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Augustine in Dialogue with Purity Culture

Augustine in Dialogue with Purity Culture

Last updated on: September 17, 2024 at 2:00 am by Adam Renberg

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Augustine in Dialogue with Purity Culture 2024-09-16T15:49:45-04:00 Adam Renberg

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We were crammed into a large storage space retrofitted with old couches and Newsboys posters, sweaty and out of breath after the game of dodgeball we just played. What better time could there be to talk about sex? An older couple from the church arrived to speak to the youth group, discussing in awkward detail how amazing sex is, so long as you wait for marriage—if you don’t, your marriage will be broken, or at least not as good as it could be. Afterwards, we all signed a ‘covenant contract’ to be abstinent until marriage, making sure not to make eye contact with anyone else—and the gossip that emerged later was about the high school couple in the back who did not sign.

I grew up amidst the ‘purity culture’ movement in evangelical circles, which tried to think through questions of sexual ethics in an overly sexualized society. While the iteration in my church was not nearly as intense or problematic as many (we didn’t read Joshua Harris, for one!), the movement as a whole has been critiqued for being repressive and shaming. If we do some cultural exegesis for a moment, it seems that purity culture has a few assumptions worth discussing here. First, pleasure in sexual intercourse is an unqualified good, so long as it is inside the confines of marriage—to have married sex is to have chaste sex, even if that includes sexual acts universally condemned by the Christian tradition. Second, physical purity is of the upmost importance, especially in reference to the female body. Young women must ‘save themselves for their husbands’, with many shame tactics used to enforce this mentality. If their bodies are defiled, even if by no fault of their own, they have failed.

There have been some attempts to correct some of the damages of this culture and to correct these assumptions, including works by Sheila Gregoire, Linda Kay Klein, and others. While myself and others have written about the early church in relation to the body on this site, I would like to offer up another dialogue partner, here, from an unlikely source: Augustine of Hippo.

Augustinian Emphases

While the fifth century church father from North Africa is often condemned for his views of sexuality, no one can claim he is naïve about matters of sex. Augustine details many of his own sexual desires in his Confessions, which culminated in a relationship with an unnamed concubine for over 10 years, who bore him a son. In fact, lust was at the center of his conversion. After he cried out to God: “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet” (Confessions 8.7.17), it was Lady Chastity who told young Augustine to trust that God can bring about sexual discipline in his life: “Why are you relying on yourself, only to find yourself unreliable? Cast yourself upon him, do not be afraid … Make the leap without anxiety; he will catch you and heal you” (Confessions 8.9.27). And Augustine made the leap.

A 15th century depiction of Augustine’s conversion by Fra Angelico or someone in his workshop.

He details his transition from a sex-crazed youth to a celibate bishop by the grace of God, which informs his logic on sexuality throughout his writings. Augustine is not foremost concerned with devaluing sexual pleasure nor condemning marriage (as some claim), but with obedience to God in all areas of life. He applies this logic to marriage and virginity in On the Good of Marriage, noting that obedience applies to both relational vocations.

“Judgment about which is to be preferred is made by the person who first compares chastity itself with obedience, and realises that obedience is in a sense the mother of all virtues. So for this reason there can be obedience without virginity, because virginity falls under counsel and not under commandment … So obedience can exist without virginity, but not without chastity” (Augustine, The Good of Marriage, 30).

We see Augustine’s logic in relation to sexuality here—one must begin with obedience to God and consider how that relates to your relationships. One can be a virgin (used here to reference Christian singleness) or married, but both require sexual obedience in some way. As Jana Marguerite Bennett notes, “The issue for Augustine is therefore not sex but obedience, and lack of obedience to God has led to fundamental chaos and disorganization in our social lives.” (Jana Marguerite Bennett, Water is Thicker Than Blood, 69) Obedience can be performed without celibacy, since God does not command all to become life-long virgins. But all are called to chastity, even in marriage.

Chastity and Concupiscence

We don’t often reference chastity in relation to marriage anymore—what does Augustine mean by this? Simply, chastity is the virtue of sexual obedience to God, to seek God’s ends for sexual relationships rather than our own. While each sexual vocation has a unique way to obey (for single persons that means not engaging in sexual relations, for married persons that means engaging in proper sexual relations), each must seek after God in their context. As Philip Lyndon Reynolds remarks for Augustine, “sexual intercourse must be performed in the service of God” (Philip Lyndon Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church, 276).

If chastity is the virtue of using sexuality for God’s end, concupiscence is using sexuality for man’s end. Sexuality and sexual intercourse are not inherently evil but can become evil if used poorly. Augustine writes, “It follows that when a person does not employ these goods (wisdom, health, friendship, food, drink, sleep, marriage, sex) for that other necessary purpose for which they were established, he sins in some cases venially and in other mortally, whereas the person who directs them for the purpose for which they were given acts well” (The Good of Marriage, 9).

Importantly, Augustine does not identify sexual obedience primarily with our bodies, but with our spirit. Physical virginity, for example, is not praiseworthy in its own right, but only when devoted to continence in God. When discussing the sack of Rome, Augustine speaks of virgins who were raped by the invaders: “Who of sane mind, therefore, will suppose that purity is lost if it so happens that the flesh is seized and overpowered, and another’s lust exercised and satisfied on it? If purity can perish this way, then purity certainly is not a virtue of the soul, nor does it belong among those good things whereby life is lived well” (Augustine, City of God Against the Pagans, I. 18). The physically defiled virgins are still spiritually intact and thus have done no wrong. Conversely, physically pure virgins who are prideful of their elevated status are spiritually impure. Augustine says, “…for who could be unaware that an obedient (married) laywoman is to be ranked above a disobedient virgin?” (Augustine, On Holy Virginity, 45). The ‘elevated’ status of a virgin is nullified if they are not spiritually chaste, even if they are physically pure; the spirit matters more than the body.

Metrics for Purity: Augustine and Purity Culture

How might Augustine speak to the assumptions of purity culture? First, Augustine might challenge our praise of sexual passions inside and outside the marriage relationship as an unqualified good. In modern attempts to emphasize the goodness of sexual activity, it is crucial to recognize two things. First, pleasure is never used as a criterion in Scripture for making a sexual act good or holy, unless you read Song of Songs in a particular way. Rather, it is a byproduct of sexual activity (as Augustine admits), not the goal. Second, with Augustine, we must recognize that sexual passions can be disordered quickly. Just because the body is good, doesn’t mean that all sexual acts are good: sexual abuse, rape, and oppression are prevalent not only in relationships outside marriage, but in them as well. Sexual abuse is never chaste, regardless of its occurrence within marriage. Passions, then, are only chaste if oriented towards obedience to God. In this sense, marriage cannot be the only criterion for chaste sexuality in itself. While sexuality’s fallenness does not entail that every sexual relationship is impure, an Augustinian framework questions human lust and encourages continual evaluation of sexual intercourse’s purpose and end. Sexual ethics does not stop when marriage starts—which offers one important corrective to some modern iterations of purity culture.

Second, Augustine’s conception of chastity emphasizes the spiritual, not the physical. In other words, physical states are only ‘good’ insofar as they are oriented towards obedience to God. When discussing sexual ethics with single or widowed persons, ‘waiting’ to engage in sexual intercourse until marriage provides a shallow motivation for abstinence. But if discussions on abstinence are directed towards obedience to God, ‘waiting’ for marital intercourse becomes a positive spiritual discipline. This also provides new hope for those who have engaged in premarital (or extramarital) intercourse or were sexually abused. Rather than being alienated or shamed by the church, they are provided with an opportunity to live in obedience to God in the future as spiritual virgins. While physical virginity can be lost, spiritual virginity is an attitude of obedience to be continually striven after—a second corrective to modern purity culture’s focus on the physical over the spiritual and a counter to much of the legalism prevalent in some purity culture teachings.

There is much we might want to reject of Augustine, especially in his elevation of virginity over marriage and his restriction of the possible ‘ends’ of sexual intercourse to procreation, which problematizes any married sexual activity without begetting children in mind. Even so, what might be gained from Augustine is a broad metric for how we might follow after God with our bodies, cultivating the spiritual virtue of chastity—sexual obedience to God—in all relational vocations.

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