375. There also exist families in some regions which are more than others exposed to jealousy as an illness. They keep their wives locked up, peremptorily forbidding them to have any conversation with men, and stopping them looking out of windows at them by fitting downward-facing grills to the windows; and they frighten them with threats of death, if the suspicions they have aroused should reveal any reason for them. There are other kinds of severe treatment which wives in these case suffer at the hands of their jealous husbands. There are two reason for this kind of jealousy. One is the fact that their thoughts about the spiritual side of the church are held captive and strangled; the other is their deep-seated desire for revenge.
[2] As regards the first reason, the fact that their thoughts about the spiritual side of the church are held captive and strangled, its effects can be deduced from the demonstrations given above, that everyone's conjugial love depends on the state of the church with him, and since the church is from the Lord, that love comes only from the Lord (130, 131). So when in place of the Lord, human beings either living or dead are approached and invoked, it follows that there is no state of the church with which conjugial love can act in unison. Even less so, when their minds are driven to that kind of worship by threatening them with dire imprisonment. The result of this is that their thoughts together with what they say are held captive and strangled; and if this happens, they are subject to the influence of attacks on the church or delusions about it. This can only lead to a wave of heat for whores and frost for a wife. It is the combination of both these effects in one person that produces such an irrepressible outburst of jealousy.
[3] As regards the second reason, the deep-seated desire for vengeance, this completely stops the inflow of conjugial love, absorbs and swallows it, and turns its heavenly pleasure into the hellish one of vengeance. The nearest target for this is against a wife. It also appears as if a malign atmosphere, impregnated with the poisonous effluvia of the surrounding district, is a subsidiary reason.
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