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" (75). "Like many neurotics he radically separates love and sexuality" (76).
"Augustine was the father of a fifteen-hundred-year-long anxiety about sex and an enduring hostility
to it. He dramatizes the fear of sexual pleasure, equating pleasure with perdition in such a way that
anyone who tries to follow his train of thought will have the sense of being trapped in a nightmare"
(78). 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" (90).

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 God had led to
disobedience within their own bodies. Sexual desire, because it operates independently of the human
mind and will, became for Augustine a privileged symptom of 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, no one is ever entirely wrong, especially not someone like Augustine, who was such a
perceptive observer of 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 in which Augustine
developed the central features of his theology of marriage, his debate with the monk Jovinian.
Finally, I will turn to a body of 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 sex, 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 One: The Confessions

The 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 of you are familiar with Augustine's description of his
adolescent 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." What is not so often noted is that Augustine actually
blames his parents for not arranging an early marriage for him. As he writes: "That would have
transformed to good purpose 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" (2.2.3). As Augustine saw it, marriage would have provided a disciplined
way of life in which the vagaries of sexual desire could be directed towards the laudable task of
producing and raising children. In a similar vein, in book 6 where Augustine described conversations
between him and his friend Alypius on the topic of marriage, he noted that at the time he failed to
appreciate the 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
(6.12.22).

Augustine speaks here in rather favorable terms about marriage itself, at least as a remedy for
concupiscence. He says that 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 the 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 form of monastic life. 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 his state as one of moral paralysis, a lack of
freedom brought on by the accumulation of his own wrong choices. He offered the following
analysis of his predicament in terms that approach a modern understanding of sexual addiction:

I was bound not by an iron imposed by anyone else but by the iron of my own choice. The enemy
had a grip on my will and so made 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 habit to which there is no
resistance becomes a compulsion. By these links, as it were, connected one to another (hence my
term a chain), a harsh bondage held me under restraint.

Augustine's account of his apparent inability to 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 himself wholeheartedly to God. As Augustine
described it, the real problem was the conflict within him of two different wills - 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 forms 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 extent he was still influenced by
any of the three sins of 1 John 2:16 ("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 the flesh" and discussed a variety
of sensual desires, 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.
Sexual temptations were no more, or less, prevalent than these other sensual allurements. Of far
greater concern to Augustine in the Confessions were the more subtle, spiritual temptations
presented by idle and morbid curiosity ("the lust of 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 him aware of the potentially disruptive and addictive
character of sexual desire. Nevertheless, in my view the Confessions offers no grounds for the
accusation that Augustine saw sex as "the locus par excellence of sin." In the Confessions Augustine
regarded sexual desire as simply one of many lusts that scourge the human heart, and not even the
most dangerous one.

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 writings in response to a pressing
issue of his day: one a treatise titled The Good of Marriage, the other a discussion of celibacy called
On Holy Virginity. Looking back on these books in the year 427, Augustine said that he wrote them
to oppose the ideas of Jovinian, a monk who had gained a considerable following at Rome in the
early 390s. Although he was a celibate monk himself, Jovinian was concerned that the enthusiasm
for 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 as 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. "Be not proud," Jovinian admonished the consecrated virgins, "you and your married sisters
are member of the same Church."

The leadership of the western church was, to put it mildly, unreceptive to Jovinian's ideas. Led by
bishops such as Ambrose and Pope Siricius, who were (not coincidentally) strong proponents of 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 taken 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 that 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 Good of Marriage was his teaching that there are three
distinct "goods" in marriage: the procreation of children (proles), the fidelity of the couple (fides),
and 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 commonplace 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 the fundamental bedrock of human community, though he portrays
the origins of humanity in imagery 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 create 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
reproduction in particular, in the social nature of the human race. From the very beginning,
Augustine argues, God intended human community to be knit together by the closest possible bond,
that of blood relationship. 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 the significance of God's taking of Eve from Adam's side. It signified the
powerful union of two people who walk side by side, with their eyes fixed ahead of them, 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 saw 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 a 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, then, as Augustine saw it, was always an instrumental good, a "good
necessary for the sake of something else," as he puts it. In other words, friendship and community
are the primary goods, while human sexual activity is the means to these ends. Nevertheless, there is
no question that Augustine viewed human reproduction as something good and originally intended
by God. No matter how much Augustine insisted (especially in his later writings) that original sin
had damaged human nature, he always maintained that sexual union itself and procreation were the
good creations of a good Creator.

There is yet another dimension to Augustine's understanding of the good of procreation, one that
might seem surprising, especially to those who expect Augustine to be hostile to sex and pleasure.
Early on in the treatise The Good of Marriage he writes:

Marriages also have the benefit that sensual or youthful incontinence, even though it is wrong, is
redirected to the honorable purpose of having children, and so out of the evil of lust sexual union in
marriage achieves something good. Furthermore, parental feeling brings about a moderation in
sexual desire, since it is held back and in a certain way burns more modestly. For a kind of dignity
attaches to the ardor of the pleasure, when in the act whereby man and woman come together with
each other, they have the thought of being father and mother.

Here Augustine has stated a theme that is often overlooked by those who see him as entirely hostile
to pleasure or sexual activity. He clearly regards sexual intercourse between married persons, when
engaged in for the sake of procreation, as something good. The good consists not only in the
production of children, but also in a change that occurs within desire itself. The evil of unrestrained
sexual desire - that is, the lust or concupiscence of the flesh - can be directed towards a good
purpose and even transformed, so to speak, when it is utilized for procreation.

A similar statement can be found later in The Good of Marriage where Augustine suggested that
procreation is necessary for the health of the human race, just as food is necessary for the health of
the individual. In this context Augustine stated explicitly that the pleasure that accompanies natural
acts, such as eating and sex, is something to be enjoyed, as long as it does not lead to excess.
"Neither activity is devoid of pleasure for the senses," Augustine insisted, "and when this is
regulated and put to its natural use under the restraint of moderation it cannot be lust." This is an
extraordinary statement, so much so that many years later in his review of his writings, the
Retractations, Augustine felt compelled to provide a further explanation: "I said this because the
good and right use of 'lust' is not 'lust.' For just as it is evil to use good things in the wrong way, so it
is good to use evil things in the right way." Although Augustine did assert that there was something
"evil" about unrestrained sexual desire, he maintained that at least in respect to intercourse within
marriage, the evil of lust ceased to be evil when it was directed to its proper purpose, that is,
procreation.

But procreation was not the only good of marriage that Augustine treated. There is a second good,
which Augustine called "fidelity" or "faithfulness" (fides in the Latin). The notion of "fidelity"
deserves close scrutiny for it, too, has a dimension that commentators have often overlooked.
"Fidelity" had several meanings for Augustine. On the one hand, it included the rudimentary
faithfulness that all married people owe each other, that is, the duty to abstain from adultery or
sexual relations with other persons. But fidelity meant more than simply avoiding illicit sex. For
Augustine, fidelity included the positive duty of married persons to engage in sex in order to help
each other avoid adultery. Augustine spoke here not of sex for the purpose of procreation, but of
sex purely to satisfy desire. Such fidelity, Augustine wrote, is "a great good of the soul, even when
manifested in the small and insignificant matters of the body."

Augustine illustrated the importance of the good of fidelity with the example of two thieves. If one
thief should enlist the help of another to commit a crime and should agree to give his partner a share
of the loot, they have entered into an agreement characterized by fidelity. Even though they are
partners in crime, their fidelity is still something good, even though it is being manifested in bad
behavior. The goodness of their fidelity, Augustine observed, is evident from the fact that if one
thief should violate their agreement, the other thief would have every right to complain. The only
grounds for breaking their agreement would be if one thief decided to return to the "true and
legitimate fidelity" which both of the thieves owe to society and which they violated by turning to
crime in the first place.

Augustine's point was that fidelity can exist as a good quality of human relationships even in a
context in which evil is present. In the case of a man and a woman, this fidelity establishes a union
that can legitimately be considered a marriage, even if there is no intention to have children. Here
Augustine took a stand that is virtually unique among early Christian writers. He acknowledged the
value of a relationship that had come into being purely out of a desire for sexual pleasure, and not
for procreation. He even called it a "marriage." What made such a marriage good, Augustine
indicated, was the good of fidelity. "For the reason why such couples were married," he wrote, "was
so that concupiscence itself might be directed towards a legitimate bond and not flow in a
disordered or haphazard way. Concupiscence in itself has the unrestrained weakness of the flesh, but
from marriage it receives the permanent bond of fidelity; in itself it leads to unrestrained intercourse,
but from marriage it has the restraint of chaste procreation."

In this remarkable passage Augustine suggests that the good of fidelity can be present even if the
couple's primary aim is not to produce children, but simply to enjoy sexual pleasure. Good is
produced because the intrinsically unstable or unrestrained character of sexual desire is given a
certain limit and order within a relationship characterized by fidelity. Fidelity is, as Augustine says, "a
sort of mutual servitude," in which spouses agree to support each other in their weakness. Not even
the call that one partner might feel towards celibacy can cancel this duty of fidelity. Augustine made
an important distinction in this context between the spouse who seeks to have intercourse primarily
out of sexual desire and the spouse who agrees to have intercourse primarily out of the duty of
fidelity. The one who acts out of lust (that is, out of greed or selfishness) is guilty of what he calls a
"forgivable fault" (venialis culpa). But the one who engages in sex to support his or her partner is
acting out of love and compassion. For such a person, therefore, no guilt is involved.

I will return in a few minutes to this topic of the "forgivable fault" and Augustine's discussion of the
value of fidelity, for this subject dominates his actual preaching on marriage. For now it is enough to
emphasize that Augustine saw fidelity, together with procreation, as one of the genuine goods of
marriage. Like procreation, fidelity was always something good, even though it might be exercised
within a relationship in which lustful or selfish desire predominated over the desire for children. The
value of fidelity, Augustine argued, is that it places a limit on the possible disorders of desire and
harnesses desire to the benefit of the marriage relationship. As Augustine put it, "What is honorable
in marriage, therefore, is chastity in having children and fidelity in performing the conjugal duty.
This is what marriage is for, and this is what the apostle [Paul] defends against every charge when he
says, 'If you have married, you have not sinned, and if a virgin marries, she does not sin'."

In addition to the good of procreation and the good of fidelity, Augustine spoke of yet a third good
in marriage, that of the "sacrament." Augustine was one of the first Christian writers to use the
language of "sacrament" in regard to marriage, although his usage of the term is somewhat different
from the later Catholic idea of the seven sacraments. For Augustine the idea of sacrament was
closely related to the Greek word mysterion, or "mystery," which was translated as sacramentum in
early Latin versions of the bible. A sacrament was a "mystery" in the sense of a sacred symbol, and
the term was frequently applied to liturgical rites, as well as to the symbolic or allegorical
interpretation of scripture. In Ephesians 5:31-32, for example, Paul had quoted the words of
Genesis 2:24 ("A man will leave his mother and father and be joined to his wife, and the two will
become one flesh") and then said that the marital union was a "mystery" (or "sacrament") which
referred to Christ and the church.

For Augustine, then, the sacrament in marriage referred to its character as a sacred sign, something
that referred beyond itself to the spiritual union of Christ and the church. What was it about
marriage that made it an appropriate symbol for this union? To answer this question Augustine
turned to the passages in the gospels describing Jesus' prohibition of divorce. In the gospels of
Matthew and Mark, Jesus' prohibition of divorce was reinforced by the same quotation from
Genesis 2 (the "two in one flesh" text) that appeared in the Letter to the Ephesians. Putting the two
together, Augustine concluded that it was precisely the prohibition of divorce - that is, the
indissolubility of the marriage bond - that constituted the "sacrament" or sacred significance of
marriage. In other words, Christian marriages had to be indissoluble because they symbolized the
eternal union of Christ and the Church.

Augustine's notion of the sacramentality of marriage was another important piece in his defense of
the goodness of marriage against ascetic extremists. To a certain extent, it was the logical outgrowth
of the notion, which he had presented in earlier writings, that the marriages in the Old Testament
were a prophetic foreshadowing of the marriage of Christ and the Church. By extending the same
idea to marriages after Christ, Augustine created a way to view Christian marriage within the
framework of salvation history. In The Good of Marriage, for example, Augustine spoke explicitly
about the different "sacraments" that were present in the time of the Hebrews and in time of the
Christians. Before the coming of Christ, polygamy, as well as divorce and remarriage, were allowed;
now strict monogamy is the norm. The reason for this historical relativity, Augustine argued, lies
partly in the fact that there was a greater need to produce children in the period before Christ. But it
also derives from the fact that marriages possessed a different sacred meaning or "sacrament" in the
prior dispensation than they do in the present. As Augustine put it: "Just as the sacrament of
multiple marriages in the past signified the future multitude that would be subject to God in all the
nations of the earth, so the sacrament of single marriages in our day signifies the unity of us all that
will one day be subject to God in the one heavenly city."

Augustine has offered here a fascinating account of the relativity of moral standards based on the
notion that sexual conduct can have different meanings (different "sacraments") in different periods
of salvation history. For Augustine, the primary sacrament of marriages in the Hebrew Bible was
their very multiplicity, a multiplicity that was fulfilled historically in the spread of Christianity
throughout the world. In Christian times, by contrast, the primary sacrament in marriage is an
indissoluble unity, a unity that will be realized only at the end of time in the City of God. As
Augustine put it: "Out of many souls there will arise a city of people with a single soul and a single
heart turned to God. This perfection of our unity will come about only after this pilgrimage [on
earth], when no longer will anyone's thoughts be hidden from another, and no longer will anyone be
in conflict with anyone about anything."

Perhaps the most important feature of Augustine's notion of the "sacrament" in marriage is that it
provided him with a way to think about a transcendent significance in human relationships. For
Augustine Christian marriages were meant to be indissoluble because they symbolized a unity that
transcended their own fragile humanity, a unity that was to be realized fully only in the coming
kingdom of God. Augustine's notion of the sacrament in marriage, therefore, acknowledged that of
all human relationships marriage was the one that was capable of bearing a unique meaning in
salvation history. Put simply, the "sacrament" in marriage meant that marriage was an eschatological
sign, a sign of the ultimate unity of God and humanity, as embodied in the union of Christ and the
Church.

Part Three: Augustine's Preaching on Marriage

This brings me to the final portion of my talk, Augustine's preaching on marriage. As I mentioned
above, not much attention has been paid to this aspect of Augustine's work. One reason for this, I
believe, is that much of what Augustine says in his preaching is unexceptional, even banal. He
warned his congregation about the dangers of adultery. He cautioned against sex with slave girls and
slave boys, as other patristic preachers did. He urged the men, especially, not to follow a double
standard in sexual ethics by holding women to rules of sexual purity that they themselves had no
intention of following. But Augustine also occasionally brought up the delicate issue of his
congregations' own acts of marital intimacy. As I noted above, in the treatise The Good of Marriage
Augustine had discussed the question of the moral status of sex when it occured within marriage
purely out of lustful or selfish desire. Augustine called this a venialis culpa, that is, a "venial" or a
"forgivable fault." Augustine derived this idea from his reading of 1 Corinthians 7:5-6, where Paul
said that married couples should abstain from sex only for brief periods of time for the sake of
prayer. "Then come together again," Paul wrote, "so that Satan may not tempt you because of your
lack of self-control. This I say by way of concession (secundum veniam), not of command." As
Augustine understood it, the concession or forgiveness that Paul offered was for acts of sexual
intercourse that took place purely out of lust and not for the sake of procreation. For married
people, such acts contain some "fault" (culpa), but are easily "forgivable" (venialis) because of the
goodness of marriage.

Just how serious was a "forgivable fault"? Augustine did not discuss this issue at any length in The
Good of Marriage. However, in several sermons he directly broached the topic and applied the
principles of his treatise to the practical lives of his congregation. For example, in sermon 9 (which
may come from the later years of his life), Augustine spoke of "daily sins" that were virtually
unavoidable because of human weakness. Among these "daily sins" Augustine listed things such as
speaking an unkind word or indulging in excessive laughter. He also mentioned eating more food
than was needed to sustain life and engaging in sex more than was necessary to produce children.
Augustine seemed to regard such "daily sins" as almost trivial. They did not require public penance
and could be expiated, he said, simply by the daily practice of almsgiving or by the daily recitation of
the Lord's Prayer. It is true that Augustine did warn his listeners not to take these sins lightly simply
because they were so numerous (ser. 9.18). Like tiny grains of wheat they were capable of piling up
and even sinking the ships that carried them (ser. 278.12). Nevertheless, within the pastoral context
of his preaching about marriage, Augustine does not seem to have been overly concerned about the
problem of unrestrained sexual desire, at least within marriage. Since he accepted the weakness of
human nature as a given, Augustine was completely prepared to follow the apostle Paul and to
accept that sex within marriage, even apart from procreation, was an acceptable alternative to
adultery or fornication.

There is another feature of marital fidelity that is accented in Augustine's preaching that supplements
in a helpful way his teaching in The Good of Marriage. In the treatise Augustine drew a distinction
between the spouse who engaged in sex primarily to support his or her partner and the spouse who
sought sexual relations primarily because of unrestrained desire or lust. Those who lack self-restraint
are the ones who have received "pardon" from the apostle Paul for this venialis culpa. But the
former, who act out of the good of fidelity, are without sin because they act out of a virtuous
motivation. The same idea is found in Augustine's preaching, but in the preaching Augustine went
even further in characterizing this type of sexual activity as an act of charity. The key text is found in
a sermon that was discovered and published by Franois Dolbeau in the early 1990's. The main
theme of this sermon, which was composed around the same time as The Good of Marriage, was to
dissuade married persons from undertaking vows of celibacy without the consent of their partners.
It might seem surprising that Augustine had to face the problem of too many people avoiding sex,
but this was not an uncommon phenomenon in his day and he had to deal with it in several letters,
as well as in his sermons.

Augustine's response in the Dolbeau sermon was to emphasize that engaging in sex out of marital
fidelity was an act of charity, mercy, and even self-control. He wrote: Love one another. Is the
husband able [to practice self-control] and the wife not able to? Are you not demanding payment of
the conjugal debt? Pay it yourself! And insofar as you are paying what you are not also demanding,
you are doing an act of mercy. Yes, indeed, I dare to say it, "It is an act of mercy."

Augustine went on in the sermon to say that the spouse who engaged in sex out of the duty of
fidelity should be regarded as actually possessing the virtue of self-control, even though he or she
consented to engage in sexual activity. "What if you no longer demand, but only pay the debt?" he
writes. "It is still attributed to you as self-control. For it is not being demanded out of lust, but it is
being paid out of mercy. So, you should say to your God: 'Lord, you know what gift you have placed
in me [namely the gift of self-control]; but I also hear what you have advised [namely, the apostle
Paul's advice to "come together again"], because you have made both me and my partner, and have
not wished either of us to perish'" (ser. 354A.13).

It is significant that Augustine chose to portray sexual activity in marriage, when motivated by the
virtue of fidelity, as an act of love, mercy, and even self-control. In the sermon Augustine portrayed
the practitioner of marital fidelity in the same terms that he used in the treatise The Good of
Marriage to characterize the saints of the Old Testament. They, too, Augustine argued, engaged in
sexual relations with one another, even though they possessed the virtue of self-control as an
internal disposition or habitus (21.25). "Perfect souls," such as the patriarch Abraham and the
matriarch Sarah, were able to make use of the goods of the world, even the pleasures of intercourse,
because these were necessary in order to produce the people of God. Since they had received the
gift of self-control from God, they were able to make use of earthly goods without becoming too
attached to them. Therefore, to engage in sex out of duty and obedience to God was completely
compatible with receiving the grace of self-control.

In the Dolbeau sermon Augustine did not say explicitly that the self-control of married persons who
engage in sex purely out of fidelity is equal to that of celibates or of the Old Testament saints, even
though the logic of his argument might have compelled him in that direction. It is clear, however,
that Augustine believed that sex did not in itself disqualify a person from achieving holiness. As
Augustine wrote in another sermon, the Exposition on Psalm 149, God would attribute "perfect
sanctification" to the married person who, while desiring to be celibate, chose to be faithful and
support the weakness of his or her spouse. The overriding emphasis, as I see it, in Augustine's
preaching on marriage was a pastoral concern for the weakness of human nature that has been
damaged by sin. Though Augustine certainly believed that celibacy was the ideal way of life for
Christians, he knew that this was not realistic for most people. Therefore, he developed a pastoral
theology of marriage that made room both for heroic acts of self-control as well as indulgence for
human limitations.

Conclusion

By way of conclusion I would like to return to the comments of Uta Ranke-Heinemann with which
I began. Do the writings of Augustine show a "hatred of sex and pleasure"? Did he equate "pleasure
with perdition"? Did he believe that "the locus par excellence of sin is sex"? Was he guilty of
"pleasure-hating fantasies"? I will leave the final answer to these questions up to each of you, though
my answer should be obvious by now. I have tried tonight to present some of the elements of
Augustine's teaching on which a balanced and critical answer must be based. Augustine never
rejected marriage or sex or pleasure. More than most Christian thinkers of his day, he tried to find a
place in the church for the average, married person. As Robert Markus once eloquently argued,
Augustine staunchly defended the value of "Christian mediocrity" against the ascetic elitism of his
day. His deep sense of the abiding difficulty of controlling sexual desire led him to take one of the
most "liberal" positions in the early church, namely to accept the legitimacy of sex within marriage,
apart from procreation. Augustine also recognized the intrinsically social character of human nature
and linked procreation to the formation of human community. Finally, by pioneering the Catholic
idea of a "sacrament" in marriage, Augustine expressed the belief that fragile, human relationships -
even sexual ones - were capable of bearing enduring, transcendent significance. Surely, there is more
here than his critics have allowed.

Thank you.

NOTES

U. Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven. Women, Sexuality and the Catholic
Church (New York: Doubleday, 1990).
Cited in Jerome, Adversus Jovinianum I.5 (PL 23: 228).
For example, in Against Jovinian Jerome had argued that marriage was only a lesser evil than
fornication and that not even the blood of martyrdom could wipe way the stain of marital
intercourse.
De genesi ad litteram 9.5-7.
See, for example, De bono coniugali 9.9.
Cf. De bono coniugali 16.18. Retractationes II.xxii.2 (BA 12: 490)
De bono coniugali 4.4.
De bono coniugali 5.5. De bono coniugali 11.12 (BA 2: 52), citing 1 Cor 7:28.
I have discussed this point at length in my essay, "Reclaiming Biblical Morality: Sex and Salvation
History in Augustine's Treatment of the Hebrew Saints," in In Dominico Eloquio. In Lordly
Eloquence: Essays on Patristic Exegesis in Honor of Robert Louis Wilken. Edited by Paul M.
Blowers, Angela Russell Christman, David G. Hunter, and Robin Darling Young. (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2002), 317-35.
De bono coniugali 18.21 (CSEL 41:215).
De bono coniugali 18.21 (CSEL 41:214).
Ser. 9.18; cf. ser. 354A.12 and ser. 278.9-10.
See Letter 127 (ca. 411) and Letter 262 (ca. 418).
Portions of this talk have appeared in previous publications, where fuller discussion and
bibliography can be found. See, especially, the following: "Augustinian Pessimism? A New Look at
Augustine's Teaching on Sex, Marriage and Celibacy," Augustinian Studies 25 (1994): 153-77; and
"Augustine, Sermon 354A: Its Place in his Thought on Marriage and Sexuality," Augustinian Studies
33 (2001): 39-60.