When Krafft-Ebing invented the word ’sadism’ to describe those who took erotic pleasure in inflicting pain, he was implicitly associating the Marquis with inquisitors such as Conrad of Marburg. Even more shocking to devout sensibilities, however, was his analysis of what he termed – after Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, an Austrian nobleman with a taste for being whipped by aristocratic ladies dressed in furs – ’masochism’. ‘Masochists subject themselves to all kinds of maltreatment and suffering in which there can be no question of reflex excitation of lust.’ In consequence, Krafft-Ebing declared, he had no hesitation in identifying ‘the self-torture of religious enthusiasts’, and even martyrs, as a form of masochism.
Seven hundred years after Elizabeth of Hungary had surrendered herself to the strict ministrations of her confessor, the unsentimental gaze of psychiatry presumed to stare at her as she had never been stared at before. A masochist, Krafft-Ebing ruled, was the perfect counterpart of a sadist. ‘The parallelism is perfect.’
Yet even as psychiatry served to challenge Christian assumptions, so also did it fortify them. Krafft-Ebing’s conclusions were not nearly as clinical as either his critics or his admirers cared to think. Raised a Catholic, he took for granted the primacy of the Christian model of marriage. The great labor of the Church in fashioning and upholding monogamy as a lifelong institution was one that he deeply valued. ‘Christianity raised the union of the sexes to a sublime position by making woman socially the equal of man and by elevating the bond of love to a moral and religious institution.’
It was not despite believing this, but because of it, that Krafft-Ebing, by the end of his career, had come to believe that sodomy should be decriminalized. Homosexuals, he declared, might be no less familiar with ‘the noblest inspirations of the heart’ than any married couple.
In cool and dispassionate language, Krafft-Ebing put the seal on a revolution in the dimensions of the erotic that was without parallel in history. Paul, by twinning men who slept with men and women who slept with women, had set in train a recalibration of the sexual order that now, in an age of science, attained its apotheosis.
‘Homosexuality’ was not the only medical-sounding compound of Greek and Latin to which Psychopathia Sexualis introduced the world. There was a second: ‘heterosexuality’. All the other categories of sexual behavior that Krafft-Ebing had identified – sadism, masochism, fetishistic obsessions – were mere variations of the one great and fundamental divide: that which existed between heterosexual and homosexual desire.
Categories that had taken almost two millennia to evolve were now impregnably defined. Soon enough, the peoples of Europe and America would forget that they had ever not been there. Exported by missionaries and embedded within colonial legal systems across the world, a way of conceptualizing desire that had originated with an itinerant Jew back in the reign of Nero would come to enjoy a global sway. In the sexual order as in so much else, the roots of modernity reached deep into Christian soil.