ABSTRACT
God is said to be all love and justice, but if the people look at the way things are, it is obvious, according to de Sade, that this conception of Deity is a mask which men have placed over the intolerable truth. God's ways to man cannot be justified on the grounds that He is interested for their own sake in creatures that can suffer. As for the Enlightenment concept of nature as beneficent, the advanced thinkers had already arrived at an inverse Darwinism. Freedom is the exertion of mastery; the greatest freedom is to cause both physical suffering and psychological humiliation in the course of sexual activity. Swinburne, at any rate, was claiming that the literary morality of the day was threatening to become, in part had become, a negative freedom. Hegel saw history as the struggle, increasingly successful, for human freedom. Swinburne's insights into eroticism, therefore, should not be dismissed because they are the insights of a masochist.
