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I have decided that there is nothing I should avoid so much as marriage," Augustine wrote soon after his conversion. "I know nothing which brings the manly mind down from the heights more than a woman's caresses and that joining of bodies without which one cannot have a wife."

Though today many believe this was Augustine's definitive conclusion about sex, his thinking developed over his lifetime and was more complex than many imagine.

Augustine's views were shaped partly in reaction to his sexually active youth, partly against Platonist philosophy, and partly in response to various heresies he combated throughout his career as a bishop.

At age 17 he began a faithful 13-year relationship with a concubine of lower social status (Roman law forbade marriage between unequal classes), clearly to satisfy his powerful sexual appetites. In the Confessions Augustine says that while he was sexually active, he felt trapped: "I was bound down by this disease of the flesh. Its deadly pleasures were a chain that I dragged along with me, yet I was afraid to be freed from it."

As a Manichee, Augustine was taught that all sexual relations, even for procreative purposes, were evil and to be avoided. It was in response to the Manichees' prayers that Augustine uttered his own famous prayer, "Lord give me chastity and continence, but not yet."

After his conversion, Augustine was influenced by his mentor, Ambrose, whose ascetic theology was heavily laced with the matter-spirit, soul-body dichotomies characteristic of Neo-Platonism and common to Italy at the time. Ambrose taught, for instance, that Eden and intercourse were incompatible, and that only after the Fall did Adam and Eve surrender their angelic bodies and acquire material bodies.

Thus Augustine's early view of conjugal love.

But Augustine later rejected Manichean Gnosticism as well as the strong Platonism of Ambrose. Not to do so, he thought, would depreciate the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Resurrection, doctrines that assume the essential goodness of bodily existence.

In his Literal Commentary on Genesis and On the Good of Marriage, Augustine argued that not only did Adam and Eve have material bodies in Eden, but they engaged in intercourse in order to propagate. Also contrary to some assumptions, Augustine denied that intercourse brought about the Fall, though he did teach that original sin is transmitted through intercourse.

Furthermore, Augustine affirmed marriage as the source of three goods: it is (1) a form of human community that makes friendship possible, (2) an appropriate outlet for uncontrollable sexual desires, and (3) a sacrament of inseparable union dissolvable only by death. Because of marriage's sacramental character, Augustine allowed divorce only for adultery and, so long as the former spouse (or, interestingly, the dismissed concubine) lived, he categorically forbade remarriage as a damnable sin.

Augustine nevertheless viewed sex and marriage as inferior to the celibate life, in contrast to Jovian, a fourth-century monk who taught that marriage and celibacy were equal (and whose views were condemned by Ambrose and Pope Siricius).

In On Holy Virginity, Augustine defends the superiority of sexual abstinence. In On the Good of Marriage, he argues that the world is adequately populated—"there is on all sides from out of all nations an overflowing fullness of spiritual kindred"—thus lessening the urgency of God's command to "go forth and multiply." Thus "even they who wish to contract marriage only for the sake of children are to be admonished" to renounce sex in favor of spiritual friendship and the pursuit of God.

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