The worship of the Madonna is the love of great solitary
souls, and--as is proved by Goethe--of the great souls in the hours of
their last solitude.
While there was only unindividualised sexual instinct, the chastity of
woman was of no account; we have seen that neither the Eastern nations
nor the Greeks attached any value to it. The woman who had best
fulfilled her vocation as a mother, was the woman most highly respected.
In the East, as well as with Jews and Romans, a woman could be divorced
by her husband for sterility. The only women who were, to some extent,
appreciated for their own sakes, were the Greek hetaerae. But when
asceticism became a moral value, chastity, too, was regarded as a
virtue, and personal love between two individuals invested it with a
profound significance. Henceforth woman should no longer be regarded as
the vehicle for the gratification of male sensuality; it should be her
mission to lead the lover to spiritual perfection. The fusion of the
older ideal of womanhood, the mother (acknowledged and sanctioned by
religion in the mother of the Saviour), with the newer ideal, the
Virgin, created the ideal of the late Middle Ages: the virgin with the
Child.
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