ABSTRACT
Bishop Augustine is perhaps on the fringe of Denis O’Brien's scholarly activity, but in light of O’Brien's distinguished contributions to our understanding of matter, body and related themes in Plotinus, the neoplatonizing bishop’s views on the use and abuse of the body may be taken to be within his sphere of concern. As he will be aware, Augustine-hating is still a flourishing cottage-industry, though he may not know that when I published a book on the bishop a few years ago a well-known scholar asked me how I could have spent so much time on such a dreadful man. For according to a persistent counter-hagiographical tradition Augustine’s principal claim to fame lies in his responsibility for many of the cultural ills which still afflict the ex-Christian West. Of these imputed ills the most commonly cited are those said to derive from the Augustinian roots of Calvin’s gloomy—even suicide-provoking—theory of double—predestination, with its corollary that most of us are condemned to hell for no personal fault of our own, indeed in many cases simply because we have not been baptized. The second charge identifies a prudish and fearful hostility to sexual activity which, with its accompanying misogyny, is widely accredited to Christian and often to specifically Augustinian influence. Without prejudice to the question of the overall historical effects of Augustine’s views of sexuality—views often handed down by his successors in grossly diminished and deformed versions—I want to consider a very limited part of his comment on our sexual nature and behaviour in an attempt to raise the debate over the adequacy of his views to a rather more sophisticated level. Via a discussion of the notorious and endlessly chewed-over pears of the Confessions, I want to argue that some of Augustine’s reflections on sexual activity and its effects are psychologically acute and spiritually coherent.
