The intrinsic duality of human nature—our intense and perpetually antagonistic desires for, on the one hand, experiences of a sublime, elevated, purely spiritual variety and, on the other, for sensations that appeal sheerly to our earthly and even prurient selves—is a phenomenon that has posed a profound moral dilemma to philosophers throughout the ages. Christian dogma has ever rested on a staunch and unambiguous principle: to wit, that the sensual strivings in man must be utterly subdued and, if possible, extirpated entirely from our bosoms. Notwithstanding nearly two thousand years of this teaching, however, society persists in contriving the means by which our basest impulses can be continuously gratified, along with our most exalted.

Thus, the theatregoer of Elizabethan days might—after devoting several hours to viewing the incomparable Burbage perform King Lear at the Globe—cap his afternoon of leisure by attending the protracted public torture, evisceration, and dismemberment of a condemned traitor. An educated Frenchman of the Jacobin era might take a respite from his perusal of Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs to watch a dozen gruesome beheadings at the Place de la Révolution. And even in our own, more enlightened and ostensibly less barbarous time and place, the Sunday churchgoer might return directly to his home after his weekly worship and—previous to partaking of his Sabbath dinner—spend a diverting hour by poring over the latest edition of one of those increasingly prevalent “penny” publications whose contents are replete with the most graphic imaginable accounts of appalling calamities, unspeakable atrocities, and grisly crimes.

To the individual whose mind is unfettered by the unreflecting prejudices of mere conventional wisdom, the co-existence within the human bosom of these seemingly irreconcilable impulses suggests a novel, perhaps even heretical, idea: viz. that the cultivation of one’s fullest humanity depends, not upon the suppression of either one’s spiritual or sensational desires, but rather on the judicious indulgence of them both—that these two predilections, far from being mutually exclusive, are, on the contrary, complementary and inter-dependent: inextricably bound together in ways that neither science nor theology has taken into consideration. In short (and contra the orthodoxies of our religious tradition), it may well be the case that, for the higher self to achieve its full fruition, the lower must be permitted its own gross, if stimulating, nourishment—in precisely the same way that, to produce a perfect rose, the plant must be rooted in soil that is fertilized by the richest (and often rankest) ordure.