Sex, Angst, Repression and God

That's what the few people who know anything about him usually associate with the North African writer Augustine (354-430). A native of Algeria, he was a thinker who had an incredible impact on the Western world, but i suspect many today won't know much about him.

I've started reading Garry Wills' biography, Saint Augustine which I picked up in Wellington's Arty Bees secondhand bookstore.

One thing is certain, Augustine was an incredibly prolific writer. Wills writes that Augustine was an ever-developing thinker, unsatisfied with even his own formulations to the end of his life, so that those (like Calvin) who attempt to make a system from his writing at a particular period in his life do him an injustice.

Wills argues well that "The testimony" is a much better rendering of his well-known confessiones.

[In the fourth century] the penitential system of the church "confessional" did not exist... Augustine was not confessing like an Al Capone, or like a pious trafficker of later confessionals.

On Augustine's supposed sexual obssessions Wills writes

We must be on guard for such misreadings... [People] are convinced that Augustine was a libertine before his conversion, and was so obsessed with sex after his conversion that they place many unnamed sins to his account - though his actual sexual activity was not shocking by any standards but those of a saint. He lived with one woman for fifteen years "and with her alone, since I kept faith with her bed" (T 4.2). This kind of legal concubine was recognised in Roman law... Even the Church recognised the legitimacy of such a relationship (Council of Toledo 400, Canon 17).

Yet the expectation of sexual excess in Augustine's life leads people to add sexual scenes and themes to his story.

Nothing like a little truth to ruin our salaciousness, huh?

Peter Brown's bio seems to be the more critically acclaimed.

Nevertheless, the reviews of this short book acknowledge that it has good points, notably in Augustine's early life and his relationship with his concubine. I've just started it. We shall see what other interesting things come up.

cor inquietum "the unstable heart", drawing us ever onward. One of Augustine's themes. i like that.


listening to Argyle Park | Doomsayer