Notes about Sexuality and Religion

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Plato said it (“refrain from plowing in every female field”), borrowing says Clement, from Leviticus (“You shall not have intercourse with your neighbor’s wife to defile yourself with her,” 18:20) but the Paedagogus gives a different justification for this rule than Plato: in monogamy, the Laws found a means of limiting the other of the passions and the humiliating servitude in which they could keep men; 76 as for Clement, he sees in it the assurance that semen – which he said contained the “ideas of nature,” 77 making fertilization part of the relations between God and his creatures – will not be wasted someplace without honor.

 

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Clement evokes a medical theme that is completely traditional: the long series of medical ailments, diseases, and weaknesses to which the too frequent use of love’s pleasures can lead. Clement alludes to the direct proofs that were ordinarily given, along with the indirect ones, which were no less customary: the vigor of all those, men or animals, who abstain as much as possible from sexual relations. Clement links this banal idea to Democritus’s proposition, often repeated as well, that orgasm is “a little epilepsy.” While not endorsed by all the physicians, this related notion turns up rather frequently in the medical literature: in its literal form as in Galen, or in a broader form as in Rufus of Ephesus, who places the “violent movements” that accompany coitus in the “family of spasms.” Now, Clement gives a precise meaning to this connection between epilepsy and the sexual act, a meaning which he supports moreover with a double reference that allows him to interweave a text by Democritus – “a man is born of a man and is torn from him”  – with a verse from Genesis: “this is the bone of my bones and the flesh of my flesh” (2:2 3). If the body is so violently shaken in the emission of semen, it’s because the substance that is detached from it and projected contains the material reasons for forming another man like the one it comes from. Here one perceives the tendency, which was frequent in antiquity, to make ejaculation the symmetrical analog of childbirth. But by citing Adam, from whom God has extracted a rib in his sleep with which to make his companion, Clement is clearly evoking God’s “collaboration” in this work of a purely masculine flesh. So the prescription not to overindulge doesn’t just relate to the prudence of bodies. The necessarily costly tremors of the emission of semen are a reminder of the indispensable gravity of this synergy.

From these great principles of restriction in sexual relations, awe can deduce a whole series of diverse prescriptions…

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From the millennial viewpoint, the age of virginity is therefore the age of the ascent of souls toward incorruptible heaven. In this vision, virginity itself has two aspects: that of a spiritual kin-ship in which the Church.plays a central role – as a virgin impregnated by the Lord, it raises virgin souls, who are lifted by their virginity up to heaven; and that of a spiritual combat in which the soul must fight off the Enemy’s constant attacks.

The last part of Thecla‘s discourse allows this same age to be viewed from a spatial perspective of sorts: from above the world and its order. It is there, in fact, that Methodius places a discussion whose structures and elements are clearly philosophical. It’s a matter of refuting the claim that the stars decide the destiny of men.

Let’s leave aside the problem of understanding the points at issue in this long debate. If it has its place in this Banquet devoted to virginity, this is because it enables Methodius to maintain that God is not responsible for evil – that he and all the celestial beings remaining under the law of his government are “far removed from evil, and incapable of human actions which spring from the sense of pleasure and pain,’ that the existence of laws that compel and forbid is not contradictory (which would be the case if destiny were sealed once and for all), that there is a difference between the righteous and the unrighteous, “a gulf between the unruly and the temperate,” that “good is the enemy of evil, and evil is different from good”; that “meanness is reprehensible” and that “God cherishes and glorifies virtue.”

All these principles are recalled to make room, in the world where we exist, for liberty whose absence would make chastity worthless: “To do good or evil is in our power, and not decided by the stars. For there are two motions in us, the lust of the flesh and that of the soul, differing from each other, whence they have received two names, that of virtue and that of vice.”

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A first point has to do with the relationship between this tekhne of virginity and the pagan practice of continence. This is a question that one might think was “outdated” in this period, but it draws its meaning and its topicality from the fact that ascetic existence defines itself as the “philosophical life.”

In the preface to his Treatise on Virginity, Gregory of Nyssa explains the plan his text will follow. After underscoring the negative aspects of ordinary life. he indicates that, following “the right method,” he will describe “the philosophical life.”

So one shouldn’t be surprised to find an explicit intention to separate Christian virginity as clearly as possible from pagan continence, combined with the reutilization of a number of themes by which the latter was justified. He writes, in a general way, and subject to a few specific modulations, a critique of the virginity that was connected in the pagan world with status or with religious functions; a reference, in the form of examples, to the recognition given to the virtue of women; and a reiteration of the debates on marriage and the tranquility of the soul.

Some Christian authors simply deny that the pagans ever esteemed virginity. This is what Athanasius maintains: “It’s only among us Christians that it is honored.” More cautiously, and in line with a historico-religious ranking order, Chrysostom recognizes that the Greeks “admired and venerated” virginity. He thus places them above the Jews, who are said to have rejected it – as is proved by their antipathy to Christ born of a virgin – but below God’s Church, to which it owes all its zeal

But its the Latin Fathers who, on account of their milieu, tend to take these practices of pagan continence into consideration. In any case, Saint Jerome devotes the whole conclusion of the Adversus Jovinium to pagan references: examples of the virgins who were honored in Greece and Rome; recollections of the heroic widows who stayed faithful to the memory of their husbands and went so far as to sacrifice themselves on their tombs; the celebrity of certain Roman nobles renowned for their chastity; reflections by moralists like Theophrastus, who recommended abstaining from marriage. And, with more emphasis than exactness, Saint Jerome invokes the opinion of Aristotle, Plutarch, and “our Seneca”…

page  145 On the Arts of Virginity

But if the paradisaical state already includes this duality of sexes, what are its meaning and function? Are we to imagine that there were sexual relations in paradise before the fall, hence in a state of perfect innocence?

The reply is universally negative. Either it is assumed, like Origen following Philo, that it was the sexual act, incapable of being innocent, that caused the fall, or that sexual relations occurred after the fall and as its consequence.

But this nonexistence of sexual relations in paradise doesn’t have the same reason or the same meaning for everyone. The game of exegesis is delimited by two texts: that of the first chapter of Genesis (1:28), where in blessing man and woman God tells them to increase, multiply, and fill the earth; and that of the mid chapter, where God decides to give man a woman so that me might have a helpmate similar to him.

This idea of a helper obviously supports the affirmation that the role of Eve was to be a companion, not a spouse. According to Gregory of Nyssa, this “help” should be understood as participation in the contemplation of the face of God which, before the fall was Adam’s sole desire.

It is also suggested, it seems, by a passage of the treatise On Virginity of Chrysostom, explaining that a woman becomes an obstacle for the spiritual life of man through a reversal of the role that was hers before the fal1.

But if such is the paradisiacal function of the woman, two questions arise. What might be the meaning of the precept “Increase and multiply? Must one suppose, like certain adversaries that Gregory of Nyssa criticizes without naming, that the human race could grow only after the fall and that the latter therefore has something good about it, since “without it the human race would have continued to consist of the first couple”?

Gregory of Nyssa asserts that there is no marriage between angels, and yet “their armies constitute infinite legions”: this is because there exists, for the angelic nature, a mode of multiplication that for us humans cannot be conceived or formulated. However, it is certain that there is one, and such must be the power of multiplication given to man in the angelic existence that was his when he left the hands of the Creator.

Now comes the second question: Why was it that God, while giving the first couple an angelic mode of reproduction, endowed

page 161 Virginity and Self-Knowledge

Basil gives two forms to this rupture, both of which, although each in a different way, are based on the idea of a certain equivalence between pleasure as a principle of attraction between the sexes, and pleasure as a general form of darkening or weighing down of the soul by the body.

Basil first explains that pleasure (hedone) is generically unique, that consequently it’s necessary to dominate not only the pleasure that drives us to the union of the sexes, but also all the others as well. And since the flow of pleasure doesn’t cease to come and go, to become agitated and bring its disturbance through the five senses and even to tangible objects, and from these, turning back on the soul, it is necessary—and this will be a crucial component of the art of virginity—to watch these entrances and exits and channels, to stay vigilant at the gate of the senses.

A whole economy of these pleasure flows must be constructed by focusing one’s attention on the boundaries of the body and the outside world, on these organs of perception and what they may perceive. An economy of the gaze, which mustn’t be directed haphazardly to everything the eyes can capture; an economy of hearing, which mustn’t attend to everything that is said, but to what it would be useful to learn. What is recommended, in short, is a selective closing off of the body to the external world, in response to a danger intrinsic to the pleasure urges that disturb and in a certain way “sexualize” the soul.

Now, among these senses that need to be closed at least partially, there is one to which Basil gives a central importance. It’s the sense of touch.

For two reasons, he says: The sense of touch is more powerful than the others for giving rise to the pleasures of sex. It is also important for tasting (which Basil seems to consider a kind of touching), and food and drink are among the most important factors for stimulating the sexual pleasures. Second and foremost, the sense of touch functions as the general form of all the senses. In each of them, it is touch that imprints the soul with the image of the external things whose different kinds touch the body; it is what makes them spread through the body and trouble the soul. The sense of touch constitutes the general medium, as were, of the whole corporeal sensitivity. It is more or less present, more or less active, more or less determinant in every form of sensation. So if one intends to control the movement of the

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pleasures that stream through all the sensory channels, one should pay the most attention to touch.

“Avoid contacts”: a precept that must be understood in the precise sense of the word. Basil cites several applications of this: avoid embraces, contacts between men and women, even brothers and sisters, while those taking place between two persons of the same sex are without danger.

But it should also be understood in a more general way: reduce the strength of the body, weaken its responses, make sure that its impulses don’t move the soul too forcefully, due to its excessive vigor. And more generally still: avoid the contact of the body as a whole (as the site of all contact) with the soul.

This theme of separation between body and soul, their reciprocal isolation, returns in different forms throughout the text: image of the soul that must carefully close its windows, instead of being like the prostitutes who keep theirs wide open and always show themselves there; of the master of the house who keeps his door locked shut when the soldiers try to get in to find lodging; of water and oil that must stay separated to avoid being troubled. Let the soul and the body remain carefully separated, therefore: by keeping them both “in their place, in their role, and in accordance with their use,” one will make peace reign between them.

But for Basil these different procedures of separation—of the senses with respect to sensible things, of the body with respect to the world, and of the soul with respect to the body—are only one side of the art of virginity. A whole other aspect concerns the soul itself and the work it must do on itself.

That the purity of the body is nothing without that of the soul is a very traditional theme to which Basil gives several forms. That of the dual purity: one must bring as much attention to bear on the movements of the soul as on those of the body: “if through fasting we cut off the passions of the body, but leave the soul agitated by its own weaknesses, by envy, hypocrisy, and the movements of the other passions, we will not make the body’s abstinence useful to virtue. And if we cleanse the soul of its passions, but we give the body over to the passions of the belly and other raptures, even without the disorder of indecency, we cannot make our life perfect in virtue.” That of the fundamental purity of the soul, which constitutes the primary and determining element compared to the integrity of the body: “For

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if the soul is free of corruption, the body also is preserved without corruption; but if the soul has been corrupted by bad thoughts, even if the body still appears to be without corruption, no purity will be found in its absence of corruption, since it is corrupted by impure thoughts.”

Finally, regarding physical castration, Basil puts forward the principle of the sinful intention. Not only is there no merit in physically making oneself a voluntary eunuch, but such a one is to be considered a sinner because he refuses to ensure the virginity of his own soul and hence he consents to the desire without allowing himself the act: “the removal of parts denounces the adultery of the one who mutilates himself,” “therefore if he has disarmed himself by cutting off the instrument of adultery, so that people think he doesn’t fornicate with his body, but he fornicates in his intention.”

So a specific effort of purification is necessary, in addition to all abstentions, separations, and closures required by the purification of the body. Basil first raises the question of the persistence of images: objects that strike the senses may very well disappear, but their image remains in the soul. They are like those flaming javelins that carry fire to the target where they stay stuck, or they imprint a trace that remains, as if on wax.

Therefore, since its not possible to keep the eyes of the body always closed, one must take care not to retain such images. It wouldn’t serve any purpose to fast if one continued to cultivate those thoughts. What soul could be called virgin if it kept the one that it loves in an embrace “with be incorporeal hands of thought”?

The body, which is always mingled with the soul and which follows its movements, would thus be corrupted by it and would accompany it in its dreams. So it’s necessary to work constantly to erase such images and replace them, on the wax of the soul, with meditations on holy things with their figures or “characters.”

But one must also consider that acts can be committed in the soul. An act is not necessarily done by the body. However, here Basil is not referring to a juridical conception that would make the complete intention equivalent to the implementation of the idea itself. He is utilizing a physiology of the soul according to which thoughts will be inscribed on the soul’s “table,” where they will not be erased, even if forgetfulness or inattention shrouds them…

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ontological privilege, which confers a particular ascetic importance on it. Like gluttony, it has its roots in the body. Impossible to vanquish it without subjecting it to austerities. Whereas anger or dejection are combated “by the soul’s industry alone,” it canner be rooted out without “corporeal mortification, vigils, fasts, work that breaks the body.”

Which doesn’t exclude, on the contrary, the struggle that one must conduct against oneself, since fornication can spring from thoughts, images, memories: “The demon through his subtle cunning has insinuated in our heart the memory of woman, starting with our mother, our sisters, our relatives or certain pious women, we must as quickly as possible rid ourselves of this memory, for fear that if we delay too long, the tempter will seize the occasion to make us think of other women before we realize it.”

However, fornication presents a major difference from gluttony. The combat against the latter must be waged via moderation since one cannot give up all nourishment: One must exercise “the control necessary for life […] lest the body show be injured by our fault and unable to fulfill its spiritual and necessary duties.” We have to keep this natural penchant for nourishment at a distance, cope with it, not try to root it out:  it has a natural legitimacy; to totally deny it, fatally so, that is, would is to “burden one’s soul with a crime.”

So it’s a matter of completely doing away with a penchant who elimination does not cause the death of our body. Fornication is the only one of the eight vices that is at the same time innate, corporeal in origin, and that must be entirely destroyed like those vices of the soul—avarice and pride.

A radical mortification, consequently, which lets us live in our body while liberating us from the flesh. “Leave the body while remaining in the body”

It’s to that beyond-nature, in earthly existence, that the struggle against fornication gives us access. It “pulls us out of the earthly mire.” It allows us to live in this world a life that is not of this world. Because it is the most radical, this mortification brings us, already here below, the highest promise: “in the fragile flesh” it confers “the citizenship which the saints have the promise of possessing once they are delivered from carnal corruptibility.”

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So one can see how fornication, while being one of the eight components of the table of the vices, is in a special position relative to the others: the head of the causal chain, at the origin of the fails and the combat, one of the most difficult and most decisive points of the ascetic struggle.

2. In the fifth Conference, Cassian divides the vice of fornication into three types. The first consists in the “intercourse of the sexes” (commixtio sexes utriusque); the second is accomplished without contact with a woman” (absque femineo tactu)—which got Onan his condemnation; the third is “conceived in heart and mind”.

Almost term by term, the same distinction is reiterated in the twelfth Conference: carnal intercourse (carnalis commixtio), to which Cassian here gives the name fornicatio in the restricted sense; impurity, immundita, which is produced without contact with a woman, when one is sleeping or keeping vigil, and is due to carelessness of a mind without circumspection”; finally, the libido that develops in the “recesses of the soul” and without there any “corporeal passion” (sine passion corporis).

This specification is important because it is the only thing that enables us to understand what Cassian means by the general term fornication, to which moreover he does not give any overall definition. But it is important above all for the use he makes of these three categories, which is so different from that found in many earlier texts.

There existed a traditional trilogy of these sins of the flesh: adultery, fornication (which translated the Greek word porneia an designated extramarital sexual relations), and the corruption of children. It is these categories, in any case, that one finds in the Didache: “You will not commit adultery, you will not commit fornication, you will not seduce young boys.”

They are the categories that one also finds in the letter of Barnabas: “Do not commit fornication or adultery; do not corrupt children.”

It often happened subsequently that only the first two terms were retained – fornication designating all the sexual faults in general and adultery those that violate the obligation of faithfulness in marriage. But in any case, it was completely customary to combine this enumeration with precepts concerning lustfulness in thought or in one’s gaze, or everything that might lead to the consummation of a forbidden sexual act: “Be not a lustful one; for lust leads the way…

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The symmetry between the art of monastic life and the art of matrimonial existence should not be overestimated. The differences are legion, of course. And on the specific theme of concupiscence, it has to be noted that monastic asceticism will give rise to practices of constant self-monitoring, of decipherment of one’s own secrets, of an indefinite search in the depths of one’s heart, of an elucidation of those things that may be a delusion, an error, and a deception on the part of oneself; whereas the precepts re matrimonial life will take the form of a “juridiction” much more than of a “veridiction,” and that the theme of debt will give rise to an endless work of codification and a long reflection of jurisprudence.

The dimorphism is already apparent in texts like those of Chrysostom. It will become more and more so, profoundly marking the way sexual behaviors are thought of and regulated in the West: in terms of truth (but in the form of a secret deep inside oneself to be elucidated indefinitely if one intends to be “saved”), and in terms of law (but as much in the form of a law of debt and of obligations as in that of prohibition and transgression). This dimorphism is still far from having disappeared, or at least from having exhausted its effects.

But it seems to me that at its origin one must not continue to find the juxtaposition in Christianity of an ancient law of marriage and the more recent forms of a complete renunciation of the world. It was the movement to constitute, in the exercise of pastoral power, a tekhne of marital life – inferior to that of monastic life, but not unrelated to it – that led at the same time to making the concupiscence of each spouse (and not the sharing of progeny) the essential form of the marital relation and to organizing between these two solitudes an intersection of responsibilities and a linkage through debt. Even in the dual form of marriage, the basic problem is what to do with one own concupiscence; hence it is the relation of oneself to oneself. And the internal law of marital sex was first organized as a way ce managing through the other this fundamental self-to-self relation.

page 221 The Good and the Goods of Marriage

Virginity is superior to marriage, without marriage being a bad thing or virginity an obligation: Saint Augustine received this general thesis from a tradition that was already clearly formed before him. It runs through his whole oeuvre; he develops it in the two groups of texts he devoted to the problems of marriage and of virginity: in the first years of his bishopric, when he felt the need to discuss both the Manichean-inspired arguments (in De continentia, around 396) and the propositions of Jovinian (in De bono coniugali, 401, or De sancta virginitate, 401); then at the time of his anti Pelagian polemics, fifteen years or so later, when he bases himself a the superiority of strict and total continence, acknowledged by current adversaries, particularly Julian of Eclanum, to argue at concupiscence is an evil.

A passage of De sancta virginitate clearly situates the general principle, at least in a negative way. It’s the same one, with perhaps different emphases and polemical edges, that one can find in Gregory of Nyssa, in John Chrysostom, or in Jerome’s Adversus Jovinianum. “Some, by aiming for virginity, have thought marriage hateful even as adultery: but others, by defending marriage, would have the excellence of perpetual continence to deserve nothing more than married chastity; as though either the good of Susanna be the lowering of Mary: or the greater good of Mary ought to be the condemnation of Susanna.” Against these two errors, Augustine asserts that marriage and virginity are not to be differentiated from each other as evil is from good, or assimilated

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…does it make any difference whether or not she stays faithful to her lover? From the viewpoint of the juridical pactum, it makes no difference since the only pact that existed – the one connecting her to her husband – was broken. And yet one can say that, while she was dishonest. she is less so if she stays attached to her accomplice than if she again changes partners. But she is more honest if the one for whom she abandons him is her husband to whom she returns. As one sees, fides modulates the sin according to degrees that the violation of the pactum doesn’t recognize.

• Picture now a man and a woman living together; they don’t seek to have any children—without doing anything criminal to prevent a birth. They have made the commitment of fidelity and will honor it till one of them dies. To this union that no juridical document sanctions—and is therefore cohabitation—one can give the name “marriage” as long as the fidelity is respected. Thus, from the standpoint of morality fides alone can have the same effects as having had a pactum recognized by the law.

• Lastly, think of a man and woman who aren’t married. They have a transitory liaison. For his part, the man is only waiting for an occasion to find a rich and honorable woman. But the woman intends to remain faithful to her lover; and once she’s dropped, she practices continence. One can’t say that she hasn’t sinned since she’s had relations outside of marriage. But could one call her adulterous? And if, during the entire time of her relationship, she didn’t do anything to keep from having children, isn’t she better than “a good number of matrons,” who are not adulterous but use marriage only to satisfy their concupiscence?

These examples show very clearly the non-coincidence of fides with something that would be a purely juridical bond. Even where it seems to have the same form and the same consequences – speaking of adultery – it brings in elements that are irreducible…

page 256 The Libidinization of Sex

The physical union of the sexes, when it takes place in marriage with procreation as its end, is therefore free of fault, iruidpabalis as De bono coniugali says. Is there more to be said? 

We have seen that it had its place, in the creation of the humany being, before sin and the fall, even if it didn’t have any reality then: it was the work of God who provided it for the constitution or a human race as a “society.” In today’s marriage, it still has this role, since it is necessary for procreation; and this procreation is one of the ends and goods of marriage. This being the case, can not be considered a good itself—a good originally placed by God and maintained after the fall? Isn’t one tempted to pass from the bonum conjugale to a bonum sexuale?

A brief evocation, in The City of God, of the sexual act in its form and its unfolding reveals the nature of the problem. In that passage Augustine faithfully reiterates the classic description of the sexual climax with its three essential points: a physical paroxysm that one can’t control, a tremor of the soul which is overwhelmed by pleasure despite its resistance, a final eclipse of thought that seems resemble death. “The desire (libido) by which the shameful pars of the body are excited” is not satisfied with “taking possession of the whole body and its outward members, but also makes itself felt within, and moves the whole man with a passion in which mental emotion is mingled with bodily appetite, so that the pleasure is the greatest of all bodily pleasures. So possessing indeed is this pleasure, that at the moment in which it is consummated, all mental

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activity is suspended.” The conclusion addresses the situation per simply: “What friend of wisdom and holy joys (sapientiae sanctorumque gaudiorum), who, being married, would not prefer to beget children without this ‘desire’ (libido)?”

The formulation is worth noting: the “friends of wisdom” who would wish to be dared this violent infirmity are undoubtedly also the pagans who have tried to practice the virtue that the Christians who seek heavenly joys in addition to the wisdom of their faith practice.

Augustine clearly indicates that he is referring to an ancient idea that the sexual act is a physical event with effects so dangerous to the body and the soul that it is better to refrain from it as much as possible. Perhaps he has in mind the passage in Hortensius that he cites moreover in Contra Julianum: “What injury to health is not produced by sensual pleasure? Where its action is the most intense, is the most inimical to philosophy. Who can follow a reasoning or think anything at all when under the influence of intense pleasure? The whirlpool of this desire is so great that it strives day and might, without the slightest intermission, so to arouse our senses t they be drawn into the depths. What sensible man would not prefer that nature had given us no such pleasures at all?”

Either, already at the origin, the human body manifested an intrinsic weakness, in evil that belonged to its nature, or else today’s sensual delights come down to us with an innocence the body owes to its initial sate. It is this alternative that Augustine reproaches the Pelagians with having artificially constructed by placing the choice between a Manicheism that denounces the evil inherent in the Creation, and their own thesis that sees relations between a man and a woman after the fall as simply the effect of a natural appetite – adpetitus naturalis – which they go out of their way not to designate by the terms libido or concupiscence.’ Actually, it was not a matter, either for Pelagians in general or

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that these first men, before sin, could command the generative organs in order to beget children, just as they command the other members which the soul moves without any difficulty and without the goad of pleasure so as to apply them to some task.”” The idea is developed more at length in the fourteenth book of The City of God. It draws on four groups of references.

Concerning what happens in the human body, where the will can command the arms and legs, “all the members formed by rigid bones, like the hands, the fingers, the feet”; but also, Augustine is careful to note, “members that only have flesh and nerves,” or even internal organs such as the lungs which one makes voluntary use of to breathe or shout.

Concerning what happens in animals, which God has made capable of twitching their skin at the spot where a fly has bitten.

Concerning what can be seen in certain persons who can move their ears or scalp at will, mimic bird cries, sweat, weep, lie as if dead and feel nothing from the blows they’re given.

Finally, concerning the skill of craftsmen in making the movements they need in their trade: “Do we now move our feet and hands when we will to do the things we would by means of these members? Do we meet with no resistance in them, but perceive that they are ready servants of the will, both in our own case and in that of oth-ers, and especially of artisans employed in mechanical operations, by which the weakness and clumsiness of nature become, through industrious exercise, wonderfully dexterous? And shall we not believe that [. .] so also should the members have discharged the function of generation?”

Let us not imagine man, in the sexual union of paradise, as a clueless being moved by the urges whose innocence is guaranteed insofar as they are beyond his grasp; but as a skillful artisan who knows how to use his hands. Ars sexualis. If sin had left him the time, he would have been, in the Garden, a diligent sower—one without passion. “The field of generation would have been sown by the organ created for this purpose as the round is sown by the hand.” Paradisiacal sex was obedient and reasonable like the fingers of the hand.

Actually, it does appear that Augustine was led in his discussion with Julian to amend the idea of a sexual relation that would have had the same voluntary progression as an action by the hand, and would then have lost the possibility of self-control, as a pun-

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ful love of their own power, they cast their eyes on their bodies (membra) and felt a rush of concupiscence that was unknown to them (eague motu eo quem non noverant, concupiverunt).”  And they couldn’t help but blush from this movement, because it was the same “carnal urge that pushes animals to copulate,” because it is the manifestation which now “the law of the members opposes to the law of the spirit” and it is the “consequence of the transgresion of the precept.”

This interpretation of the opening of the eyes as the perception of a new reality is taken up again in  the later texts. Book 14 of The City of God is explicit on this point. It must not be imagined that the humans before the sin were blind. Hadn’t Eve herself seen “that the fruit was good to eat” and pleasant to look at? They were capable, therefore, of seeing their own bodies. But must we accept that they did direct their gazes to there sex? No, for the latter was clothed in a “vestment of grace”—a vestment that, on the one hand, prevented their members from rebelling against their will and to which, on the other hand and consequently, they didn’t pay any attention and didn’t seek to know what this clothing might conceal.

But with the transgression and the withdrawal of grace, the punishment is revealed: it is the “disobedience in return,” physical reproduction, in the body and very precisely through the sexual members, against the human will insurrection by which man had risen up against God. Now, this revolt draws the gaze and the attention to it: “When they were stripped of this grace, that their  disobedience by reciprocity (recioproca inobedientia) might be punished, there occurred a complete new and shameless movement of their members that made the nakedness indecent, made them  observant, and filled them with confusion (fecit adtentos redditque confuses).”

Under the regime of grace, the inattention of the gaze and the voluntary use of sex were connected, making it so that the latter was visible without ever risking being naked. The fall, on the other hand, connect the eye’s attention and the involuntary character of the movement so that sex is naked, but such a degree of shame, such a feeling of humiliation after so deceptive a pride, that one tries to make that pride the sign and effect of the physically invisible rebellion. In short, sex “springs forth,” arisen in its insurrection and offered to the gaze.’ It is for man what man is for God: a rebel. Like Adam.

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God’s creature, this creature of man, risen up before him and against him, sensed that it should hide itself after its disobedience.

So one can define that “something” which, with the fall, modified the innocent use of sex that would have been possible in paradise. It is not a new organ—the differentiation of the sexes already existed and the transgression did not render it bad; it was not an act—it already had its place, its function, and it still preserves that function. The involuntary form of a movement is what makes the sexual  organ the subject of an insurrection and the object of the eye’s gaze. Visible and unpredictable erection.

Let us note, of course, the fact that libido conceived in this way is characterized essentially by male genitality, its forms and its properties. It is phallic from the origin. Augustine is quite aware of the possible objection and he tries to find the counterpart, in the woman, of the indecent motion that shames the man by pointing out her internal rebellion, and hence her fall from grace. “It was not a visible movement the woman covered, when in the same members she experienced something hidden but comparable to what the man experienced; both of them covered what each one felt at the sight of the other.” And perhaps because he sensed what was artificial in this symmetry that had the woman covering what as invisible to her, and no doubt also to preserve the already evoked theme of modesty in regard to mutual desire, Augustine adds in the same passage: “The man and the woman blushed, either each for each, or the one for the other.” In any case, the visibility of the male organ is at the center of things.

And it has to be noted, moreover, that this interplay manifests man’s entry into the reign of death. Death relative to the grace that God has withdrawn from him; death also in this world, since death now becomes a fatal illness; death, finally, as we’ll see, since it is through the indispensable role of sexual union in childbirth that the original sin is passed down from generation to generation. in the involuntary movement of the sex organ and the visibility connected with it, man must recognize death: “For in the first surring of the disobedient motion which was felt in the flesh of the disobedient  soul, and which caused our first parents to cover their shame, one death indeed is experienced, that, namely, which occurs when God forsakes the soul.” Before, most exegetes saw

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in physical death the explanation if not for the first appearance of the two sexes, at least for their use. For Augustine, the sexual act didn’t have to wait for the passing away of the generations to be practiced, but the involuntariness that now haunts it signifies & spiritual death of which the end of earthly existences, one after the other, is also a manifestation. The body that escapes man’s will is also a body that dies. ‘The withdrawal of grace both removes this control and actualizes death.

Augustine gives the name libido to that movement which trverses and sweeps along every sexual act, that makes them both visible and shameful, that ties them to spiritual death as to there cause, to physical death as to their accompaniment—that movement or, more exactly, its involuntary form and force. Libido is what specifically marks the sexual acts of fallen man; or, using the words of another vocabulary, libido is not an intrinsic aspect of the sexual act that would be tied to it analytically. It is an element which the transgression, the fall, and the principle of “reciprocity of disobedience” tied to the act synthetically. By identifying and defining this element, by locating its point of emergence in metahistory, Augustine establishes the basic condition for separating that “convulsive bloc,” in terms of which the sexual act was thought, from its intrinsic danger. He opens up a field of analyse while sketching out the possibility of a “government” of behaviors on a completely different basis than the alternative between abstinence and a more or less willing acceptance of sexual relations.

II

So the fall provoked what could be called the libidinization of the sexual act: either one supposes that the latter would have been able, without the transgression, to unfold without any libido; or that it would have strictly obeyed the will.

The libido, in any case, is manifested today in the form of the involuntary. It appears in that supplement that emerges beyond volition, but is only the correlative of a defect, and the effect offall from grace.

This stigma of the involuntary in the sexual act subsequent the transgression has two main aspects. First, there are all the dis

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appointments by which the sex organ can frustrate the intentions at the subject. In Adam, the rebellious member had announced itself by an abrupt springing forth; among the men of his line, it is manifested by inopportune failures as well as by unseemly movement. The involuntary of the fallen sex organ is the erection, but it is also impotence. A passage of The City of God says it plainly.

While the other organs, in their respective functions, are in the service of the mind and can be “moved by the sign of the will,” the same is not true of the sex organ: “Even those who delight in this measure are not moved to it at their own will, whether they confine themselves to lawful or transgress to unlawful pleasures; but sometimes this lust importunes them in spite of themselves, and sometimes fails them when they desire to feel it, so that though lust rages in the mind, it stirs not in the body. Thus, strangely enough, this emotion not only fails to obey the legitimate desire to beget offspring, but also refuses to serve the passion to climax.” Which Augustine translates with a remarkable expression:  the libido is sui juris.

But Augustine also sees the form of the involuntary in the impossibility of separating the sexual act from those movements that one doesn’t control and from the force that propels them. However wise one may be, and however just and reasonable is the goal that one has in the union of the sexes, however mindful one shows oneself to be of the law of God and the example of the Patriarchs, one can’t ensure that it takes place without the uncontrollable tremors that mark the ineradicable presence of libido in the human being.

In this world, no right intention, no lawful will can break the link between it and the use of the sexual organ. Even within marriage, the conjugal act “doesn’t depend on the will, but on a necessity without which, however, in the begetting of children, it is impossible to arrive at the result that that same will seeks.”

Which explains that the end of marriage may very well be known by all, its celebration may very well be solemn, the legitmate act of the spouses, “while aspiring to be known, yet blushes to be seen.” The distinction between sexual union and movement of the libido, which reflection and exegesis enable one to establish in theory, escapes the will, however, and cannot be realized in practice.