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The longest chapter in the book, tendentiously titled "The Christian Panic," discusses Augustine's struggles with his own powerful sexual drives and habits, the tensions created by his Neo-Platonist and gnostic intellectual background, and the Christian faith he embraced as an adult. Some of Augustine's views may strike us today as strained or severe, but when they are viewed in historical context they offer moderating elements. After the debauched excesses of the Roman Empire...modern sexual libertines have nothing on Caligula and Nero...the ancient world witnessed an opposite swing of the pendulum. As Blackburn correctly notes, the Stoics were skeptical of sexual pleasure, and the Manichees, with whom Augustine associated for nine years, along with some gnostic Christian cults, preached total abstinence from sex. Tertullian and Augustine's Christian mentor, Ambrose, sometimes sounded as though they'd prefer the extinction of the human race to its propagation through intercourse.
Augustine strikes a moderating position amidst these extremes, his Christian faith and fidelity to Scripture proving a corrective to the philosophical and sectarian extremes of his day. Augustine couldn't deny Scripture's teaching that creation is good, including God's provision for propagation through sexual intercourse. Moreover, our Lord having assumed a physical body, and his having been raised from the dead and preserved from corruption, were proof that the physical world is not evil. Jesus' blessing of the wedding at Cana, and Scripture's other teachings about the honor of the marriage bed and conjugal obligations between spouses, combined to correct some of the excesses of his day. While Augustine acknowledged the good of marriage, he certainly denied that it was the highest good, and he remained suspicious of sexual pleasure. He counseled married couples capable of it to abandon sexual intimacy and instead to pursue spiritual communion with each other and with God.
Christianity and natural reason have long taught that our appetites for food, drink, sleep, sex, and the other natural pleasure associated with the body can be out of whack, ill-tuned, excessive, or deficient. The unprecedented abundance of food, leisure, drink, and sexual stimulation that contemporary Americans enjoy has neither increased our fulfillment nor decreased the number and degree of dysfunctions associated with these goods, as any talk show or bestseller list will attest. Moreover, Christianity has never regarded lust, or the other sins of appetite, as the worst of sins...though they may be among the most common, arising as they often do in the "heat of the moment" and without the full consent of the will (see Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, Q. 154, art. 3). Lust can't compare in seriousness with envy, anger, and the many species of pride, culminating in the satanic desire to supplant God. Rather, Christianity has always taught that our appetite for sexual pleasure, just like those for food, drink, and sleep, needs to be tutored, trained with bit and bridle, sensitive to the slightest touch of command, lest it rampage out of control, dragging us helter-skelter after it.
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