Introduction

Saint Augustine's Sin
by Garry Wills

According to Pulitzer Prize winner Garry Wills, most readers of Augustine interpret his meditation on sin in the Confessiones as an indication of his obsession with sex. But as Wills suggests in his discussion of book two of Augustine's influential work, sexual transgression is not Augustine's main focus as he reflects on the nature of human sinfulness. Instead, Augustine seeks to understand man's power to transgress-how it is that good creatures can choose evil deeds. He describes his own shame after participating in a minor theft as a teenager and interprets this act-and all other acts of sin-in light of the three founding sins of the Bible: the fallen angels' rebellion, the temptation of Adam, and Cain's fratricide.

With a brilliant introduction and notes throughout, this is a rewarding interpretation of a seminal work translated with new vividness and authority.

Augustine + sin = 5 sex. That is the equation most people begin with when they first think of Augustine's Testimony. They are so obsessed with the idea that Augustine was obsessed with sex that they find it hard to read what he actually wrote about sin. He felt that he had committed far graver sins than those of the flesh. Few believe that he actually meant it when he said that his great sin at the age of sixteen (when he had probably already met and had sex with the mother of his child) was the theft of some pears. Many get around their own problem by trying to find a sexual meaning in that theft. If they cannot do that, they cannot take the man seriously when he speaks of sin. As Nietzsche wrote to his friend Overbeck:

For a diversion I was just reading the Confessions of Saint Augustine, with great regret that you were not here with me. What a high-flown wordsmith! Such tear-jerking phoniness! How hard I laughed, for example, over a "pear theft" of his youth, made the basis for his account of student days (0 2.227).

Audiences come to hear the bishop talk about sex, and are not going to put up with anything so beside the point as agonies of regret over pears that were not edible anyway. Yet James O'Donnell (2.141) notes that "The meditation on the pear theft is the longest sustained passage on any topic so far in [the book]."

Worse in a way, is to come. The next long episode cum analysis in Book Four of The Testimony - describes another sin. This one fits so little modern expectations that most readers miss the fact that it is the story of a sin - unless, of course, they can slip a sexual content into it (as Rebecca West did in her book on Augustine). The ordinary reader thinks it describes not a sin but a sorrow, a rather hysterical reaction to the death of a friend. Even so nonordinary a reader as Nietzsche found this the second-most absurd passage in the book:

How psychologically phony (for example, when he relates the death of a friend with whom he made up one soul, and decided to live on, since in this way his friend would not be entirely dead.) What revolting pretentiousness.

But if Augustine seems to exaggerate his other sins in a semi-hysterical way, he is equally guilty of exaggerating his sexual sins. Despite his reputation as a dissolute young man, he lived from age sixteen or seventeen to age thirty-one or thirty-two "faithful to one woman's bed" (T 4.1), a woman with whom he brought up their child in an exemplary way. Though the woman was not his wife, such common-law marriages were recognized not only by Roman law in Augustine's time but by the church itself, which formally sanctioned them in Canon 17 of the Council of Toledo (400 c.e.). Augustine's own mother seems to have got along well with her grandson and the boy's mother - she lived with the young parents, and her only recorded objection was not to the house's sleeping arrangements but to the Manichaeism her son was professing at the time (T 1.19).

Actually, Monnica did not want her son to marry - not, that is, until he had reached a stage in his career when he could marry "up" in terms of wealth and status. The family had invested a great deal in Augustine's career, and it wanted a return on the investment.2 When the time came to arrange a marriage, Monnica, as executor of her husband's estate, chose the appropriate heiress. The girl was not yet of marriageable age (fifteen), so Augustine took an interim mistress - the only other woman we can be sure he ever slept with. It is to be noticed that, here again, he did not resort to promiscuity but to another stable relationship with one woman. Before his fiancée could become his betrothed, Augustine had returned to the faith of his youth and renounced the world. It was allowed him as a Christian to marry. But the rules for a truly observant Christian were, in that ascetical period, that sex should be indulged in marriage only as needed for procreation, and he thought it would be easier for him to abstain entirely than to face the trial of infrequent sex with a wife in the same bed with him [3]. There was little in this sexual history to discredit anyone but a man with the high standards of a saint. He had used the mother of his son disreputably, as he came to realize and admit (What Good There Is in Marriage 5.5). But he cannot reasonably be considered profligate.

Well, if his sex life was so respectable, what is all the fuss about? First of all, we must remember that the fuss is made mainly by modern readers, not by Augustine himself. For a man supposedly obsessed with sex, Augustine spent very little time on the sins of the flesh in his sermons. He warned his flock more about stinginess toward the poor and pride in their worldly possessions or status. Lack of sexual control was a result of original sin, not the cause of it, and it was not even the most signal part of that legacy. As the great Augustine scholar, Peter Brown, noted:

Other signs of Adam's fall invariably struck Augustine, in his later years, as playing a far more powerful role in human affairs. The terrible cascade of helpless misery, of ignorance, arrogance, malice and violence set up a deafening roar. Beside these devastating ills, sexual temptation was no more than an irritating trickle.... In a standard edition [of The City of God], out of sixteen lines devoted to deliberate human sins, only two refer to sexuality.

It is true that most of the material used to show that Augustine was obsessed with sex comes from those very "late years" Brown is describing; but that had to do with an accident of his controversy with the Pelagians.

If Augustine spends little time analyzing sexual sin, it is because there is little to analyze. There is no mystery to the appeal of pleasure. The surrender to it is a weakness but not, in itself, one of malice. It is not a mark of the great sinners, the cold rejectors of God, beginning with Satan. It is not a sin of pride, avarice, or tyranny. It was not the sin of Adam or of Eve. Sins of the spirit concerned him more than sins of the flesh. The latter he calls obvious, however reprobate, in their appeal: "[W]e sway to what touches the flesh or affects any of the senses by its fitness to them" [10], "[l]imbs that intermingle in embrace" (T 10.8). Yielding to pleasure is thus understandable. He is harsher on those who actually seek pain, in the "transgressive knowledge" of sadomasochism (T 10.55). This comes closer to the desire for knowing and experiencing everything that Satan stands for. The two great sins of Augustine's youth - the pear theft and his reaction to the dying friend - resemble this transgressive knowledge more than they do any simple yielding to pleasure.

© 2003 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Garry Wills is one of the most respected writers on religion today. He is the author of Saint Augustine's Childhood, Saint Augustine's Memory, and Saint Augustine's Sin, the first three volumes in this series, as well as the Penguin Lives biography Saint Augustine. His other books include "Negro President": Jefferson and the Slave Power, Why I Am a Catholic, Papal Sin, and Lincoln at Gettysburg, which won the Pulitzer Prize.