Augustine of Hippo and sex

[olegramps]

7. Firstly in the City of God he wrote that he would have desired procreation to be without pleasure.

He only excuses the use of the procreative faculties in its production of children. In his writings against Julian a married bishop who, in agreement with the Jewish theologians, maintained that sexual relations were to be enjoyed without the excused of procreation. Augustine wrote that the Manicheans were knowledgeable about the fertility cycle and only engaged in sex during the unfertile period in order to avoid pregnancy. He condemned this as sinful lust. When Pius XII approved of the use of rhythm birth control many conservative theologians were in disagreement. Augustine was nothing more than a hackneyed disciple of Plato. In his attack against Julian he wrote:
"Should one seek the pleasures of the body, which, as Plato said truly and earnestly, are the enticements and baits of evil? What injury to health, what deformity of character and body, what wretched loss, what dishonor is not evoked and elicited by pleasure? Where its action is the most intense, it is the most inimical to philosophy...WHAT FINE MINE WOULD NOT PREFER THAT NATURE HAD GIVEN US NO PLEASURES AT ALL.&quot Against Julian, 4,14,72) The assimilation of Platonic philosophy was so extensive that "Some of our fellow Christians are astonished to learn that Plato had such ideas about God and to realize how close they are to the truths of our faith. Some even had been led to suppose that he was influenced by the Prophet Jeremias during his travels in Egypt or, at least, that he access to the scriptural prophecies, and this opinion I followed in some of my writings."

Please note that the attempt to reconcile pagan philosophy with the Hebrew theology was attempted by Philo, a Hellenize Jew. His extensive writing were rejected by the Jewish theologians as slander of the Creator. Julian charged that Augustine was a heretic and wrote, "God made bodies, distinguished the sexes, made genitalia, bestowed affection through which bodies would be joined, gave power to the semen, and operates in the secret nature of the semen. God made nothing evil."

The only good that Augustine saw in marriage was the production of children that excused the lust of sexual intercourse. He only attest to the extent to which dualistic pagan philosophy had been assimilated. One of the most respected Catholic theologians, Professor John Noonan of Notre Dame, clearly summerized the effect of Augustine's influence: "After the conflict of Pelagius and Augustine, sexual intercourse was clearly in a suspect position, stained by concupisence, forced to justify itself by procreative purpose." (Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by Catholic Theologians and Canonists, p. 138)