Note 109 — Chapter IV · THE SONG OF THE MOTH

This solution of the libido problem was brought about in a similar manner by the flight from the world during the first Christian century. (The cities of the Anchorites in the deserts of the Orient.) People mortified themselves in order to become spiritual and thus escape the extreme brutality of the decadent Roman civilization. Asceticism is forced sublimation, and is always to be found where the animal impulses are still so strong that they must be violently exterminated. The masked self-murder of the ascetic needs no further biologic proof.

Chamberlain (“Foundations of the Nineteenth Century”) sees in the problem a biologic suicide because of the enormous amount of illegitimacy among Mediterranean peoples at that time. I believe that illegitimacy tends rather to mediocrity and to living for pleasure. It appears after all that there were, at that time, fine and noble people who, disgusted with the frightful chaos of that period which was merely an expression of the disruption of the individual, put an end to their lives, and thus caused the death of the old civilization with its endless wickedness.