A Seminar Paper on Augustine’s View on Sexuality

Sub: Major Figures in Theology – Classical and Medieval

Classical: St. Augustine
Submitted to: Rev. Dr. T.M. Jose Submitted by: Sam Varghese
Class: M.Th. II Christian Theology Date: 12/07/2022

Introduction

It is hard to overestimate the importance of Augustine’s work and influence, both in his own
period and in the history of Western philosophy after it. Patristic philosophy and theology, and
every area of philosophy and theology in the later medieval period, manifest the mark of his
thought. In fact, at least until the thirteenth century, when he may have had a competitor in
Thomas Aquinas, Augustine is undoubtedly the most important philosopher of the medieval
period. Furthermore, although his influence is somewhat less after the medieval period, it is
still important. Many of his views, including, for example, his theory of the just war, his
account of time and eternity, his understanding of the will, his attempted resolution of the
problem of evil, and his approach to the relation of faith and reason, have continued to be
important up to the present. In this paper we would be specially focussing on his view on
Sexuality.

A Brief Bio- Sketch

He was born in 354 AD to Monica, a devout Christian, and Patricius, a non-believer. His family
wasn't wealthy or prominent, but they could afford an excellent education emphasising on
rhetoric. His family's objective was for him to marry well and use his rhetorical skills to
succeed. While waiting to marry, he took a concubine and had Adeodatus. Adeodatus stayed
with Augustine when his concubine left. Augustine's work De magistro describes the boy's
brilliance and their relationship. Adeodatus died soon after De magistro's discussion.1

Monica wanted Augustine to become a Christian, but he joined the Manichaeans. In 383 AD,
Augustine travelled to Italy and met Ambrose, bishop of Milan, one of the most influential
Christian intellectuals of the day. Augustine's conversion, aided by Ambrose, occurred in 387
AD. Inspired by stories of desert ascetics, Augustine resolved to a life of celibacy, which he

1
Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, The Cambridge Companion To Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), 1.

1|Page
described in Confessions. In 391 AD, he was ordained a priest and appointed bishop of Hippo,
Africa. He died in 430 AD.2

He was a powerful bishop. He fought Manichaeism, Donatism, and Pelagianism. These three
Patristic theological beliefs informed his concept on free choice and evil. As bishop, he also
wrote extensively. Two hundred letters, 500 sermons, and 100 intellectual and theological
writings survive.3

His life was tumultuous in the Church and Roman Empire. He died while barbarian forces
surrounded Hippo after the fall of Rome in 410 AD. The Church was tumultuous during this
time. It shaped orthodoxy and its relationship to the state, so theological disputes often became
political ones.4

Augustine's contributions to philosophy can be arranged in several ways. In Augustine's work,

unlike that of a mediaeval philosopher like Aquinas, diverse ideas are so interwoven that
separating them would damage the thought. Augustine wrote a lot about the nature of the will,
but his ideas on the will are also important to his position on faith and reason, virtues and vices,
and his denial of Pelagianism.

Formative Influences in the life of St. Augustine:

Augustine’s thought-world was influenced by several factors, out of which the first and the
foremost was his mother Monica. She was a devout and pious lady. It was her prayer life that
resulted in the conversion and baptism of St. Augustine.

He was also influenced a lot by Bishop Ambrose who was the one who baptized him. Bishop
Ambrose was a very good preacher and a good interpreter of the Scripture. He interpreted Bible
in two ways: Spiritual and allegorical. This strongly influenced Augustine. Ambrose also
applied twin path in his exposition which were the Path of Reason and Path of Faith. Same way
St. Augustine used reason and faith in his preaching and conviction.5

He was also very much influenced by Neo- Platonism. According to his understanding this
philosophy would unlock the treasures of the faith of the Catholic Church. This was because
he was more exposed the Roman Catholicism.6

2
Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, The Cambridge Companion To Augustine…, 2.
3
Edwin A. Blum, “Augustine: The Bishop and Theologian”, Bibliotheca Sacra 138/01 (Jan-March 1981): 62.
4
Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, The Cambridge Companion To Augustine…, 3.
5
T. M. Jose, Lecture Notes on St. Augustine. Manakala: Faith Theological Seminary. June 2022.
6
T. M. Jose, Lecture Notes on St. Augustine… June 2022.

2|Page
Manichaeism also influenced him in this thought-world. The major understanding of
Manichaeism was similar to Zoroastrianism. The understanding is that there are two opposite
realities in the world (God of good and God of Evil). This is because of God’s creation. In the
initial stage of St. Augustine’s thought world, he was attracted by Manichaeism but later he
developed a different opinion towards it. He said that whatever God created is good and not
evil. So he started wring against it. According to Neo-Platonism, "Evil is not the absence of
good, but a lack of substantial reality." St. Augustine used this idea to refute Manichean
thinking. According to his thinking, Christian Platonism entertained a high regard for human's
moral and spiritual potential. He also says that culpable sin proceeds only from the abuse of
free will.7

He was also influenced by Donatism not fully but partially. This positively influenced the
thought pattern of St. Augustine. Donatism is a schism which broke out in North Africa c.313,
and it persisted until 698. The proponent of this schism was ‘Donates’, who was the bishop of
Carthage in 313. This was the period of the beginning of Arianism. Donatists later on regarded
themselves as the true church as they claimed Cyprian’s authority in re-baptizing Catholics8.

Parmenius and Tyconius were very well known teachers of Donatism. They made an influence
on Augustine through their writings. Tyconius taught that the church was truly universal.
According to him, a bipartite mixture of the ‘cities’ is like wheat and tares (weeds) growing
hand in hand, and it is the mixture of the church and there will come a time, during judgement,
both of them will be separated. The church’s holiness is not that of its members but of Christ,
its head, to be realized only eschatologically.

Augustine on Sex and Sexuality

To summarise fairly the views of Augustine on sexuality in a few paragraphs is at best a

difficult task, and at worst an impossible one. Even a cursory reading of his Confessions allows
a reader to marvel at his frank references to the sexual challenges in his life.

In the Confessions, he talked about his sexual behaviour as a teenager. He also talked about his
de facto relationship with an unnamed woman from Carthage. However, he stayed faithful to
this woman for many years9. At that time, his relationship would have been socially accepted,
and even the Christian church of his day would not have been totally against it. Certainly his

7
T. M. Jose, Lecture Notes on St. Augustine… June 2022.
8
T. M. Jose, Lecture Notes on St. Augustine… June 2022.
9
“Works of Augustine- His Ideas” http://www.augnet.org/en/works-of-augustine/his-ideas/2332-sexuality/
Australia: Augustinians, 2013 (Accessed on 02/07/2022).

3|Page
sexual urges caused him a lot of worry. This is clear from the way he uses negative imagery
for them in his Confessions.

He compares his sexual urges to pictures of disease, disorder and corruption. For him, Desire
is mud, a whirlpool, chains, thorns, a bubbling cauldron, and an open sore that must be
scratched.10 His negative views about sexual matters influences his equating of them with
original sin. This identifies Augustine as a major source of the negative attitudes on this subject
in Western society.

Sexual activity carried out within a marriage with the intention of having children is
blameless. The carnal pleasure that the spouses experience represents God's manner of
inducing a man and woman to have children and raise a family. Other than this, however, sexual
activity that occurs when procreation is impossible, such as when a woman is pregnant or a
couple is elderly, is considered sinful. If one choses to engage in sexual intercourse primarily
for the sake of pleasure, regardless of whether procreation is possible, this he considered to be
a sin of lust, albeit a minor sin. 11

It should be added here that Augustine's pastoral sense led him to observe that if a couple were
fairly sure that procreation would not come about through an act of intercourse, and one of the
partners requested having intercourse at that time, only the requesting party would be burdened
with a (minor) sin. The responding party would be expected to oblige the request because they
are bound to ‘render the marital debt’12. This Augustine gleaned from his reading of 1Cor. 6:5-
6, "Do not refuse one another except perhaps by agreement for a season, that you may devote
yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, lest Satan tempt you through lack of self-
control. I say this by way of concession, not of command”13.

Rather than talking about sexuality as an act, he talked about it as an interior state, a triumph
of the carnal will over the spiritual will. He proposed that all sexuality, all sensual pleasure
involved the triumph of the carnal will. Since sin was located in the carnal will and not the act,
Augustine developed a rigorous puritanical attitude towards sexuality that would fixate
European culture until the present day.

Augustine encountered negativity towards sexual relations as a Manichean during his troubled
adolescence. This happened at the same time that he suddenly became a parent outside of

10
“Works of Augustine- His Ideas” http://www.augnet.org/en..., (Accessed on 02/07/2022)
11
Edwin A. Blum, “Augustine: The Bishop and Theologian”, Bibliotheca Sacra…63.
12
Edwin A. Blum, “Augustine: The Bishop and Theologian”, Bibliotheca Sacra…63.
13
I Cor 6:5,6: The Revised standard Version

4|Page
marriage in a de facto relationship and struggled philosophically with the problem of evil,
which he had been thinking about after reading Hortensius of Cicero.

For Manichees of the "hearers" category such as Augustine, sexual relations were tolerated,
being regarded as almost inevitable because of a biological weakness in human nature.
Augustine's life was forever changed by his attitude toward sexuality. When Augustine was
almost seventy years old, Julian of Eclanum, his Pelagian rival, charged Augustine with still
having Manichean beliefs in this area.14

Augustine and Julian had disagreements on a variety of topics, including the nature of human
sexuality. Augustine identified the beginning of sexual desire with the beginning of human
disobedience, the original sin of Adam and Eve that had tainted all of the human species. But
Julian hesitated to accept the concept of original sin. He claimed that sexual desire was merely
another bodily sense and that the entire human race would not be punished for the disobedience
of one person.

For the people of today, it may seem strange that the general arguments of Augustine won out
over those of Julian, although Julian was probably correct in some areas. Augustine highlighted
the persistence of sexual concupiscence in his writings even in the last ten years of his long
life. It's possible that Augustine's own struggle with repressing sexual desire, which he wrote
about in his Confessions forty years earlier, nevertheless had an impact on his perception of
human sexuality and original sin. His perception of human sexuality was always tied to his
awareness of sexual desire. The origins of European sexuality, both in its Puritanism and its
most liberal character, go back to the belief of Augustine that human sexuality is located in the
will.

In the City of God (xxii.17) he vehemently rejects the notion of some that in the world to come
the resurrection will bring both men and women into male bodies, as if femininity had been a
regrettable error by the Creator. On the other hand, he feared sexuality (not least in himself) as
passing easily out of rational control. Even the sisters in the Hippo nunnery were warned that
a woman can unconsciously and unintentionally throw a man off balance merely by a flashing
eye.15

14
“Works of Augustine- His Ideas” http://www.augnet.org/en..., (Accessed on 02/07/2022)
15
“Augustine on Sexual and Conjugal Morality”. https://theo.kuleuven.be/apps/christian-ethics/sex/
history/h2b.html. (Accessed on 02/07/2022)

5|Page
Professor James O'Donnell (USA), a renowned scholar on Augustine, presented the strong
claim that sexuality remained fundamentally good for Augustine. "To what extent Augustine
may be made the parent of later attitudes toward what now seem unduly negative is open to
doubt," O'Donnell wrote. "He did hold that being a virgin was superior to entering marriage,
but emphasised repeatedly that both states of life were inherently good. He held that the purpose
of sexual intercourse was procreation and that even in marriage it was otherwise culpable, but
he was careful to minimise the burden of that fault”.16 O'Donnell also stated, "His views on
sexuality and the place of women in society have been tested and found wanting in recent years,
but they, too, have roots in a lonely man terrified of his father - or of his God."17

Evaluation

A number of Augustine's sayings illustrate the commonplace that generalized attitudes to

women are often determined by attitudes to sexuality. The man who had once adhered to the
ascetic Manichees and simultaneously lived with a woman to meet his erotic need could be
expected to be inconsistent. His conversion to Catholic Christianity enforced a positive
evaluation of the body which was potentially at odds with the fact that renunciation of sex lay
at the nerve-centre of his decision.

Be that as it may, it is open to debate whether Augustine is directly responsible for the traditions
of sexual morality that came down to all subsequent centuries or simply was effective in
strengthening the prevailing viewpoints of the church of his day. What is certain, however, is
that Augustine has had a substantial impact on the development of Western conceptions of
sexuality, and that it is particularly his negative views about sexuality that have
predominated. His views on sexuality are in conformity with his rigorous world view which is
centred on God. What Augustine believed that God wanted for human sexuality was accorded
much greater importance than what human beings sought from it.

Peter Brown reminds modern interpreters, particularly on the matter of sexuality, that
Augustine was the defender of marriage against the extreme asceticism of his contemporaries.18
He writes, “We must never read Augustine as if he were contemporary with ourselves. He was
the contemporary of Jerome and Gregory of Nyssa and Ambrose, and Christian tradition would
have taken a quite different direction, I am sure, if Augustine did not stand between us and

16
“Works of Augustine- His Ideas” http://www.augnet.org/en..., (Accessed on 02/07/2022)
17
“Works of Augustine- His Ideas” http://www.augnet.org/en..., (Accessed on 02/07/2022)
18
Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography: A New Edition with an Epilogue (California: University Of
California Press, 2002), 35.

6|Page
them. His is a voice of moderation.” 19 He further notes, “Augustine wished for a greater
recognition of the physical, sexual components of human nature, and was prepared to defend
their legitimate expression (if in a disciplined manner) in marriage.”20

When we take into account the time period in which he wrote, these references are even more
amazing. The more fundamental question is whether he is portraying himself too negatively.
Augustine offers little solid proof that he was a complete libertine, despite the fact that he went
so far as to call his youthful self a "bubbling cauldron of sin."21

Conclusion

Not all who followed Augustine interpreted him rigorously. His (later) stature as a Doctor of
the Church insured that his writings could not be ignored. However, even those who paid close
attention to him did not always follow him to the letter. This was also true of one of the most
quoted scholars of the medieval period who had an influence down the centuries, even to our
own time, namely Thomas Aquinas.

Bibliography

Blum, Edwin A. “Augustine: The Bishop and Theologian”. Bibliotheca Sacra 138/01 (Jan-
March 1981):57-67.

Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography: A New Edition with an Epilogue. California:
University Of California Press, 2002.

Jose, T. M. Lecture Notes on St. Augustine. Manakala: Faith Theological Seminary. June
2022.

Stump, Eleonore and Norman Kretzmann. The Cambridge Companion To Augustine.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Webliography

“Works of Augustine-His Ideas” http://www.augnet.org/en/ Australia: Augustinians, 2013

(Accessed on 02/07/2022).

“Augustine on Sexual and Conjugal Morality”. https://theo.kuleuven.be/apps/christian-

ethics/sex/history/h2b.html. (Accessed on 02/07/2022).

19
Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography: A New Edition with an Epilogue…, 36.
20
Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography: A New Edition with an Epilogue…, 38.
21
“Works of Augustine- His Ideas” http://www.augnet.org/en..., (Accessed on 02/07/2022)

7|Page