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The industrious races complain a great deal about having to tolerate idleness: it was a masterpiece of the English instinct to make Sunday so holy and so tedious, a form of cleverly invented and shrewdly introduced fasting, that the Englishman, without being aware of the fact, became eager again for weekdays and workdays. Things like it are frequently seen also in the ancient world (even if, as is reasonable among southern people, not exactly connected to work -). There must be fasts of several kinds, and in every place where powerful impulses and habits rule, the lawgivers had to take care to insert extra days in the calendar [Schalttage] in which such an impulse is placed in chains and learns once again to go hungry. Seen from a higher viewpoint, the periods when entire races and ages get afflicted with some moral fanaticism or other look like such imposed times of compulsion and fasting, during which an impulse learns to cower down and abase itself, but also to cleanse itself and become sharper. Individual philosophical sects (for example the Stoa in the midst of Hellenistic culture and its lecherous air heavy with aphrodisiac scents) permit this sort of interpretation as well.- And with this is also given a hint for an explanation of that paradox why it was precisely in Europe's Christian period and, in general, first under the pressure of Christian value judgments that the sex drive sublimated itself into love (amour-passion ).