Introduction
Among the early Christian theologians, St. Augustine ranks as one of the greatest of all times. Even now, his initial ideas on marriage and sexuality have had considerable effects on Protestants and Catholics. Therefore, it is important to offer an analysis and review of his marriage and sexuality ideas.
Augustine’s perspective of sexuality according to most critiques is evil and pessimistic in nature. His personal plight with sexuality influenced his views on original sin coupled with broadening his ideas on the principles of Christians’ sexuality.
For more than a century, his teachings have had a considerable influence on Christian precepts and the western cultures.
An in-depth analysis of the scholar’s ideas on the original sin and marriage as well as his early sexuality experiences that helped o promote his ideas on sexuality and later literary works are discussed in this paper.
The paper will provide a clear grasp of St. Augustine’s thoughts on sexuality. A great part of Augustine’s works is a chronicle of personal struggles that he faced in life.
This paper focuses on the arguments and ideas used on the Confessions as the primary source and support from another secondary source to explore the topic. The Confession is one of St. Augustine’s best-known works, and it acts as a chronological autobiography of his youthful years through his affirmation of the Christian doctrines.
In a literary sense, this book is the best work to show the depiction of Augustine before his conversion. In addition, it helps to affirm his perspective on women, thus giving a clear grasp of his early interaction with them.1
His early interaction with women
Since his early years, the scholar’s interactions with the females were riddled with controversy. For instance, during his adolescence, he confesses that he constantly had problems with his fleshly desires.2
Later on, he would be convinced that this issue underscored the penalty that was meted upon human beings after the first sin.
It is strange that during his youthful years he never recognized this sin, yet later he started to write at length about the inability of a man to control his sexual desires. His later understanding of the unchangeable sinful nature of humans is something that he struggles with throughout his life.
It is clear that while he was still young, St. Augustine had a lustful past. His work shows that even when he was approximately at the age of thirty, he had not yet married or left his misguided ways.
During this period, his mother was convinced that by leading a conventional way of life, Augustine would probably find a suitable woman and marry, and so she kept on reminding him to adopt such a life.
She believed that by officially marrying one wife and leaving his old ways, the son would be a step closer to a fulfilling life accomplishment.
She knew that by adopting the conventional way of living, Augustine would perhaps understand the tenets of Christendom and accept it after that. He accepted the idea and engaged a ten-year-old girl.
However, even though he no longer associated with the concubines, and he was rightfully engaged, he still strongly experienced sexual desires. He decided to get a temporary sexual partner while waiting for his ten-year-old bride came of age.
Not long after this period of his life, Augustine underwent a shocking religious experience. He ultimately became a celibate after accepting Christianity by becoming a Catholic.
Initially, he led a very promiscuous life, but his new doctrines forced him to adopt a simpler lifestyle. One thing remains clear that his early way of life left an irreversible mark on him.
In his work, Augustine explores the female relationships that he had in his life including his mom and paramour.
However, closer analysis reveals that to Augustine, his early sexual partners were revered only as sexual satisfaction objects and not individuals that he could deeply care about or love.
However, one thing stands out clearly, that is as he became more mature, the scholar had an almost total lack of female contact or companionship.
Although, St. Augustine was later involved in a non-sexual friendship with mutually celibate women, he is only recorded as rarely writing to women. One vital fact to pick from the Confessions is the scholar’s non-reference to his sister. It is only after the sister’s demise that the scholar briefly talks about her in his book.
The aspect that makes the matter with the sister important is that Augustine’s idea of dealing with his uncontrollable sex organs and sin as a whole is through severing all ties with women. If looked at from another perspective, analysis shows that St. Augustine never thought that women were at his level in a literary sense.
However, his literary ambitions perhaps hindered his associations with them and not his sexual desires. Ideally, the scholar describes his struggles with his sexual problems in his book because he could manage to talk about the intermittent underlying problems of human sinful nature.
St. Augustine believes that these problems are both personal and universal, thus making them relevant for everybody. Through narrating his plight, he can talk directly to all Christians, and thus use his work as a learning tool for a societal issue that needs to be changed.
His Ideals on Sexuality
St. Augustine’s honesty about his sexual perspective is one aspect that stands out for his work and for long has fascinated analysts. He shows that in his younger years he was not that innocent. He was both sexually active and even went to the extent of bearing a son with a concubine he once lived with.
His harshly describes himself as a being once addicted to his sexual urges. Analysts and critics interpretation of this statement has varied over the years. Some of them view Augustine as a man without moral. However, contemporary analysts have compared his views of how he sees himself to those of other men of his time.
By fact that Augustine had taken in a paramour underscores a deep lying concern that perhaps he was after all a human just like people of his time, and thus his take on sexual encounters is simply hyperbolic.
The theologian views his early sexual urges as a constant source of excruciating emotional pain, and this alone explains the stress he places on denouncing his initial sexual exploits.
The comparison of sex and sin are a common theme in most of Augustine’s works. For example, in his recount of sin, he claims, “he aims to keep constantly in mind his initial way ward and corrupt ways not because he likes to remember them, but so that he can remember always to love God”.3
Through the analysis of the above sentence, it is evident how the scholar looks disapprovingly at his sexuality. In his descriptions, certain words like ‘foul’ and ‘corruption’ repeatedly appear to stress the fact that his sexual trends were something he considered so negatively that the very fact that he knew about it affected his soul.
However, people should keep in mind that personally, the scholar had no issues with sexual indulgence, jus that he hated the reasons why most people indulged in it.
In fact, his analysis extends to pinpoint the variations between lust and love by suggesting that he knows the difference between the two. However, almost everything to the scholar seems to be described as lust, and thus many people derive the misconception that sin and sex are directly related.
Throughout the Confession, Augustine implements a negative tone to describe his sexual behaviors by depicting them through elaborate pictures of chaos, disease, and corruption.
Desire, as seen by Augustine, is almost an uncontrollable urge, a reflex, or an escapable bondage that he cannot subdue or control unless through the help of God. Therefore, according to him, the only last obstacle between him and total surrender to God is desire because he, like all other men, cannot survive in a celibate lifestyle.
The negative aspect of sexual immorality for Augustine was not in the act, but rather in the usual feelings that come after the act.
In his work, Augustine is known to compare love, which is fulfillment and pleasure acceptable in God’s eye, and lust, which goes against the doctrines of God. For him, the correct love follows a rejection of selfish lust and the control of the physical desire to follow God.4
In addition, his view of women also changed due to his belief that sexual feelings were evil. For instance, he held a misconstrued theory that an erection in a male amounts to sin.
Apparently, this action is a body reflex that cannot be controlled voluntarily. Therefore, his mitigation plan was to place sanctions on women so they would not have the chance to influence and manipulate men.
The scholar believes that people’s private parts are shameful. He also believes that the fact that people can never control their private parts is a direct resemblance to how the first biblical characters Adam and Eve went even against God’s control.
He clearly states that this bodily lust is clearly there not to be enjoyed, but to be ashamed of since it is a divine punishment for all of Adam and Eve’s descendants. St. Augustine agrees that the union in marriage is beautiful and a necessity.
This aspect explains why almost all his writing centered around three main aspects, which he terms as pillars of marriage. These three main points of his writing relay that marriage is the only blessed means of having sex and giving birth, abstinence guarantee, and cementing of the union bonds.
His work suggests that Adam and Eve from the start had already received all these three main fundamental aspects of marriage. It was mainly after the two biblical characters committed the unholy act that people eventually were inducted into feeling shame and lust after sex.
It is evident that his unhappy experiences and struggles with his sexuality establish the grounds that pushed him to write widely on the issue. He looks deeply into his sexuality ideals.
In his assumption, Augustine theorized that the devil chose to use Eve because she was easy to deceive, probably due to lack of reasonableness and temperateness.
On the other side, Adam knew that taking the forbidden fruit was sinful, but he did it anyway as a way of showing compassion and solidarity towards his wife.
Through this explanation, Augustine believes that the reason why people fell into sin is that man initially never controlled the woman, thus bringing the sin of the flesh to the spirit.
Augustine states that Adam and Eve sinned because they were human and not because he was seduced by Eve. Such ideas not only work to incite and reinforce his ideas on sexuality, but they also help in shaping the scheme and model of women’s place in history.
From his perspective, the scholar believes that Eve was the one seduced, and thus she is not in any way responsible for what happened to the humankind. In the eyes of the scholar, Adam is also responsible for introducing the fall of humankind.
St. Augustine seems to be promoting a more non-biased perspective of origins of sexuality by giving an equal share of blame to Adam and Eve.
The actual issue that St. Augustine describes and fights against in line with his sexuality is the internal war between the two different wills. The humanly desire to serve only himself and his lust and that desire to serve God and live righteously.
The two warring factions that he best characterizes as the ‘lust of the flesh’ against the spirit and vice-versa regularly compete against each other. According to the scholar, lustfulness defined his life, and sexual urges were part of this sinful nature.
In addition, St. Augustine believes that love and lust are the fruits of sin, and thus they should be labeled as a punishment since it goes against God’s original design of procreation. Since he views the act as a punishment, he hates is and claims that everyone should be ashamed of the practice.
Conclusion
The current Christian mindsets are influenced by St. Augustine’s teachings on sexuality and marriage. The origin of the negative perspective on the subject goes back to his early conflicts with other religious factions and his personal lustful experiences as a youth.
However, as opposed to labeling it entirely negative, his perspective on marriage and sexuality alternatively is biblically balanced and vocal on his stands.
While it takes a higher intervention to have a beautiful marriage, the scholar makes it clear that without a divine presentation before God, a shared abstinence and willingness for giving birth, marriages would not work.
Sexual intercourse and sexuality have the primary role of procreation, which is evident even in the biblical sense. Irrespective of the repetitive emphasis on the procreation aspect of sex by the scholar, he is affirming that his argument has a biblical backing5. Like all the men during his period, St. Augustine also thought less of women mainly as inferior both mentally and socially.
Unlike the others before him, his ranking placed women lower than their male counterparts, but at least they had significant roles.
However, his analysis and suggestions led to women acquiring better standards and ranking in society. His extensive writing on sexuality and marriage shows his grasp of an extensive vital role that women play in society as opposed to other scholars before his time.
Footnotes
1Jerome, “Life of Hilarion,” Early Christian Lives, eds. Athanasius, Jerome, Sulpicius Severus, and Gregory the Great (London: Penguin Classics, 1998), 85-116.
2Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 12.
3Ibid, 24.
4Augustine, 43.
5Augustine, 44.