universal, not individualised,
the world, the cosmos, God.

While the mystic attempts to embody the inconceivable Deity in his soul,
the worshipper of the Madonna, like the artist, imaginatively creates a
being which he sets up for contemplation at the greatest possible
distance. The mystic is blind, as it were; he is yearning personified,
and he would force God into his soul. The metaphysical lover needs a
plastic figure which, in the extremest case, may represent the whole
world to him, and this figure must be a woman. It is a historical
accident that this woman is frequently connected with a woman of
ecclesiastical tradition, an accident strengthened by insufficient
creative power on the part of the lover, or lack of courage and
self-confidence. He is grateful for the support given to him by
tradition. The greatest metaphysical lovers, Dante, Goethe and
Michelangelo, freely created the objects of their love; the Protestant
Goethe--whom some people even accuse of paganism--clung more closely
than either of the others to the Mary of Catholicism (in the final scene
of _Faust_). The worship of the Madonna is the love of great solitary
souls, and--as is proved by Goethe--of the great souls in the hours of
their last solitude.

While there was only unindividualised sexual instinct, the chastity of
woman was of no account; we have seen that neither the Eastern nations
nor the Greeks attached any value to it. The woman who had best
fulfilled her vocation as a mother, was the woman most highly respected.
In the East, as well as with Jews and Romans, a woman could be divorced
by her husband for sterility. The only women who were, to some extent,
appreciated for their own sakes, were the Greek hetaerae. But when
asceticism became a moral value, chastity, too, was regarded as a
virtue, and personal love between two individuals invested it with a
profound significance. Henceforth woman should no longer be regarded as
the vehicle for the gratification of male sensuality; it should be her
mission to lead the lover to spiritual perfection. The fusion of the
older ideal of womanhood, the mother (acknowledged and sanctioned by
religion in the mother of the Saviour), with the newer ideal, the
Virgin, created the ideal of the late Middle Ages: the virgin with the
Child. Here the natural vocation of woman and the fantastic mission laid
upon her by man were united in a paradoxical higher intuition, and it
is superfluous to point out th