Protestantism did
so, half-heartedly. Luther's vacillating attitude towards sexuality is
typical of this indecision. At heart he could not justify sexuality; he
regarded it, in the same way as did the Fathers of the Church, as an
evil with which one had to make terms. His sanction of marriage was
nothing but a crooked and ill-founded compromise; and as he remained at
the old dualistic standpoint, it could not have been otherwise. But the
moment the new sensuous-supersensuous form of love had come into
existence, it behoved Christianity, as the religion of personality, to
acknowledge it.
After this digression I return to the period of the inception of the
third stage of love. If I were writing a history of eroticism, I should
now have to describe the rococo period, a period essentially
rationalistic and devoted to pleasure, a period which believed in
nothing but the obvious and understood love only in the sense of sensual
pleasure. If sensuality had hitherto been evil--at least
theoretically--it now became obscene.
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