Related writings: Sexuality; The Fall of Man

Augustine of Hippo is one of the most important figures in Western philosophy and Church history, given the title of Doctor by the Catholic Church for his many contributions to theology and doctrine, one of the most notable being original sin. I assert that his profound shame, desire for ultimate control over his thoughts, and pessimistic outlook on humanity is the basis for most sexual shame that exists in Western society today, particularly in right-wing, Christian, predominantly male circles.

Augustine’s sexual shame is evident from his earliest memory of the subject in his work Confessions. As an adolescent, he was horrified at his father having noticed his manhood at a public bath and giddiness at the possibility of grandchildren. Augustine, writing decades later, reinterprets this event as his father being preoccupied with worldly things rather than godly things but it’s quite clear that the young Augustine was simply and understandably embarrassed.

A Jiayan reading would note that shame is itself a source of suffering, especially when wrongly reified as evidence of cosmic disorder. When looking back on the event, Augustine could have chosen to view the moment as a mere awkward human experience — something all too common for teenagers — but instead it became the seed for his obsession with sexuality.

There is little account of shame or guilt in Augustine’s young adulthood in the Confessions. He had a number of flings with women and possibly men before settling down in a happy relationship with one unnamed woman with whom he had a child. In those days, his intensely devout Christian mother followed him around, causing him immense grief on account of his Manichean beliefs.

Later, when his mother was in the process of arranging a socially acceptable marriage for her son, she forced the woman Augustine had been living with to leave; living with a mistress would be bad optics. This turn of events caused Augustine much heartbreak and is likely the key to his complete about-face a year later when he is baptized a Catholic, swears a vow of chastity, and becomes fixated on the (in his view) irrational nature of sexuality. It’s clear that Augustine’s sudden change signals a deep attachment-oriented pain, for he cared deeply for this woman and she was suddenly taken away from him with no regard for his feelings. Jiaya would counsel one to let go of clinging-induced suffering without condemning any desire that underlies human connection.

For Augustine, who was such a sexual being that he immediately took another mistress after his mother had kicked out his first, to become chaste just like that had to have been an immense, if not impossible, undertaking. Not only was he presumably consumed by depressive thoughts of the woman he loved and had a child with but he also probably dealt with fleeting desires relating to no person in particular — the biological urges most experience on a daily basis. The fact that he couldn’t just flip a switch and turn them off likely resulted in anhedonia and shame, especially as a new convert to Christianity.

Jiaya recognizes that desire and intimacy are neutral, conditioned arising states, no more morally charged than breathing. Like many states of mind, they can become skillful when used to promote interconnectedness and unskillful when used to promote egoism. Augustine, who either lacked or rejected such a distinction, unhealthily viewed every involuntary impulse as corruption rather than part of the natural flow of Ji.

As such, he set off on a quest to rationalize this newly developed coping mechanism through the story of Adam and Eve, a section of the Bible so clearly metaphorical that the most renowned Jewish (e.g. Philo) and Christian (e.g. Origen) philosophers of Augustine’s time barely found it necessary to speak about it. Yet to Augustine, this story held the clues to his sexual shame and regrettable desires.

He put forward the idea that prior to the Fall, Adam and Eve had complete control over their sexual capabilities and could thus engage in sex without concupiscentia (translated as sexual lust, but what he means is pleasure in or enjoyment of the act) which Augustine asserted as an evil. After the Fall, concupiscentia was brought into the world and so any and all sexual acts now involve evil by their very nature. Therefore, in Augustine’s interpretation, celibacy is the highest good. Intercourse with the intent to procreate is the only acceptable sexual act, though it still requires evil.

While the Genesis narrative touches on a multitude of things that come into the world as a result of the Fall including the pain of childbirth and the toil of labor, sexual pleasure is not among them. Augustine’s backing for the idea is flimsy, based solely on the moment in which Adam and Eve realize they’re naked. There’s simply no evidence in the text that connection-oriented pleasure between humans wasn’t intrinsic to Creation, and this is assuming one accepts the premise that the story is literal to begin with.

Augustine disregards entirely the perspective that sexual intimacy can form deep bonds between people, revealing the interconnectedness of beings and the unity of all things. In the Jiayan framework, (sensual) pleasure is one of many ways to reveal oneness. Augustine’s insistence that pleasure is by definition evil is thus both theologically and metaphysically questionable.

Augustine further convicts man by claiming that all of humanity was present in Adam when he sinned, thus every human, including infants, are eternally damned at birth and have no free will except to sin. Augustine specifically identifies semen as the means by which Adam’s sin is inherited, bolstering the sexually repressed nature of his worldview to a comical degree. Humans are indeed born into a network of interconnected relations, but these relations are not stained by their very nature. All beings enter the world in a state of neutrality and, by their choices, fall into or out of alignment with Ji.

Notably, Augustine was one of the first to identify the sin of Sodom as sexual deviancy (homosexuality in particular), rather than the shunning of foreigners as it is repeatedly identified in the Bible. Augustine’s need to point this out could hint at some underlying insecurity.

Augustine failed in his capacity for self-reflection not because he lacked intelligence or sincerity, but because he mistook his personal pain for cosmic truth. Instead of examining his attachments, accepting that which he cannot change, and distinguishing between unskillful craving and the neutral reality of desire itself, Augustine projected his perspective onto all mankind. He could not see beyond himself.

Jiaya affirms that the human body is not a corrupted machine but a wondrous manifestation of Ji through which connection, joy, and intimacy can reveal the underlying Whole. Augustine’s universalization of his personal experiences taught Christendom to fear what it might otherwise have understood.