Christian History Home > Issue 67 > What Would Augustine Say?
What Would Augustine Say?
The fifth-century theologian answers five crucial twenty-first-century questions.
Jay Wood | posted 7/01/2000 12:00AM
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His reasoning? Although sexual activity accords with God's original design for humans, it has suffered due to sin and strayed significantly from its divinely intended use. In Paradise, our bodies were entirely subject to the will's bidding. As such, Adam could have commanded his body for sexual purposes merely by a rational act, and children, Augustine writes, would have been generated "by a calm act of the will."
Erotic desires and passions were not part of God's original plan for our sexual lives, as the Pelagian heretic Julian of Eclanum taught, but a consequence of sin. According to Augustine, sin caused a disjunction between our bodies and wills, mirroring the split between God's will and our wills—our bodies no longer obey reason and the will but are moved by lust. Our divided selves are readily seen, he thought, in the sexual dysfunctions we suffer: impotence, frigidity, priapism, premature ejaculation, unwanted nocturnal emissions, and unbidden sexual fantasies. As regards sex, ours is like the condition poignantly described by the Apostle Paul: "For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do."
Though Augustine's views came to dominate Western Christian thinking about sexual morality, they contrast sharply with aspects of some contemporary Christian thinking about sex.
On the one hand, his teaching that sexual activity ought to occur only within the bounds of lifelong, monogamous, heterosexual marriage remains the dominant Christian teaching. On the other hand, he would recoil at the permissive stance taken in some Christian circles toward marriage after divorce. No doubt he would also try to convince Christians to remain unencumbered by marriage.
Finally, he would be appalled at much contemporary Christian marriage instruction that we should excite sexual passion and pleasure in our spouses for the sake of recreational sex. The idea that a godly Christian woman would greet her husband at the door draped only in plastic wrap to arouse his sexual ardor would probably occasion yet another anti-heretical treatise.
War
How Good Christians Can Be Good Citizens
Robert L. Holmes
The fall of Rome in 410 was a calamity of staggering proportions to the citizens of the Roman Empire. Civilization itself had been shaken to its foundations.
So it was viewed by Augustine, from his vantage point on the North African coast. But he worried not so much about the empire as about the threat of a backlash to Christianity.
Hadn't critics warned for years that Christians' pacifism would weaken the empire? Didn't this confirm the fears that Christianity was too other-worldly for its followers to be responsible citizens of the state?
Though church and state had worked together for nearly a century (since the conversion of Constantine), Augustine still felt that he needed to establish once and for all that Christians could in conscience assume the full obligations of citizenship, including participation in warfare.
The task was a challenge. Critics seemed to have on their side the teachings of Jesus himself. Though Jesus never talked about war directly, his message of love, humility, and compassion seemed incompatible with violence and killing. And so it was understood by most early Christians.
However, Augustine had already argued (in his attack on the Manichees) that, properly understood, Jesus' teachings did not in all cases call for literal obedience. Of Jesus' injunction, "If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also," Augustine said, "What is here required is not a bodily action, but an inward disposition. The sacred seat of virtue is the heart."
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