St. Augustine’s desire for all earthly things, especially sex, became a problem. Although it is often said that Augustine’s negative preoccupation with sex was the result of his youthful indiscretions, but this misses the larger reality of his Christian-Platonic worldview. Indeed, when examined closely, Augustine’s youthful sexual dalliances and his later relationship with his unnamed mistress appear trite by modern standards. Augustine admits that he lived with his mistress for nearly a decade as a common-law wife to whom he was faithful while raising a son.[1] Moreover, although celibacy was certainly a prized ideal in the early Church, Christian clergy and bishops regularly married in late Antiquity.[2] That all Christians did not share Augustine’s negative attitude to sex is clearly demonstrated by his late debate with Julian of Eclanum.[3]
Hence, from a strictly Christian moral standpoint (1 Cor. 7:38) there was no particular reason why marriage and lawful sexual activity was not an option open to Augustine. Nevertheless, Augustine choose celibacy and insisted on the problematic nature of all sexual desire. In light of this, it would be more accurate to see Augustine’s negative attitude toward sex as being a result of his desire to be a Christian-Platonic philosopher who sought the eternal over the distraction of the temporal.[4] In discussing the matter in his Soliloquies (written just before his baptism) Augustine comments that he is committed to giving up sex completely in order to purely pursue the life of the mind.[5]
Hence, within Augustine’s Christian-Platonic framework, much as in the cosmic hierarchy the baser and more material is to be hierarchically ordered to the greater and more spiritual, so to the human heart should be ordered to the eternal and spiritual, and not to enjoyment the temporal.[6] Indeed, in the pre-lapsarian state, the baser desires did not interfere with the exercise of reason. Adam and Eve would not have enjoyed or even desired sex, but instead would have engaged in the sex-act purely for the rational purposes of reproduction.[7] The orderly nature of the cosmos- where the material was subordinate the spiritual- would have been reproduced in the human heart as a microcosm of the macrocosm. Adam and his bride would have never burned with desire for one another but would have simply called their genitals to attention by an act of will, engaged in reproductive act without pleasure, and deactivated their genitals just as easily.[8]
Augustine saw his own struggle to quiet his sexual desires and live a life unadulterated life of reason to be symptom of the Fall. Sinful desire which interferes with reason (concupiscence) is a punishment for sin.[9] Just creation is in revolt against the creator, so too the desires of the fallen person are at war with the rational and spiritual centers of the self: “In short, to say all in a word, what but disobedience was the punishment of disobedience in that sin? For what else is man’s misery but his own disobedience to himself, so that in consequence of his not being willing to do what he could do, he now wills to do what he cannot?”[10]
Even without sin, created being is inherently unstable.[11] Creation comes from nothingness and has a tendency of drifting back into nothingness.[12] For this reason, humans and angels are in need of grace to prop them up even in their state of integrity.[13] Only by receiving a special grace can humans and angels not drift back into nothingness through falling into sin.[14] In Augustine’s thought- much as in later Roman Catholicism- although “grace” (gratia) certainly comes by God’s undeserved favor (i.e., the Pauline charis), it is primarily defined as God’s supernatural assistance and self-communication to his rational creatures in order that they might achieve higher and greater degrees of moral regeneration.[15]
[1] Augustine, Confessions, 4.2; NPNFa, 1:68-9.
[2] William Philipps, Clerical Celibacy: The Heritage (London: Continuum, 2004), 81-96.
[3] Gerald Bonner, “Pelagianism and Augustine” in Doctrinal Diversity: Varieties of Early Christianity: A Collection of Scholarly Essays, ed. Everett Ferguson (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999), 203-4.
[4] Gary Willis, Augustine’s Confessions: A Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 59-62.
[5] Augustine, Soliloquies, 1.17; NPNFa, 7:543.
[6] Steven Schafer, Marriage, Sex, and Procreation: Contemporary Revisions to Augustine’s Theology of Marriage (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2019), 28-9.
[7] Augustine, City of God, 14.24; NPNFa, 2:280-1.
[8] Augustine, City of God, 14.24; NPNFa, 2:280-1.
[9] Timo Nisula, Augustine and the Functions of Concupiscence (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 258-9.
[10] Augustine, City of God, 14.15; NPNFa, 2:275.
[11] Augustine, City of God, 12.15; NPNFa, 2:235-6.
[12] Paul Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy: Creator and Creation in Early Christian Theology and Piety (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 298.
[13] Augustine, Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love, 106; NPNFa, 3:271.
[14] Augustine, City of God, 14.2; NPNFa, 2:282.
[15] Augustine, On the Grace of Christ, 1.15-16; NPNFa, 5:223-4.
From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).