The impact of his views on sin, grace, freedom and sexuality on Western culture can hardly be overrated. These views, deeply at variance with the ancient philosophical and cultural tradition, provoked however fierce criticism in Augustine’s lifetime and have, again, been vigorously opposed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries from various (e.g., humanist, liberal, feminist) […]
by Alan G. Soble …Augustine’s theology of sexuality (for example, that Adam’s prelapsarian erection would have been under his voluntary control; that the passionate, troubling, disobedient sexual impulses we experience in our own postlapsarian existence are part of the punishment visited on humankind by God. That sexual activity between married spouses, if done for its […]
I will spare the reader Freudian or other speculative interpretations of Augustine’s state of mind and note only that he found it difficult to reconcile the influence of his very pious mother, Monica, and her church with his strong sex drive and his deep attachment to the woman (to us, nameless) who was the mother […]
by Diarmaid MacCulloch. Much was now purged from Judaic religion that had once been acceptable, even in the Jerusalem Temple: notably Asherah, God’s long-standing wife, now recast as one of the seductresses who had turned the people of God from the right path. She was the most prominent victim of Jerusalem’s theological spring clean, which […]
Reviewed by Stuart Elden. Libido becomes, in Augustine’s phrase, sui juris, its own right, a law unto itself. Here, as elsewhere, there are a set of issues concerning the animality of human lust (i.e. p. 344). Temptation to sin, rather than sin in itself, is a crucial factor. This is part of the reason that […]
By Stephen Greenblatt. The New Yorker. Augustine and Monica experienced something remarkable: they felt themselves climbing higher and higher, through all the degrees of matter and through the heavenly spheres and, higher still, to the region of their own souls and up toward the eternity that lies beyond time itself. And “while we were speaking […]
By James Boyce. Published on May 14, 2015. Augustine drew heavily on custom, theology and tradition to buttress his case. He accepted that original sin was not fully expounded in the Bible, but was adamant that unless it was accepted, even good Christians would be tempted to seek salvation through holy living and end up […]
by Riane Eisler. In traditions that go back to the dawn of civilization, the female vulva was revered as the magical portal of life, possessed of the power of both physical regeneration and spiritual illumination and transformation. Far from being seen as a “dirty cunt,” woman’s pubic triangle was the sacred manifestation of creative sexual […]
by Peter Brown. For the Roman population to remain even stationary, each woman needed to produce 5 children, so pressure on young women was “inexorable”. Median age at marriage may have been low as fourteen.
Augustine, one of the greatest teachers of western Christianity, derived many of these attitudes from the story of Adam and Eve: that sexual desire is sinful; that infants are infected from the moment of conception with the disease of original sin; and that Adam’s sin corrupted the whole of nature itself.
P216 …Augustine bases much of his view of evil on his analysis of sex. The carnal custom, grown “as strong, almost, as nature” (ref), is telling proof for Augustine of the vitiation of man’s will. Sexual concupiscence is not a sin itself, but is the punishment of sin, the witness of sin, the occasion of […]
by Bertrand Russell. Augustine may have had problems getting it up: “[Lust] arouses the mind, but does not follow its own lead by arousing the body.”