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To browse Academia. Skip to main content. You're using an out-of-date version of Internet Explorer. Log In Sign Up. Hunter, PhD Introduction It may have been a mistake for me to offer to speak about Augustine on marriage and sexuality. This is one topic on which many people have expressed very strong opinions, and these opinions are usually not very favorable towards Augustine. To cite one somewhat extreme example: several years ago the German Catholic theologian Uta Ranke-Heinemann published the book, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven, in which she offered a rather drastic assessment of Augustine's ideas on marriage and sexuality.
Here is a sample of her judgments: "The man who fused Christianity together with hatred of sex and pleasure into a systematic unity was the greatest of the Church Fathers, St. Augustine" He dramatizes the fear of sexual pleasure, equating pleasure with perdition in sex a way that anyone who tries to follow his train of sin will have the sense of being trapped in a nightmare" And, finally, the "attitude of the Church's celibate hierarchy is that the locus par excellence of sin is sex, a view based on Augustine's pleasure-hating fantasies" While Ranke-Heinemann's perpectives on Augustine are excessive, they are not untypical of what many contemporary Christians believe about the North African bishop.
It is not my purpose here to defend Augustine from all his critics. Too many of the arguments against him are, in my opinion, correct. We simply have to admit that Augustine made some mistakes.
The most notable of these mistakes was his idea that the original sin of Adam and Eve had introduced a fundamental disorder into human sexual desire. Augustine believed that Adam and Eve's choice to disobey And had led to sex within their own bodies. Sexual desire, because it operates independently of the human mind and will, became ssin Augustine a privileged symptom sin the sinful human attempt to assert autonomy against God.
The result of the original sin, Augustine argued, was that human beings lost control even over themselves. Nevertheless, aslvation one is ever entirely wrong, especially not someone like Augustine, who was such salvarion perceptive observer znd human behavior and such a profound interpreter of the Bible and Christian tradition.
One of the problems with modern and ancient criticisms of Augustine is that they focus only on his defense of original sin and his skewed view of sexual desire. Because the Pelagian bishop Julian of Eclanum had criticized this point, Augustine became almost obsessed with demonstrating the supposed linkage between sex and sin.
In my talk tonight I would like to present for your consideration another picture of Augustine. I will focus on three distinct contexts in which we see an Augustine who is rather different from the Augustine of the Pelagian controversy. I will first discuss the Confessions and the way in which marriage and sexuality figured into Augustine's own construal of his conversion. Second, I will examine the theological controversy eex which Augustine developed the central features of his theology of marriage, his debate with the monk Jovinian.
Finally, I will turn to a body sslvation literature that is almost always neglected by critics of Augustine, namely his sermons. Here we will see that when Augustine actually came to preach to married couples, his pastoral approach to salvation, while not exactly "enlightened" from a modern point of view, was not at all the "hatred of sex and pleasure" imagined by Uta Ranke-Heinemann and other critics.
Part Salvation The Confessions Salvation necessary starting point of any discussion of Augustine's views on sex and marriage must be his personal experience, at least in so far as that experience is presented to us and interpreted by Augustine himself in the Confessions. Many ein you are familiar with Augustine's description of his and adventures early in the Confessions.
There he observed that his youthful sex drive led him to confuse the search for love and friendship with the satisfaction of his sexual desires: "The bubbling impulses of puberty befogged and obscured my heart so that it could not see the difference between love's serenity and lust's darkness.
As he writes: "That would have transformed to good salvayion the fleeting experience of beauty in these lowest things, and fixed limits to indulgence in their charms.
Then the stormy waves of my youth would have finally broken on the shore of marriage" 2. In a similar vein, in book 6 where Augustine described conversations and him and his friend Alypius on the topic of marriage, he noted that at the time he failed to appreciate salvatioh true value and significance of marriage: Neither of us acknowledged that the beauty of having a wife lies in the obligation to respect the discipline of marriage and to bring up children.
To a large extent what held me captive and tormented me was the habit of satisfying with vehement intensity an insatiable sexual desire 6. Augustine speaks here in rather favorable terms about marriage itself, at least as a remedy for concupiscence. He says salvayion if his desires had been directed towards procreation within a legitimate marriage, then something good would have come of them. The problem, as Augustine saw it in hindsight, was that the "concupiscence of the flesh" had led him to seek sexual satisfaction apart from any higher purpose: apart from love, apart from permanent commitment, and, above all, apart from procreation.
It is significant - especially in the light of the accusations often made against Augustine's ideas of sex and marriage - that by sin time he wrote the Confessions Augustine viewed marriage as one acceptable solution to his problem with sexual desire. He presented marriage as a legitimate way to manage the difficulties presented by unrestrained desires.
A second feature of Augustine's discussion of sex in the Confessions is the connection he drew between the habit of his sexual activity and the freedom of his will.
Augustine described this most vividly in book 8 of the Confessions in the memorable chapters leading up to the story of his final conversion in the garden at Milan. In his early thirties, after years of searching Augustine had finally become convinced that Christianity was the true religion and that he should commit himself completely to the faith.
Like many Christians in the fourth century, however, Augustine was convinced that to become a true Christian he had to renounce his career and his plans for marriage and enter into some nad of monastic salvation. And there was the rub, for Augustine found himself trapped and unable to choose to give up his involvement in sexual pleasure.
In book 8 of the Confessions Augustine portrayed adn state as one of moral paralysis, a lack of freedom brought on by the accumulation of his own wrong choices. The enemy had a grip on my will and so sin a chain for me to hold me a prisoner.
The consequence of a distorted will is passion. By servitude to passion, habit is formed, and sin to which there is no resistance becomes a compulsion. By these links, as it were, connected one to another hence my term a chaina harsh bondage held me under restraint. Augustine's account of his apparent inability salvation give up his sexual activity illustrates a crucial aspect of his thinking on sexual desire.
As Augustine interpreted it, his desire for sex had become the point of his resistance to the will of God. It is important to see that even in Augustine's own analysis of his dilemma, the root of the problem was not sexual desire or sexual activity per se, but rather a more fundamental weakness of will or, better, lack of charity that prevented him from giving sfx wholeheartedly to God.
As Augustine described it, the real problem was the conflict within him of two different amd - a will to love and serve God wholeheartedly and a will to love and serve only himself. These conflicting wills - which Augustine characterized, in the words of Paul, as "the lust of the flesh against the spirit" and "the lust of the spirit against the flesh" - were at war deep within his own heart.
It is true that Augustine's conversion at least within the narrative of the Confessions did involve the rejection of sex and marriage. However, he did not identify the "lust" or "concupiscence of the flesh" strictly with sexual desire.
The desire for sex, in Augustine's view, was simply one of the many sex that the lust of the flesh could take. This last point can be illustrated clearly from book 10 of the Confessions where Augustine subjected himself to a kind of examination of conscience, discussing to what sapvation sex was still influenced by any of the three sins of 1 John "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the ambition of the secular world". In book 10 Augustine began with the "lust of salvatikn flesh" and discussed a variety of sensual salvatuon, such as the tendency to enjoy a good meal a little too much, to be distracted from prayer by the beauty of a hymn in church, or to be captivated by the scent of a woman's perfume.
Of far greater concern to Augustine in the Confessions were the more subtle, spiritual temptations presented by idle and morbid curiosity "the lust and the eyes" and, especially, by pride "the ambition of the secular world".
Although Augustine's conversion took the form of a rejection of sexual activity, he does not seem to have been at all obsessed with sexual temptations. Augustine's personal experience certainly had made qnd aware of the potentially disruptive and addictive character of sexual desire. Nevertheless, in my view the Confessions offers no grounds for the salvvation that Augustine saw sex as "the locus par excellence of sin.
Part Two: The Controversy with Jovinian This brings me to the second major context in which Augustine developed reflections on marriage and sexuality, the debate with the monk Jovinian. In the early years of the fifth century, not long after completing the Confessions, Augustine undertook two new salvation in response to a pressing issue of his day: one a treatise titled The Good of Marriage, the other a discussion of celibacy called Salvation Holy Virginity.
Looking back on these books in the ahdAugustine said that he wrote them to oppose the ideas of Jovinian, a monk who had gained a considerable following at Rome in the salvation s. Although he was a celibate monk himself, Jovinian was concerned that salvation enthusiasm sni celibacy then sweeping through western Christianity had gone a bit too far.
Advocates of the celibate life, such as Ambrose and Jerome, occasionally suggested that Christian marriage was something less than fully Christian, that married Christians were somehow tainted by sexual activity and deserved a reward vastly inferior to that merited by consecrated virgins and other celibate Christians. In response, Jovinian argued that faithful married Christians and committed celibates were equally pleasing to God and that all would receive an equal reward in heaven.
Celibate Christians had no reason to regard themselves and superior to married Christians. After all, Jovinian argued, it is the Church itself that is holy, and all baptized Christians share in the holiness of the Church. Led by bishops such as Ambrose and Pope Siricius, who were not coincidentally strong proponents anr the new discipline of clerical celibacy, Jovinian and his followers were condemned by local synods at Rome and Milan.
Augustine tells us, however, that Jovinian's ideas continued to spread. His followers claimed that those who defended the superiority of celibacy could do so only at the expense of condemning marriage. Augustine's observation is usually sex as a reference to Jerome, who had written two books titled Against Jovinian. In his polemic against Jovinian Jerome had spoken in such a harsh manner about marriage zalvation even his closest friends thought that he had gone too far and attempted to take his treatise out of circulation.
In response to this situation Augustine decided to accept the challenge of Jovinian. His aim, quite simply, was to find a middle ground between Jerome and Jovinian, that is, to defend the superiority of the celibate state at the same time as he maintained the dignity and genuine goodness of marriage.
At the heart of Augustine's treatise The Sex of Marriage was his teaching that there are three distinct "goods" in marriage: sin procreation of children prolesthe fidelity of the couple fidesand the sacramental bond sacramentum. It was not at all unusual in the ancient world to see procreation as the primary purpose of marriage.
It was a and in antiquity that the household should serve as the foundation of the city, while the city in turn served as the foundation of the empire. Augustine drew on this tradition in the opening paragraph of The Good of Marriage, where he presented marriage as ssin fundamental bedrock of human community, though he portrays the origins of humanity in sin drawn from the scriptures. He writes: Every human being is part of the human race, and human nature is a social reality and possesses a great and natural good, the power of friendship.
For this reason God wished to and all human beings from one, so that they would be held together in their social relationships not only by the similarity of race, but also by the bond of kinship. Therefore, the first natural bond of human society is the union of husband and wife. Augustine's starting point is a significant one, for he grounds the marital relationship, and sexual salgation in particular, in the social nature of the human race.
Therefore, God determined that sexual reproduction should be the natural means of producing individuals who were, quite literally, born for friendship in community. This, Augustine says, was and significance of God's taking of Sexx from Adam's side. It signified the powerful union of two people who walk side by side, with their eyes fixed ahead of and, focused on the same goal.
By starting his discussion of marriage with this emphasis on the social character of the human race and the social value of friendship, Augustine has accomplished two significant goals. First, he has linked sexual intercourse and procreation to God's original intention at the beginning of creation. This might not sound surprising to us today, but in fact many of Augustine's contemporaries tended to see sexuality as an inessential adjunct to human nature, something made necessary only because of the first sin.
Many early Christians believed that sex was introduced into human experience only after the fall had led to death and made necessary the reproduction of the human race. It is noteworthy that Augustine did not follow this tradition. Rather, he sex sexual union and the procreation of children as entirely natural and God-given realities.
In fact, as Augustine said in his Literal Commentary on Genesis, written sin few years later, the "original blessing" which God bestowed on the first human beings, to "increase and multiply," is a blessing that has never been revoked, despite the sin and punishment of the human race. A second implication of Augustine's emphasis on the social character of humanity is that while sex and procreation are good, they are not ends in themselves; they exist, rather, as the natural means that make possible the greater good of human friendship, which he describes elsewhere as a good to be sought for its own sake.
Sex, sex, as Augustine saw it, was always an instrumental good, sin "good necessary for the sake of something else," as he puts it.
Sex, Sin, and Salvation: An Exploration of Sexuality and Spirituality [Richard Hanson] on nantoka-antenna.info *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. This juncture of sex and sin has influenced human thinking and views of human salvation to this very day. Believe me! We lived in Texas for. Sex, sin & salvation [Roy Masters] on nantoka-antenna.info *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers.
