S. Augustine and sexuality

This article is the section on Augustine’s doctrine regarding sexuality that was omitted from the final version of my book *Married Priests in the Middle Ages* (Claudiana, 2000) as a digression to be developed separately. In the Italian context, it is the only book describing the origin of mandatory celibacy for the clergy that is not written from a Catholic perspective. In it, I translate medieval Latin and Greek texts in favor of a married clergy, introducing a little-known form of Christianity—what J.D. Crossan would call “sarcophilic”—characterized not by celibacy but by mandatory marriage.

The notion of impurity upon which the theoretical prohibition against married Latin clergy having sex was based—a notion that emerged in the late fourth century—had a rather vague and uncertain foundation: it could not be reconciled with the idea of the natural goodness of matter, while the boundaries between conscious guilt and biological instinct were difficult to define. It took the genius of Augustine, the greatest theologian of the early Latin Church, who lived between the 4th and 5th centuries, to not only doctrinally justify the condemnation of human sexuality in and of itself, but to greatly exacerbate it, instilling in Western European culture the idea of sex as sin. In fact, he leveled against it one of the worst accusations imaginable: that of being the consequence and means of transmission of original sin, that is, of the entry of Evil into the world. This was precisely the contribution of the great African bishop and philosopher to the debate on the subject, only a few decades after the establishment of mandatory celibacy for married Latin clergy.

As for me, I believe that sexual relations should be radically avoided. I believe that nothing debases a man as much as a woman’s caresses and the physical relations that are part of marriage.

These words bear witness to Augustine’s conflicted relationship with sexuality. Possessed by a deeply sensual nature, in his youth he embraced the pagan lifestyle of unrestrained indulgence in his instincts and had two concubinal relationships and an illegitimate son, Adeodatus, who died at the age of eighteen. Augustine did not experience attraction to women as a means of realizing a symbiotic dimension that would create that tertium novum—a new third entity distinct from the individualities of the two partners—which would engage and satisfy the emotional, psychological, and physical needs of both. Instead, he reduced it to a basic genitality entirely inferior in quality of feeling and relationship to male friendship:

I do not see for what help woman was made for man, if one excludes the purpose of procreation. For if one excludes this purpose, I do not understand it: if woman was not given as a help to man to bear children, for what other help was she given? Perhaps so that together they might work the land? If help were necessary for this purpose, then man would have been a better help to man. The same applies to consolation in solitude. How much more pleasant for life and consolation is it for two friends to live together than for a man and a woman to live side by side.

A sexuality experienced exclusively as the exploitation of another’s body could not help but provoke a psychological reaction of the opposite nature: a pressing desire to free oneself from the antithesis of possession and the absence of passion, a yearning for purification and an escape toward the world of the spirit and the otherworldly. In fact, during those relationships, he had been a follower first of Manichaeism and then of Neoplatonic philosophy. The religion founded by the Persian Mani in the third century had been the last great expression of the Gnostic spirit. It was based, therefore, on the usual dualistic conception: the world of matter and bodies was the work of an evil Principle, and the human soul was a divine spark imprisoned in dark carnality. One must therefore reunite with the good spiritual God through total asceticism: the perfect Manichaean believer thus abstained entirely from sexuality, whereas the lower rank of adherents to which Augustine belonged had to commit to not procreating new human spirits imprisoned in the body using a contraceptive method analogous to the Ogino-Knaus method. Adherence to Neoplatonism, the last great Greek philosophy, the work of the thinker Plotinus who, according to his contemporaries, seemed to be ashamed of having a body, did indeed entail the rejection of dualism, but not that of the conception of matter as the element furthest from God, as non-being. From Manichaeism, however, it retained the negative sentiment toward the world, in which he believed that the life of creation was clearly dominated by evil. These earlier views were decisive in his decision to explain the universal prevalence of sin by linking it to sexuality. His arguments appealed more to the prejudices of the average person and the clichés of popular culture than to biblical or patristic foundations. The inhibitions of the common man and of Roman laws toward expressions of human love were canonized and absolutized as the voice of the universal conscience denouncing their negative nature.

The opportunity to address this topic in depth came to him in the final years of his life through the fierce controversy with the Pelagians, the “heretics” who rejected the theory of original sin. Faced with opponents who based their entire reasoning on the goodness of the world’s nature as God’s work, Augustine developed his theory of human sexuality. The distinction between the sexes was part of God’s original plan, but if Adam had not sinned, his sexuality would have been of a nature truly different from what humanity knows. Augustine goes into detail, using his imagination to create a model of sexual union in which the only thing to be preserved was reproduction:

Above all, this lust is rightly shown to be the object of modesty, and those organs which it stimulates or inhibits by its own prerogative, so to speak, are rightly considered to be the object of modesty, and not on the basis of our own self-determination. They were not like this before the fall of man. For Scripture says: “They were naked and were not ashamed” (Gen. 2:25), not because their own nakedness was unknown to them, but because it was not yet shameful… With the loss of the state of grace, so that disobedience might be struck by a corresponding punishment, a shameful change took place in the functioning of the body, whereby nakedness became improper… It was fitting that the punishment should appear above all in that organ through which the human species is propagated, because from that great sin it was changed for the worse… Thus that union, worthy of the happiness of the Garden of Eden, had there been no sin, would have produced children to be loved without the lust of which to be ashamed… Therefore, with the genital organs, moved by the will and not aroused by lust, the man would have provided the seed for offspring, and the woman would have received it whenever and to the extent that was necessary. In fact, we do not move at will only the limbs that articulate with bones connected to one another, such as the hands, feet, and fingers, but also those that articulate with flexible muscles. When we wish, we move them by shaking them, we lengthen them by stretching them, we bend them by turning them, we stiffen them by clenching... The husband would have united with his wife without the sensual stimulus of lustful passion, in the serenity of the soul and without compromising the integrity of the body. It is an experience that cannot be replicated today. However, one must consider that even if those organs were not aroused by a turbulent ardor, but were used, as they should be, by a free faculty, the male seed could still have been deposited in the wife’s womb, preserving the integrity of the female organ. Even today, when the menstrual flow of blood is emitted, the integrity of a virgin’s womb remains intact. The path by which the seed is introduced is identical to that of the discharged flow. Just as, in childbirth, it is not the groan of pain but the full development of the fetus that would have enlarged the woman’s womb, so too, for fertilization and conception, it is not libidinous stimulation but an act of will that would have united the two sexes.

Every actual physical and mental mechanism of the union between man and woman, as nature had fashioned it, was absent from the description of primordial sexuality: the erectile impulse was missing, and consequently the woman retained her virginity during intercourse, which was preserved even during and after childbirth; there was no passion reaching its peak in orgasm, but rather the clear awareness of performing a necessary reproductive function; the sperm cells would have traveled up the channels of the menstrual flow, and Eve would have become a mother without herself enduring the pains of childbirth. These fantasies achieved their desired goal: to create a true and original sexuality to be restored to God and thus to condemn the current, natural one—an emblem of man’s sinful tendencies and characterized by the libido, a powerful and negative force that deprived man of freedom and rationality and chained him to the Earth. It was, however, a punishment devised by divine Providence to make man aware that his ideal of autonomy had produced nothing but the dominion of evil over his own nature. Only God’s grace allowed the holy man not to consent with his will to the concupiscence that necessarily acted within him, while the sinful man necessarily indulged it, adding sin upon sin. As a punishment affecting all of humanity, it contained within itself the mechanism for its spread: the new modes of conception (erection conceived through death)[4] contaminated all those who were born after the expulsion from Eden. Death, suffering, sin, and otherworldly punishment: these were the consequences of Adam’s sin that the act of reproduction conveyed from generation to generation. Not even membership in the Church fully shielded one from the evil inherent in man after the Fall: it was not only the pagans who loved one another and reproduced in lust and begot children in sin, but also Christian parents:

Because of this (concupiscence), it follows that children, even if conceived in a just and legitimate Christian marriage, are not born as children of God, but as children of the world[5]…

For Augustine, baptism made one a child of God but did not definitively free one from the evil of concupiscence: in fact, it was, naturally, always present and ready to cause the one regenerated in faith to fall back into sin. Man would never attain perfection on this earth and would always have to be defined as a sinner because of the presence of concupiscence in the soul and body and the perpetual conflict it engendered:

In baptism it is not achieved that the law of sin ... is completely erased and no longer exists

Only the death of the body would put an end to the presence of sin.

The bodily matter from which Christ was born was therefore Mary’s, but it was not male concupiscence that fertilized her. Therefore, even though He was born of a body and with a body, He resembled other men but was not like them, who were generated in the flesh of sin: He, who removes original sin from others through rebirth, could not contract it through birth It is clear from these premises that Christ, as a man, once he had reached adulthood, never experienced the stirrings of physical desire: The Christian faith is not ashamed to say that Christ had genitals; rather, it is you who should be ashamed, indeed who should feel fear when you say that Christ’s genitals, against his will (for he could never have desired such a thing, he who chose to live a celibate life), were at times stimulated by such lust, and that that part of his holy body became erect in defiance of his holy intentions, producing inappropriate effects… But if you do not dare to say that Christ’s genitals became aroused and erect against his will due to desire, why, wretched one, do you dare to think it? [8] Augustine quickly became, after his death, the most authoritative theologian of the Latin Church, and his ideas—which made sexuality the telltale sign of the dominion of sin and idealized it as the antithesis of the spirit[9]—contributed so greatly to the strengthening of the spiritualistic and dualistic tendencies of Western Christianity that, one hundred and fifty years later, Pope Gregory the Great finally went so far as to define sexual union within a legitimate marriage as a sinful act.

[1] Augustine, Soliloquies 1:10, Opera Omnia III-1, Rome 1970, 408.

[2] Ibid., De Genesi ad litteram 9:5, Opera Omnia IX-2, Rome 1989, 458.

[3]See Ibid., De civitate Dei, 14, 17–26, Op. Om. V-2, Rome 1988, 336–358.

[4]See Ibid., Epistola ad Attico 5, 5. C.S.E.L. 88, II, 6.

[5]Ibid., On Marriage and the Conciliation of the Two Kingdoms 1:18, Op. Om. VII-1, Rome 1978, 426.

[6]Ibid., On the Merits and Remedies of Sin 1, 26:39, Op. Om. 17-1, Rome 1981, 68.

[7]Ibid., Against Julian, Op. Imp. VI, 22, Op. Hom. 19-2, Rome 1994, 1126.

[8]Ibid., IV, 54, 712.

[9]See S. Kierkegaard, Don Giovanni, … only with Christianity has sensuality become the counterpart of the spirit, Italian ed. Milan 1981, 65.

[10]Gregory I, Ep. to Augustine of Canterbury, S.Ch. 371, Appendix 11, c. 8.