The Embrace of Eros: Bodies, Desires, and Sexuality in Christianity

Chapter 4. Augustine on Eros, Desire, and Sexuality

67 ChApter 4 Augustine on Eros, Desire, and Sexuality John E. Thiel ( ( the theologiCAl CAreer of Aurelius Augustinus (354–430) has so influenced the Christian tradition that one could credibly argue that no person besides Jesus himself has had more of a hand in shaping its beliefs and practices. Augustine’s views on the Trinity, creation, the nature of the church, grace and free choice, and the efficacy of the sacraments all molded the history of theological thinking on these topics and, in some cases, even set the course for what became Christianity’s orthodox heritage. Even when the medieval Catholic tradition resisted the strong theology of grace of his later years by consigning it to oblivion, Augustine remained its undisputed authority whose name theological commentators invoked in order to justify their opinions on nearly every other Christian matter. No traditional thinker exceeded Augustine’s measure in the minds of the great Continental Reformers, perhaps even to the point that the Reformation was as much a recovery of Augustine as it was a recovery of Paul. Although this history 68 The Embrace of Eros of Augustinian effects has been extensive at the level of belief, practice, and doctrine, it has been most consequential at the level of Christian attitudes toward and values concerning human desire, the yearning that our minds, hearts, and bodies experience for what they lack and wish to make their own. In this essay, I will explore Augustine’s views on desire, assess their remarkable influence on Christian life throughout the centuries, and consider how Augustinian sensibilities are still very much engrained in the tradition, even as we have become critically aware of their deleterious effects. a BrIEf tour of augustInE’s tHougHt I would like to make an argument here that draws on Augustine’s whole career and, for that matter, on the events of his entire life. The intelligibility of that argument requires a basic knowledge of that life and thought which some readers of this essay may not possess and which I would like to offer as a brief sketch. No doubt, the shorthand quality of this exposition will be subject to all sorts of criticism, though the presentation here claims to be no more than an orientation that serves the purposes of our more focused attention to the issue of desire in Augustine’s thought. Born in 354 in the North African town of Thagaste in present-day Algeria , Augustine from his youth demonstrated a keen intelligence that continued to prove itself throughout his life.1 His intellectual ability first appeared in a facility for words that brought him boyhood honors in rhetoric. He studied the classical Latin poets, cultivating a breadth of literary knowledge on which he drew throughout his life. Around the age of twenty-six, he wrote a book on aesthetics that has since been lost, the first of many books and treatises that would be the issue of an extraordinarily prolific literary career. Even though Augustine was strikingly intelligent, he exhibited a certain rigidity of mind that appeared throughout his life in a proclivity to “either-or” thinking, an intellectual habit that would have telling consequences for the Christian tradition. This disjunctive mind-set first appeared at the age of nineteen as Augustine troubled philosophically and, of course, emotionally about the problem of evil and sought comfort in the belief system of Gnostic dualism. For about ten years of his life, from his late teens to his late twenties, Augustine was a practicing Manichean, and, like all Gnostics, identified evil as material existence itself. In his early belief system, the physical universe, and particularly the body, imprisoned the divine spirit that committed Gnostics believed their inner self to be. This divine self, tragically lost in an ontologically evil world, could transcend its fallen state through the awareness of its self-divinity in Augustine on Eros, Desire, and Sexuality 69 this life or by escape from the body at death and return to the heavenly realm of the true God. For the young Augustine, this dualistic account of reality placed evil on one side of a metaphysical either-or. Existence was either good or evil, spirit or matter, metaphysically saved or metaphysically lost. There were many advantages to this Gnostic worldview, not the least of which was the clarity of its explanation of the age-old problem of evil. For the Gnostic, there was nothing mysterious about evil...