St. Augustine, 17th century portrait by Phillipe de Champaigne.
I am currently reading a book on the history of sexuality within the Christian tradition, Eunuchs For Heaven, by Uta Ranke-Heinemann. Originally written in German, it is a well researched and thorough study of the role sexuality (celibacy, marriage, etc) has played within the Catholic Church. The book covers many aspects on how the Church has dealt with sexual issues; I am not finished it yet, but recently I read a bit on St. Augustine (354-430). All that can be said, after a brief survey of his ideas on sexuality, is that this guy was seriously messed up when it came to sex. Why in the world the Catholic Church continues to base so much of its sexual ethics on such a man is a question that needs to be asked, and asked often. His influence beyond Catholicism was great too; but the Protestants no longer remain as indebted to him as the Catholics. Still, this does not mean that Protestantism is immune from sexual weirdness. Ultimately, even puritan Protestant views on sex can be traced back to the influence of such men as Augustine.
This is a complicated topic, and a blog post cannot really do it justice, but a simple description of Augustine thought on sex is this: sexual pleasure is essentially a result of the fall of man, something evil, something to be avoided. It did not exist in the Garden of Eden, and only came into being in the imperfect world of man’s post Garden experience. Man’s carnal nature is therefore bad and to be avoided. The best path for the redeemed Christian then is through total abstinence from sex, all denial of sexual pleasure, if possible. And if one is married, then sex should never fall into the evil world of sexual desire and pleasure for its own sake, but rather sex should exist only in the service of procreation. Anything beyond that is a sin. In other words, sexual intercourse with one’s spouse should never result out of sexual desire, but rather, sexual pleasure should result from the desire to procreate, and the less sexual pleasure felt, the better. It is even possible, in Augustine’s world, for a man to commit adultery with his own wife, if his sexual desires for her are too inordinate. Yes, that is correct: Augustine and many theologians of his time, and after, taught that a man can commit adultery with his own wife, if he is too roused up for her sexually. As Heinemann sardonically points out, in vitro fertilization, condemned by the Church, would actually be Augustine’s perfect method of procreation, since it involves no sexual pleasure whatsoever.
This ideas were promulgated 1500 years ago. Perhaps they might seem a bit outdated. Augustine and the thinkers of his time reflect a heavy influence of what is called Gnosticism. In a nutshell, the Gnostics believed that all matter is evil, and only the spirit is good. Yet Pope John Paul II echoed the Augustine disapproval of sexual desire and pleasure and when he famously stated that a husband should not lust after his wife. I have never met a woman who did not laugh out loud at this notion. As his famous pronouncement indicates, the Gnostic distaste for all things physical still lingers on within the Catholic Church and other areas of Christianity as well.
But this is only a small portion of Augustine’s views on sex. As I stated in an earlier post,http://theracerx.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/st-augustine-on-the-evils-of-sex-semen-and-the-raging-hard-on/ Augustine felt that semen was the vehicle for original sin. All of us carry original sin in that we are products of male semen. Here again Augustine reveals the Gnostic influence of his day, an influence that is still felt in much of Catholic and Christian sexual ethics. He was very much a man of his time: this neurotic hatred of all things sexual, the disdain of the body, the idealized desire for an all embracing chastity and virginity, is quite common among the philosophers and religious men of the Late Roman empire. Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, and Christianity all reflect this. The body is ultimately bad, the spirit is good. We might view this merely as an amusing historical curiosity if it were not the foundations for what is still today the Christian views on sex, sexual pleasure, contraception, homosexuality, etc. One of the things I have become more aware of recently is that the Old Testament, and Judaism in general, are not nearly as anti-sex and anti-body as the theologians and Church Fathers of the first five centuries of Christianity. The Christian Church became progressively more and more rigid in matters of sexuality as time went on, the further it moved from its Jewish roots and from the life of Christ himself. For instance, the Gnostics believed all created matter was evil and only the spirit was good; in the Old Testament, God created the world and matter, and therefore all matter is ultimately good, including sexual pleasure. Solomon had many wives and concubines, and there was nothing wrong with this. The Song of Songs extolls sexual love. The Book of Daniel has a wonderful hymn on the beauties of God’s creation. The Psalms also have some nice hymns on the beauty of the world. Yet by Augustine’s time we see the Gnostic influence stifling the Judaic. More and more the world is a dark place, filled with sin, and all sexual activity is seen as sinister, the body is bad, all of which is a reflection of the evil that the fallen world engendered. In the early Church priests and Bishops married, just as rabbis would in Judaism; by the twelfth century celibacy was mandatory for all priest in the Roman Church, although, as the author effectively argues, mandatory celibacy was always a nearly impossible rule for the hierarchy to control and in many ways it is one of the main forces behind the Protestant Reformation. For the Catholic Church, still clinging to this fanatical attitude towards human sexuality, the result is that today we have a Catholic clergy made up of many, many psychosexually stunted individuals. The sex abuse scandals prove this. The roots of this lie in the Augustinian influence on what is deemed proper human sexuality.
According to Augustine, all relations between husband and wife should be as free as possible from all sexual desire. Obviously this couple is engaging in a mortal sin.
I have come to the conclusion that there is something fundamentally wrong, demented, and even inhuman, about much of Catholic sexual morality. I personally have to come reject most of it. Throughout the entire history of the Church, few people have ever been able to follow the “teachings” of the Church on sexuality. And why should they? Why should anyone base his or her own sexual behavior on what a complete neurotic like Augustine has to say? Why in the world is the Church still influenced by this? Because he was a brilliant thinker? So what. Just because he was a great thinker and intellect does not give him a special insight into human sexuality, especially given his complete lack of understanding of human biology, which no one of his era possessed. People of his time thought semen flowed out from the brain through the spinal column. Seriously. They had no conceptions of hormones or brain chemistry or the body’s natural cycles. To them, under the pervasive Gnostic influence, the body was sinister, a suspicious organ to be subdued. Augustine is just one, albeit the most influential, of many men of that time who profoundly shaped the Catholic and Christian views on sexuality. Ambrose and Jerome would be two others, but I should save them for another post, and I have much to write on this topic.
And yet people still make obeisance to these men, and they still influence Catholic thought today, such as with John Paul II, who clearly reflects the influence of Augustine. Benedict is the same. We continue to listen to these old men, professed celibates, on the matters of sexuality. Why? It is truly absurd and something which I can no longer follow or believe. If this makes me a heretic, so be it. As far as I am concerned, people just need to say that Augustine was fucked up when it came to sex, and we need to reject his notions for what they are, bizarre and unhealthy.
As I said, as I continue in this book, I will certainly have more to write on this topic. What I am learning is quite fascinating and enlightening.