressed sexuality, secretly luxuriating, takes possession of the whole soul, and a religious construction is put on the results.  The sexually excited subject attributes religious motives to his ecstasy.  I have no hesitation in asserting that the majority of these ecstasies—­especially