The Rights of Women and the Sexual Relations/Part 1/14. Religion
RELIGION.
What has been said above of marriage and divorce will be a plain hint to thinking women as to the importance of liberation from the bonds of religious belief. But this point is too important, and the questions attaching to it are too interesting, for me not to devote a separate chapter to it.
It is undeniable that woman is inferior to man in the vigor and logic of her thought as well as of her will. It is, therefore, quite apart from the greater lack of opportunity for intellectual development, generally much harder for her than for man to form for herself an intelligent view of a liberal philosophy which has done away with the teachings of religious belief. On the other hand, woman is emotionally receptive and has an active imagination, and is, therefore, more accessible to the seductive or imposing words of the pious than man. Moreover, her position and her sufferings supply ample need for comfort, which, as is well known, only faith, "the church," is able to give.
Thus it can be explained that it must be more difficult to cure women than men from the religious malady. Weak woman is still everywhere the prey of the priests where men have already shaken off the yoke, and assuredly those blackcoated gentlemen would entirely emigrate from many a country if suddenly there were no more women.
But the more difficult it may be for woman to withdraw herself from the influence of the priests and from those teachings which afford the priests their bread and butter, the more necessary this emancipation has become for her. It would lead me too far in this place if I should attempt to revolutionize the religious world of the women by purely rational conceptions of the supernatural and superhuman things by which, in the name of religion, their mind is biassed and intimidated. This has been done on another occasion. (See "Six Letters to a Pious Man.") It must and will become clear to the women that they above all are interested in the recognition of pure humanity, of which they par excellence are the most beautiful representatives, but that there can be no thought of this recognition as long as the human being and its happiness is sacrificed to the fictitious objects of a nebulous religious world and despotic authorities. Moreover, the religions, made by men, are all designed to relegate woman to a subordinate position, who, in order to find her lot endurable, must attribute it to a "God." This "God" is nothing more than an invisible overseer of women for the benefit of the men, who hold them as slaves. For a joke, the women ought to give him the companionship of a goddess, whose duty it should be to control him. She might be called Mrs. God.
Let no woman fear to lose her "moral hold" after throwing off the bondage of religion. I have known women who have freed themselves from everything that is known as belief through their own reason, and again others who have been brought up without anything of what is generally called religion. They are more moral, more humane, more wholesome, fresher, and more lovable than all those who have allowed their souls to be adulterated by the morbid views of a religious teaching which is inimical to nature. In the woman the true and the right is already present, crystallized as it were; she only needs to protect herself from harmful influences, she needs only the courage to follow her natural inclinations, and she can be sure that she will not miss her destination and will not go astray on the road of her purely human mission. What often becomes clear to the man only after long reflection, sometimes flashes up in the woman at once. The vigor and logic of thought are in her replaced by more direct and more correct operations of the feelings and a sort of mental sight. But where a female nature has once attained the strength to translate the language of the feelings into the language of thought, she is capable of surprising the most daring philosopher. I call attention to George Sand, whose ideas on the emancipation of woman and whose psychological expositions of the most beautiful sides of ennobled humanity shame and ‘astonish us men.
There is nothing more pitiable than the fact that the greater part of the sex that preeminently represents beauty and joy pines away in the bondage of disagreeable and joyless powers. — As spring beside winter, so does this dark, odious, dehumanized priesthood stand beside the joyous, poetic, humane Grecian world, whose goddess was beauty and whose religion was joy. A second Greece will one day arise, an ennobled Greece, which will expiate the sins of the old by a complete recognition of the feminine sex. A second, revised edition of Greece designates the stage towards the attainment of which the entire aspirations of our present development must be directed.
It requires a great deal to take from man in general the religious need (I am not at all speaking of the æsthetic need) to embody his thoughts, desires, hopes, and ideals in pictures, or to worship them in symbols. It is, therefore, possible that the age of complete mental liberty will be bridged over by a period of philosophic-artistic romanticism; by a sort of new mythology which will represent the results of our historical development and of the moral ideals in works of art, and make them the objects of a new cult. If the objects of this cult only are the right ones, then it will beautify life without impeding development. It will especially afford opportunities to draw art into the foreground and lead it towards its destination, which is: the enriching, beautifying, and ennobling of public life. Architecture as well as sculpture, painting as well as music, eloquence as well as poetry, will in the future actually be placed, and that, forsooth, in the sense of the highest end of art, in the service of the collectivity, the State, the people; the craving of men for elevation above the every-day affairs of life will be satisfied through art, and the churches will be changed into temples of art or into theatres. Is it not wonderful that our church-goers, where the want of reason and humanity does not stagger them, are not repulsed at least by the want of poetry and taste? In the simple garden of the Tuileries at Paris, with its statues and promenades, more religion ts to be found than in Notre Dame and all the other churches of the metropolis. But what is the garden of the Tuileries in comparison to public resorts which have been purposely created from the desire and the idea to satisfy the ennobled sense of the people for the forms of beauty and the embodiment of thought?
An entirely new world is here opened up to man, and to the statesman who has an eye for more than the things of mere vulgar use. On the other hand, he will be filled with anger and disgust if he must daily be a witness of the way in which the rich means of society are squandered on nonsensical, absurd, and vulgar institutions, while they could so easily be employed for creations which even by their mere external form would elevate the sense of the people, would ennoble its taste, and give its ideas ethical tone. The mere visit to a beautifully located, tastefully arranged promenade has a more ennobling influence upon the coarsest of men than a visit to the most beautiful church; lingering in a beautifully equipped temple of art does more for the moral nature than all temples of "God;" the construction of a single Greek theatre would be more important for civilization than a thousand institutions of "edification."
Space does not permit me to develop my ideas on this rich theme more minutely. I will only call attention to the fact that the state of civilization, or the capacity for civilization, of a people or a single individual can surely be estimated best according to the degree of their susceptibility to the ideas of the democratic world of beauty, an expression by which I mean to comprise everything pertaining to this subject. France, Italy, and Germany are foremost in this respect. In proportion to its means, England is the most backward; and if London did not at least have its Westminster Abbey and its excellent parks, excellent, to be sure, more on account of their size than their arrangement, it would be completely submerged in shopocracy and priest rule. As far as America is concerned, we cannot make any demands without considering the newness of the life here; but even in spite of this consideration, one can easily feel discouraged and repelled by the preponderance of the spirit of ignorance and materialism throughout public life. And yet American development is perhaps not too far removed from the need of the noble man. The influx of European intellect and the headlong speed of the materialistic scramble will perhaps soon create an opposite tendency which will thrive all the better the fewer the impediments the State institutions will put in its way.
Let us, therefore, also hope for a Greek future in America. But as regards the women now, let them, in view of the coming beautiful age of an ennobled Greece, manifest their taste meanwhile In a passive way by learning to do without the confessional and prayers, without nunneries and calvaries. At the same time, let them improve whatever other opportunities present themselves daily, to the end of removing the priesthood and excluding its influence. I will mention only one thing. The Catholic "Church" regards only those marriages as valid that have received her "blessing;" she does not recognize divorce, and does not permit the remarriage of divorced persons. It is reasonable that a power bent at all hazards on subjugating the spirit should attempt to make the satisfaction of human needs dependent on its permission or conditions, in order to become in this way the mistress of the entire man, and to remind him every moment of his dependence. The Catholic "Church" has, therefore, also introduced a great number of fast-days, etc., in order to rule over man even in the matter of eating and drinking. And how should she have forgotten to rule over him in the matter of sexual love! But she exercises the most exquisite cruelty of authority by the prohibition which makes it impossible for divorced people to marry again. This prohibition means in other words: "The more unhappy people feel, the more they need our consolation; the more unhappy marriages are, the more occasion have we to intrude into family life, and especially to take advantage of the helpless women. We are the physicians who make the cure of diseases a crime in order to secure the longest possible control of the patients, We must, therefore, seek to prevent the dissolution of marriages; to that end we refuse to recognize divorce; and in order to erect another barrier against the temptation to secure one nevertheless against our will in a merely legal way, we make it an impossibility or a crime to marry again for those who are narrow enough to regard no marriage as valid without the blessing of the priest."
It is in the power of women wherever civil marriage obtains to upset the humane calculation of the priests. Let them content themselves with civil marriage, and after a possible divorce — do the same thing. No sensible woman ought any longer to consent to the self-degradation of permitting the desecrating hand of a priest to "bless" her love. Shame! These pestilent propagators of ignorance and disgust! Every bride must cast a doubt on her taste and her loveliness, if she can consent to let a priest bless, i.e., desecrate, her affection.
I call the attention of women to still another point. I maintain that piety, faith, in brief the occupation with the other world, that is with a world and with beings that have no existence, is just as pernicious to men's love towards women as the veneration of a ruler makes impossible all true relations among citizens. Whatever a man sends out to an imaginary being beyond the clouds in the shape of feeling, fancy, enthusiasm, "love," he withdraws from the real beings here who exist before his eyes, who associate with him, and to whom he ought to give his whole heart and mind. But if man will take what he has hitherto wasted on the skies back to the earth, into life, into mankind, then first he will become man in reality and learn to make of his fellow-men what they can and ought to be. Woman becomes his "God," and love his "heaven," and mankind his "immortality." Do not smile, ladies, but regard it as in sober earnest when I say to you: only the unbeliever is capable of truly loving a woman, and piety exists forever only at the expense of true humanity.
But to return to our Greek ideal. Ancient Greek life was simple, natural; the Greek life of the future, as the outgrowth of the entire preceding history, will for this reason also prove infinitely more varied, more conscious, and nobler. Womankind also must, therefore, be thought of quite differently from what we see in the figures of Greek women, which are indeed noble and classically simple, but for this very reason also somewhat ‘monotonous and inflexible. Hitherto we have sought for ideals, in the representations of the plastic arts, especially among the ancient Greeks. I am of the opinion that this has been unjust towards a later development, and has too much disregarded the laws of this development. Who doubts that ‘historical life is progressive instead of retrogressive in all directions? And why, even if classic Greece in its specific combination could not repeat itself as a whole, should not individual elements be found in the entire rich field of history which, if a later age should again construct of them a whole, must produce a richer and nobler life than that of the Greeks has been? (We do not even mention here the political anomalies and inhumanities of the Greeks.) It can hardly be contested that we are more advanced than the Greeks, not only in the sciences, but also in art. But we are not only in advance of them in the wealth of our world of conceptions, of knowledge, of ideas, of means, but also in more beautiful human ideals. It is that which is generally overlooked in adhering to our stereotyped school education and imitation. Not only in intellectual and spiritual but also in a physical respect our age can show more beautiful human beings than the Greek. The intermingling of the nations, from which the Greeks were still very much excluded, and which, besides, could only take place very gradually, is a means for the perfection not only of the intellectual but also of the physical man.
I have had opportunity to make manifold observations among both sexes of the most diverse nations. The most beautiful women — in order to speak of these — I have found in America and England, at least in so far as concerns color and contour of face. But what is generally wanting to those finely cast although sometimes somewhat stereotyped features is the soul. They are, in spite of their purity, too sharp, without softness, intellectual penetration, plasticity, and poetry. They look at us, as it were, like cold crystallizations of beauty, in which there is no active ferment of passion, or of feeling, or of imagination; in short, no deep soul-life. This beautiful dough of human development is generally destitute of the real yeast of feeling and soul. That is not only due to the state of culture but, at the same time, to the national mixture. As far as form is concerned, the English women, even when a small French foot might entitle one to the best conclusions, are frequently deformed by a most conspicuous breadth of waist. The mixture in America, however much it still betrays the English type, has already produced much more perfect forms than in England. The English length of limb, which is so apparent in both men and women, also has already partly been lost. In London a lady told me: "The English women must be admired.on the balcony, the French on the street." She was not enough of a physiologist to make clear the truth of her assertion by describing the forms. The American women seem to have acquired some French attributes; perhaps they are only wanting some German ones in order to complete the transition of the feminine world into a new Greek era.
Ideals of beauty cannot very well be native to those nations which bear too much of a national stamp in their external appearance. The ideal body as well as the ideal mind must be cosmopolitan, and they are to be found in Germany and France.
I believe that according to character as well as physique the French and the Germans, i.e., French men and German women, or German men and French women, are above all destined to establish by intermingling the new generation of a nobler race on European soil. French spirit and German character, German intellect and French vivacity; French fire and German strength, German feeling and French grace; French sense and German sentiment, German thoughts and French impulses; — those are the elements whose union would necessarily constitute the ideal of true humanity, and would correspond with each other as the blue-eyed and the brown-eyed races correspond physically.
The intermingling of the nations is so important a condition of development that without it we may expect actual stagnation. In those peoples which are most completely shut off from the intercourse of the nations civilization is-stagnant like a swamp, and only the lower spheres of development are active. One need only call to mind China, Spain, partly also insular England, especially Ireland. Italy as well as Greece fora long time seemed to be doomed to a similar fate. Perhaps the Austrian admixture was destined to revivify the noble Italian blood to such an extent that it was able to pour itself in new fermentation into the stream of human development, and thus subjugation had also in this respect to become a means of progress. It seems, moreover, that the mixture-ferments, which start the development of a people, as for instance in Italy and Greece, outlive themselves after a certain time, or lose their vital force, and that then a resuscitation must first take place before development can thrive anew. I shall not enlarge upon these suggestions. They lead to one of the most interesting speculations concerning the development of many-sided humanity.
I recommend it in passing to the earnest consideration of our artists who cannot yet break loose from. the old-fogyism of the schools, which leads them again and again to make their studies, instead of among living men, only among dead statues, — instead of in the moving present, only in immobile antiquity. Two thousand years after Christ they will find quite different human ideals than two hundred years before the crucifixion.
But the women, I hope, will not resent it if I also direct their attention to the meeting and intermingling of the nations, which is the quietly effective means for the universal ennobling of humanity, but which can take place only in a condition of complete liberty where every obstacle of mutual prejudice, mutual embarrassment, and mutual egotism will be torn down. The graces of the arts and the genii of humanity can only take up their abode where a free spirit in free intercourse has domesticated the best and the most beautiful which human development has produced in the course of the centuries.
But the philistines will ask why this chapter bears the heading "Religion."