Talking about the Body, 4

Augustine, the fourth-century bishop, enjoyed sleeping with women. He liked sex. His monogamous relationship with a woman who bore his child was not a marriage. The arrangement between the two of them was sexual. Their one child was probably a mistake; clearly, Augustine and his concubine used birth control. He put aside his concubine, who became a voluntary widow, so that he might marry properly and enter the governing class. The girl chosen for him by his mother, Monica, was Catholic and she, his mother, hoped Augustine might himself become a baptized Catholic as a result of the union.

Taking up with a mistress after his concubine departed, Augustine realized that he had a compulsive need for sex, the obvious basis for any further relationships with women, even a wife. He chose not to marry, becoming instead ordained to the priesthood.

The mystical joy of communion with the spirit had intervened: "limbs asking to receive the body's embrace" were disturbingly similar to the touch of God. Christ's embrace of the soul was superior to even Catholic marriage: the direct encounter with God's Wisdom in "an utterly untroubled gaze, a most clean embrace; to see and to cling to Her naked, with no veil of bodily sensation in between."

The discipline of continence allowed him to embrace Christ more fully: "O, my late joy!"

But Augustine did not take up an ascetic life alone. His male friends joined him in "a holy plan of life, . . . truly chaste because [of the] untarnished joining" of like souls. In Hippo, five years later (391) Augustine founded a little monastic community that became for him serenity at the center of his hectic episcopal life.

What troubled Augustine was the urge to act out sexually (the urge not in itself a sin), and he felt it deeply. Even married couples had to fight against this urge. In the act of marital intercourse, even for the production of children, the body enacts Adam's fall. Augustine taught that we all feel sexual shame. Baptism and incorporation into the church freed men and women from the shame of Adam--and that only at the end of time. This is the power of what has come to be known as "original sin," which, according to Augustine, is transmitted to children at conception.

For Augustine, clearly, the way out of the sexual trap--the body created to embrace the material, the requirement that the body be loved and cherished, as Augustine believed--was not easy. He regretted having engaged in sexual intercourse because, having done so, he knew what he was relinquishing: sadness attends the act, always, because of its coming between the human and God.

How does this brief review of Augustine's struggle with sexuality relate to today's disputes over homosexuality and the church (and, as I argue, women in the church)? Male society, for Augustine, was the only safe society allowed to the Christian who wished to know God outside of the pleasures of the flesh. With Augustine the church learns shame and her children are conceived in shame. Parents are taught the the act of sexual intercourse is in itself a submission to concupiscence, the urge to pleasure. When males in the church engage in sexual acts, they do so only for pleasure and they violate the last refuge of the celibate male: the company of other celibate males. If the purity of the church cannot be upheld in the company of men, then its society as a mirror of God's purity is doomed. Bad enough that women have entered the sacred garden of male continence and discourse, tempting them with conpupiscence; for the male to do the same, to imitate the female, is intolerable.

Augustine was not gay. He loved the flesh of women. He retreated to the company of celibate men to protect himself and to remain open to the embrace of Christ. He subjugated the flesh to his and God's will. And expected others to do the same, insofar as they were able. The modern conservative objection to the full inclusion of gays and lesbians in the church is one with Augustine's rejection of the embrace of flesh: God's will is that the body be held in purity for the embrace of Christ. The male body is the vessel of that purity. Once again, the model is the body of Christ, the male whose penis is forever that of an infant.