Notes about Sexuality and Religion

St Augustine of Hippo [now in Algeria]

Page 366 – 367

When he reached adolescence, the lusts of the flesh overcame him. “Where was I, and how far was I exiled from the delights of Thy house, in that sixteenth year of the age of my flesh, when the madness of lust which hath licence through man’s viciousness, though forbidden by Thy laws, took the rule over me, and I resigned myself wholly to it.? (fn1)

His father took no pains to prevent this evil, but confined himself to giving help in Augustin’s studied. His mother, St. Monica, on the contrary, exhorted him to chastity, but in vain. And even she did not, at that time, suggest marriage, “lest my prospects might be embarrassed by the clog of a wife.”

At the age of sixteen he went to Carthage, “where there seethed all around me a cauldron of lawless loves. I loved not yet, yet I loved to love, and out of a deep-seated want, I hated myself for wanting not. I sought what I might love, in love with loving, and i hated safety….To love then, and to be beloved, was sweet to me; but more, when I obtained to enjoy the person I loved. I defiled, therefore, the spring of friendship with the filth of concupiscence, and I beclouded its brightness with the hell of lustfulness.” (fn2)

These words describe his relation to a mistress whom – faithfully many years (fn3) – he had a son.

At 19 becomes a Manichaen, which grieved his mother, who raised him Catholic

Then mother turns up in Milan, where he was teaching,  instructs marriage, finds 10-yr-old fiancee, and gives mistress the boot.

“My mistress, being torn from my side as a hinderance to my marriage, my heart which clave unto her was torn and wounded and bleeding. And she returned to Africa vowing unto Thee never to know any other man, leaving with me my son by her.” (fn4)

Augustin finds another mistress coz can’t marry until fiance is 12. But conscience troubled him, and he prayed: “Give me chastity and continence, only not yet.” (fn5)

Then in 386, before weeding, he fully converted and was baptised by St Ambrose. Became life-long celibate.

Page 376

To pion virgins raped by Goths when sacking Rome in 410: “Tush, another’s lust cannot pollute thee.”

BR: There is one proviso to the exculpation of virtuous women who are raped: they must not enjoy it. If they do, they are sinful.

ref: Confessions

Page 379

sex in marriage not sinful if for procreation. A virtuous man will wish to manage without lust. Desire for privacy shows people are ashamed. What is shameful about lust is its independence of the will. If Adam had kept away from the apple tree, our sexual members, like the rest of the body, would have obeyed the will. The need for lust in sexual intercourse is a punishment for Adam’s sin, but for which sex might have been divorced from pleasure.

Russel notes that a section of City of God, Book XIV, chapter 27 is left in Latin in the Dods’ translation

Henry Bettenson gives:

When mankind was in such a state of ease and plenty, blest with such felicity, let us never imagine that it was impossible for the seed of children to be sown without the morbid condition of lust. Instead, the sexual organs would have been brought into activity by the same bidding of the will as controlled the other organs. Then, without feeling the allurement of passion goading him on, the husband would have relaxed on his wife’s bosom in tranquillity of mind and with no impairment of his body’s integrity. Moreover, although we cannot prove this in experience, it does not therefore follow that we should not believe that when those parts of the body were not activated by the turbulent heat of passion but brought into service by deliberate use of power when the need arose, the male seed could have been dispatched into the womb, with no loss of the wife’s integrity, just as the menstrual flux can now be produced from the womb of a virgin without loss of maidenhead. For the seed could be injected through the same passage by which the flux is ejected. Now just as the female womb might have been opened for parturition by a natural impulse when the time was ripe, instead of by the groans of travail, so the two sexes might have been united for impregnation and conception by an act of will, instead of by a lustful craving.

The Confessions of St Augustin 370 CE – John K Ryan trans

(2) What was there to bring me delight except to love and be loved? But that due measure between soul and soul, wherein lie the bright boundaries of friendship, was not kept. Clouds arose from the slimy desires of the flesh and from youth’s seething spring. They clouded over and darkened my soul, so that 1 could not distinguish the calm light of chaste love from the fog of lust. Both kinds of affection burned confusedly within me and swept my feeble youth over the crags of desire and plunged me into a whirlpool of shamefLil deeds. Your wrath was raised above me, but I knew it not. I had been deafened by the clanking chains of my mortality, the penalty of my pride of soul. I wandered farther away from you, and you let me go. I was tossed about and spilt out in my fornications; 1 flowed out and boiled over in them, but you kept silent. Ah, my late-found joy! you kept silent at that time,- and farther and farther 1 went from you, into more and more fruitless seedings of sorrow, with a proud dejection and a weariness without rest.

(3) Who might have tempered my misery, turned to good use the fleeting beauties of those lowest things, and put limits to their delights, so that youth’s flood might have spent itself on the shore of married life, if rest in such pleasures could not be gained by the end of begetting children, as your law, O Lord, prescribes? Even so do you fashion the offspring of our mortality, for you have power to stretch forth a gentle hand and soften those thorns that had no place in your paradise.* For your omnipotence is not far from us, even when we are far from you. Or 1 might have listened more heedfiilly to your voice as it soimded from the clouds: “Nevertheless, such shall have tribulation of the flesh. But 1 spare you.”- “ft is good for a man not to touch a woman.”- And again: “He that is without a wife is solicitous for the things that belong to God, how he may please God. But he that is with a wife is solicitous for the tilings of this world, how he may please his wife.”- I should have listened more heedfully to these words, and having thus been made a eunuch for the sake of the kingdom of heaven,-1 would have looked with greater joy to your embraces.

(4) But I, poor wretch, foamed over: 1 followed after the sweeping tide of passions and 1 departed from you. 1 broke all your laws, but 1 did not escape your scourges. For what mortal man can do that? You were always present to aid me, merciful in your anger, and charging with the greatest bitterness and disgust all my unlawful pleasures, so that 1 might seek after pleasure that was free from disgust, to the end that, when 1 could find it, it would be in none but you. Lord, in none but you. For you fashion sorrow into a lesson to us.- You smite so that you may heal. You slay us, so that we may not die apart from you.-

Where was 1 in that sixteenth year of my body’s age, and how long was I exiled from the joys of your house? Then it was that the madness of lust, licensed by human shamelessness but forbidden by your laws, took me completely under its scepter, and 1 clutched it with both hands. My parents took no care to save me by marriage from plunging into ruin. Their only care was that 1 should learn to make the finest orations and become a persuasive speaker.

Chapter 3

(7) “Whose words but yours were those that you sang in my ears by means of my mother, your faithful servant?”

…

It was her wish, and privately she reminded me and warned me with great solicitude, that I should keep from fornication, and most of all from adultery with any man’s wife.

…

But lest I be put to scorn, I made myself more depraved than I was. Where there was no actual deed, by which I would be on equal footing with the most abandoned, I pretended that f had done what 1 had not done, lest I be considered more contemptible because I was actually more innocent, and lest I be held a baser thing because more chaste than the others.

City of God

Book XIV

(16) In fact, not even the lovers of this kind of pleasure are moved, either to conjugal intercourse or to the impure indulgences of vice, just when they have so willed. Sometimes the impulse is an unwanted intruder, sometimes it abandons the eager lover, and desire cools off in the body while it is at boiling heat in the mind. Thus strangely does lust refuse to be a servant not only to the will to beget but even to the lust for lascivious indulgence; and although on the whole it is totally opposed to the mind’s control, it is quite often divided against itself, it arouses the mind, but does not follow its own lead by arousing the body.

(19)But the genital organs have become as it were the private property of lust, which has brought them so completely under its sway that they have no power of movement if this passion fails, if it has not arisen spontaneously or in response to a stimulus. It is this that arouses shame; it is this that makes us shun the eyes of beholders in embarrassment.

(20) Hence I am inclined to think that even Diogenes himself, and the others about whom this story is told, merely went through the motions of lying together before the eyes of men who had no means of knowing what was really going on under the philosopher’s cloak. I doubt whether the pleasure of that act could have been successfully achieved with spectators crowding round…

(23) In fact, this lust we are now examining is something to be the more ashamed of because the soul, when dealing with it, neither has command of itself so as to be entirely free from lust, nor does it rule the body so completely that the organs of shame are moved by the will instead of by lust. Indeed if they were so ruled they would not be pudenda – parts of shame.

…

Nevertheless, the soul is less ashamed when it is divided against itself by the disobedience of its perverted elements than when the body does not yield to its will and obey its command; for the body is something different from it, inferior to it, and the body’s natural substance has no life without the soul.

…

Then man himself also may have once received from his lower members an obedience which he lost by his own disobedience. It would not have been difficult for God to fashion him in such a way that even what is now set in motion in his flesh only by lust should have been moved only by his will.

…

If this is so, is there any reason why we should not believe that before the sin of disobedience and its punishment of corruptibility, the members of a man’s body could have been the servants of man’s will without any lust, for the procreation of children?