In discussing the valuation of the sexual impulse we found that we had good ground for making a very high estimate of love.  In discussing chastity and asceticism we found that they also are highly to be valued.  And we found that, so far from any contradiction being here involved, love and chastity are intertwined in all their finest developments, and that there is thus a perfect harmony in apparent opposition.  But when we come to consider the matter in detail, in its particular personal applications, we find that a new factor asserts itself.  We find that our inherited social and religious traditions exert a pressure, all on one side, which makes it impossible to place the relations of love and chastity simply on the basis of biology and reason.  We are confronted at the outset by our traditions.  On the one side these traditions have weighted the word “lust”—­considered as expressing all the manifestations of the sexual impulse which are outside marriage or which fail to have marriage as their direct and ostentatious end—­with deprecatory and sinister meanings.  And on the other side these traditions have created the problem of “sexual abstinence,” which has nothing to do with either asceticism or chastity as these have been defined in the previous chapter, but merely with the purely negative pressure on the sexual impulse, exerted, independently of the individual’s wishes, by his religious and social environment.

The theological conception of “lust,” or “libido,” as sin, followed logically the early Christian conception of “the flesh,” and became inevitable as soon as that conception was firmly established.  Not only, indeed, had early Christian ideals a degrading influence on the estimation of sexual desire per se, but they tended to depreciate generally the dignity of the sexual relationship.  If a man made sexual advances to a woman outside marriage, and thus brought her within the despised circle of “lust,” he was injuring her because he was impairing her religious and moral value.[92] The only way he could repair the damage done was by paying her money or by entering into a forced and therefore probably unfortunate marriage with her.  That is to say that sexual relationships were, by the ecclesiastical traditions, placed on a pecuniary basis, on the same level as prostitution.  By its well-meant intentions to support the theological morality which had developed on an ascetic basis, the Church was thus really undermining even that form of sexual relationship which it sanctified.

Gregory the Great ordered that the seducer of a virgin shall marry her, or, in case of refusal, be severely punished corporally and shut up in a monastery to perform penance.  According to other ecclesiastical rules, the seducer of a virgin, though held to no responsibility by the civil forum, was required to marry her, or to find a husband and furnish a dowry for her.  Such rules had their good side, and were especially equitable when