MYSTICISM AND SENSUALITY
it may become painful, it is in blind darkness like the animal's. It is in fact a means of reconciling desire for the soul's salvation with desire to be lost in the mortal bliss of an embrace. But the desire for a desirable object is this time the desire for an object with no chann of its own; it is the unintelligible and unconscious desire for death or at least damnation. Guilty sensuality and death An analysis of delectation throws light on the hitherto inexplicable subject of man's sensuality. This is how it must be regarded if we are to see what links it to man's only pure experience, the mystical experience. I believe that to take human sensuality in its loftiest form, in the way the Carmelites' book does, as something intended by God and not dependent on the mistaken directions it has sometimes followed and which have sullied it, will lead us away from t~e illumination of mysticism. Limited sensuality with its permitted aspects covers up the mortal aspects that are seen in the flight of the drone or the temptation of the religious, whose meaning is more remotely evident in morose delectation. What is true is that the kind of genital activity intended by God, limited to marriage, and more generally the sort of sexuality thought of as natural and normal, as opposed on the one hand to unnatural deviations and on the other to experiences considered as guilty and sin-laden, and having a harsher flavour because of that-the lure of the forbidden fruit. Mostly, for a pure soul, licit sexual desire would be absolutely pure. That is possible, but that partial truth hides a fundamental truth. In spite of the common tendency to associate an element of shame with sexuality it is reasonable and in confomlity with the Church's attitude to number sexuality as a function among the neces'sary activities. There is something to be praised and marvelled at in the lovers' embrace, quite the contrary of the element of shame I have discussed. The