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.
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