Feminist Interpretations of Augustine

1 Augustine: Sexuality, Gender, and Women

1 Augustine: Sexuality, Gender, and Women Rosemary Radford Ruether There are few lives of any historical person that have been so often recounted , analyzed, and psychoanalyzed as that of Augustine. This is largely the result of his work the Confessions, as well as of the accurate perception that much of his teaching on sexuality, sin, grace, and predestination is heavily conditioned by his personal experience. Any discussion , therefore, of Augustine’s views on sexuality, gender, and women must include some discussion of his personal journey. Augustine was born in 354 c.e. in the North African town of Tagaste of a pious Catholic mother and a pagan father. Augustine seems to have disliked his father, whose harsh, prideful, and libidinous nature reflected 48 Feminist Interpretations of Augustine characteristics he wished to shun in himself. Although he would finally embrace his mother’s Catholic Christianity, and even make his mother the symbol of the church and the mothering nature of God, in his youth her church represented to him a naive religiosity unworthy of his intellectual acumen. Yet Augustine was loved deeply by both parents and seen by them as the family’s rising star. His father dug deeply into his pockets to invest in the education of his bright son, who was to rise through his wits from their hometown to the provincial capital of Carthage and finally the imperial cities of Rome and Milan.1 This educational and career trajectory meant that Augustine did not consider containing his youthful sexual urges through legal marriage to a hometown girl. Only at the end of his rise into the company of the imperial elite could he hope for a suitable marriage into a family of high rank. Thus sometime soon after he arrived in Carthage (371), Augustine settled for monogamous concubinage to a woman whom he loved, very likely herself a Catholic catechumen, but whose social origins precluded the advantageous marriage that he sought.2 This relationship would last for about twelve years. Although Augustine would later portray it as solely a bondage to sinful lust, it was an accepted convention in his society and one his parents understood. In the first year of their relationship, Augustine’s common-law wife bore him a son, lovingly named Adeodatus, or ‘‘gift of God.’’ In the same year that his first and only child was born, while he pursued his higher education in Carthage, he also became an auditor with the Manicheans, a Persian sect that he believed offered deeper insights into the nature of good and evil than those he found in his mother’s simple faith. The Manicheans promoted birth control as a way of preventing souls from being born into bodies, and it is likely that Augustine began to practice birth control at that time to prevent further children. It is notable that his concubine bore him no more children in their subsequent years of sexual congress together.3 After completing his studies at Carthage, Augustine became a teacher of rhetoric. His mother was distraught at his Manicheanism and refused to let him into the family home. Augustine planned his escape from her motherly demands by moving to Rome, leaving her weeping like Dido on the shores of Carthage.4 But unlike Dido in Virgil’s epic, Augustine’s mother did not commit suicide but pursued her errant son to Milan, where, a few years later, she would receive the satisfaction of seeing him baptized into the Catholic faith. In Rome Augustine became the tutor of Sexuality, Gender, and Women 49 the sons of the nobility. The Roman pagan aristocracy appreciated Augustine both for his brilliance and for his heterodoxy, which put him outside the realm of their rivals, the bishops of the Catholic Church.5 Augustine would soon move on to the city of the most powerful of such Catholic bishops, Ambrose of Milan. By 384, at the age of thirty, Augustine was on the brink of accomplishing the goals of his upwardly mobile career. He was acclaimed as a teacher by the highest circles of society and was engaged to marry the daughter of a high-ranking Milanese Catholic family, but she was not yet twelve years old—the legal age for girls to marry under Roman law. In such a marriage there was no question of intellectual companionship; it was only another steppingstone in this ‘‘brilliant career.’’ His concubine was sent packing back to...