Sexuality series – Augustine on being created male and female

As part of the mainstream Christian tradition, Augustine has significantly shaped the conversation about how Christianity has understood and approached sexuality throughout the years since the early Church, including the fact that human beings were created both male and female. However, something we must consider when one tries to find out Augustine’s views on human sexuality is that his understanding of marriage and social norms strongly influenced his views. To make things even more difficult, Elizabeth A. Clark (Professor of Religion, Duke University) asserts that Augustine links women with the physical world and such a link affected Augustine’s conclusions on this topic. In addition, we find changes in Augustine’s writings that might affect how we read him nowadays. Then, the struggle for Augustine was real when he tried to interpret the Scriptures in new ways while at the same time being informed by the Roman/Greek culture of his time. In this respect, I will present Augustine’s perspective of what it means to be male and female in a comprehensive way, so readers may better appreciate his legacy for the church.

The corruption of sexual desire

Based on Romans 7, Augustine uses the Apostle Paul’s words to find support for his belief that human sexual parts are uncontrollable because of the consequences of the fall. This belief is interesting because, for Augustine, the rest of the human body parts are controllable, except the sexual parts in both the male and female. One notes here the place that libido/sexual passion plays in Augustine’s understanding of sexuality and its implications as well. For him, the responsible person of the fall would be Eve, for being disobedient to God by paying attention to the serpent’s voice. In Augustine’s reasoning, such an episode is the source of the original sin, and thus, the place where the original human sexuality–sex, desire, passion, etc– became corrupted.

To understand Augustine better in that regard, it is important to notice what he says about human sexuality during the Paradise. In the pre-fall state, he argues, both the male and female were able to have purposeful sex with the objective of begetting children and multiplying humanity. Under such a state, Augustine believed that the male and female had the ability to control their sexual parts without recurring to sexual passion. Instead of using an uncontrollable passion, both sexes were able to use their reason and will to activate a particular organ in the right place at the right moment. In other words, the key feature of human sexuality during the Paradise is, for Augustine, the human ability of both the male and female to control their bodies in an unpassionate manner. After the fall, this body control was lost, becoming sexuality shameful and corrupted. In this respect, we can summarize Augustine’s conclusions. First, sexual activity became degraded by sin; second, the female was responsible for such degradation; and third, sexual desire/passion has become sinful, and it must be avoided.

Sexuality and the cultural mandate

In Augustine’s reasoning we observe how he connects human sexuality with the creation order. Sexuality and its related aspects, such as sexual desire and the sexual act, for instance, are the ways God has established to carry out His will that humanity would be able to fill the earth. Despite the fact sin has affected and degraded sexuality, the purposes of God regarding the multiplication of the sexes will continue developing until the end, following the divine order regarding the stewardship of the earth. Augustine admits that God could have chosen other ways to carry out His will but chose the means of procreation instead. This suggests that for Augustine the procreation process–including its social dimension–is of great importance. This is the context to understand better one of his comments supporting male rulership and female subordination in society. Because sexuality has been degraded, both sexes need to work together on their social duties in order to fulfill the cultural mandate.

Augustine also shows a hierarchical understanding of the social roles of the sexes. The subordination of women–something Augustine agreed with–is then a way to manage the household and the social aspect of the created order. This seems to be grounded in the belief that both the male and female had been created according to the image of God. For Augustine, it is the rational soul that mirrored God. In this respect, both the male and the female participated in the image of God. But it is only the male who totally reflects such an image. Augustine interprets Paul’s words that the man is the glory of God and that the woman is the glory of man in the sense that women’s intellect and body are inferior to men’s. In other words, for him, women reflect the image of God only partially in the rational aspect but not in her female body. In the end, for Augustine, the female is basically the ‘helpmate’ of the male. Not surprisingly, Augustine’s thought regarding female subordination basically would consider women’s lives developing within the household as wives and mothers.

Modern readers should not ‘cancel’ or discard Augustine because of his thoughts on women since his ideas were simply part of the moral order of the society of his time. Although we might see Augustine’s positive attitude toward women in the way he held her mother and sister as well regarded, in general terms he tended to have a negative view of women. His negative views on gender roles are appreciated when he decided to send her back her first concubine to Africa in order to marry another woman (he would stay with the child). But since the waiting was long, he found a second concubine to satisfy his sexual urges. Although Augustine was not Christian when this happened, this illustration shows the lack of balance between the sexes in his times where the male had power and status that the female did not have.

A more mature Augustine and a renewed theological anthropology

Throughout the years, Augustine had the opportunity to renew and broaden his vision of marriage and gender roles, allowing him to rediscover the value of human sexuality in light of the gospel. This could explain why, despite Augustine’s negative conclusions about human sexuality, he also developed a more positive image in relation to his former ideas regarding both sexes when we consider all his writings as a whole. This statement seems to be in contradiction with the previous paragraphs, where Augustine placed a huge responsibility to the female. This apparent contradiction might disappear in some respects if one considers Augustine’s comments on the sexes according to this renewed theological-sexual anthropology.

In his Confessions, a more thoughtful and mature Augustine asserts that the female had a purpose since the beginning of the creation (before the fall). This purpose was procreation, so that humanity might be reproduced. By claiming this, Agustine considered procreation -including the means associated with it–- as something good and part of the created order. One observes that Augustine granted procreation a prominent social status, even as the goal of marriage. Probably because of what he experienced during his former life, Augustine asserts that the sexual act had become corrupted in the fall and that sexual desire should be avoided. It gives the impression that he tended to equate uncontrollable lust with sexual desire itself. In any case, there are parts where Augustine seems to be more negative about human sexuality and marriage than in other writings.

Noteworthy for sexual ethics is that after many years of reflection we see Augustine proposing and defending a new perspective regarding the purpose of marriage: procreation (associated with the body) and friendship (associated with the soul). Such bonding or unitive dimension serves as a key characteristic to differentiate marriage from other kinds of relationships. Augustine seems to have seen in this natural/spiritual dimension of marriage, and extensively to procreation, an eventual solution to the dilemma regarding the natural purpose of sex and the danger of lust/passion. The mature Augustine now justifies the existence of sexuality as a means to bring Christ to the world. It must not be a surprise Augustine also tended to spiritualize the procreative dimension of marriage, asserting that now that Christ is manifested it is not even rational to desire to have children.

In conclusion

Despite the limited view of sexuality held by Augustine, he indeed contributed to Christianity by highlighting the spiritual dimension of marriage in a culture that emphasized physicality. Although Augustine continued praising procreation as an important end of marriage, one observes he amplified his vision of human sexuality. I believe this allowed him to make more connections between sexuality and the way humanity is presented according to the Scriptures, thus developing a theological-sexual anthropology within Christianity. We appreciate such developments in the notion of marriage as an institution and the connection of human sexuality with the creational order.