must be shameful.  “Se la cosa amata e vile,” as Leonardo da Vinci profoundly said, “l’amante se fa vile.”  However illogical it may have been, there really was a justification for the old Christian identification of the flesh with the sexual instinct.  They stand or fall together; we cannot degrade the one and exalt the other.  As our feelings towards nakedness are, so will be our feelings towards love.

“Man is nothing else than fetid sperm, a sack of dung, the food of worms....  You have never seen a viler dung-hill.”  Such was the outcome of St. Bernard’s cloistered Meditationes Piissimae.[45] Sometimes, indeed, these mediaeval monks would admit that the skin possessed a certain superficial beauty, but they only made that admission in order to emphasize the hideousness of the body when deprived of this film of loveliness, and strained all their perverse intellectual acumen, and their ferocious irony, as they eagerly pointed the finger of mockery at every detail of what seemed to them the pitiful figure of man.  St. Odo of Cluny—­charming saint as he was and a pioneer in his appreciation of the wild beauty of the Alps he had often traversed—­was yet an adept in this art of reviling the beauty of the human body.  That beauty only lies in the skin, he insists; if we could see beneath the skin women would arouse nothing but nausea.  Their adornments are but blood and mucus and bile.  If we refuse to touch dung and phlegm even with a fingertip, how can we desire to embrace a sack of dung?[46] The mediaeval monks of the more contemplative order, indeed, often found here a delectable field of meditation, and the Christian world generally was content to accept their opinions in more or less diluted versions, or at all events never made any definite protest against them.

Even men of science accepted these conceptions and are, indeed, only now beginning to emancipate themselves from such ancient superstitions.  R. de Graef in the Preface to his famous treatise on the generative organs of women, De Mulierum Organis Generatione Inservientibus, dedicated to Cosmo III de Medici in 1672, considered it necessary to apologize for the subject of his work.  Even a century later, Linnaeus in his great work, The System of Nature, dismissed as “abominable” the exact study of the female genitals, although he admitted the scientific interest of such investigations.  And if men of science have found it difficult to attain an objective vision of women we cannot be surprised that medieval and still more ancient conceptions have often been subtly mingled with the views of philosophical and semi-philosophical writers.[47]