Sex and the Early Church

As I mentioned Wednesday night, a lot of our Christian and religious beliefs within the Church, regarding sexuality, have been negatively shaped by the influence of some of our early church fathers such as St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Though these men contributed amazing things to the Church and it’s theology, they were not perfect and had some definite hangups about human sexuality. Philip Yancey brings this to attention in his book Rumors of Another World. You can view excerpts of this book in the article Holy Sex.

For some short, but scholarly treatment on this issue, check out the below papers, submitted by my friend and scholar, Cameron Jorgenson who is working on his Ph.D. at Baylor University. Cameron and I attended undergrad together, and were roommates at Fuller during our M.Div. program. You can read his insightful and witty humor at his blog Summa-Aesthetica, where he reflects on his interests in theology, moral formation, culture and art. For some good reading check out the following two articles below:
(I had some trouble posting some of his footnotes for some reason. But his bibliography is listed)

1) Aquinas on the Ecstatic Nature of Love
And its Relation to Sexuality and the Passions
(see below)

2) Augustine on Sexuality and the Passions
(see below)

Aquinas on the Ecstatic Nature of Love
And its Relation to Sexuality and the Passions

A Paper Submitted in Partial
Fulfillment of the Requirements for
PHI 5311 – Cicero, Augustine, & Aquinas
Robert C. Miner, Ph.D. – Professor
Baylor University

By
Cameron H. Jorgenson

Waco, Texas
December 13, 2004

Introduction
Thomas Aquinas is remembered for many things; being an authority on sex is not one of them. While this particular investigation does not set out to prove a thesis quite that ambitious, the claim is provocative nonetheless. In his masterful Summa Theologiae, the Angelic Doctor explores the nature of love in a way that allows him to transcend problematic elements of Augustine’s account of the sexual passions. Although Augustine seems to make sexual passion inseparable from vice—similar to Cicero’s conception of grief—Aquinas’ description of the ecstatic nature of love opens up possibilities for redeeming sexual passion as a part of the rightly ordered creation.
Although his discussion of love and ecstasy is limited to one article of one question, Aquinas’ treatment is typically pithy and worthy of extended discussion. What follows is an attempt to unpack Summa Theologiae I-IIae 28.3 and apply its insights to the question of the sexual passions. The intent is to sketch a framework within which sexuality can be understood as a redeemable passion, one that is a natural outgrowth of love and the image of God.

Summa Theologiae I-IIae 28.3
In his treatment of “The Effects of Love” in Question 28, Aquinas addresses the question of whether ecstasy is properly described as an effect. The argument is provocative. Citing Dionysius, Aquinas claims that the “Divine love produces ecstasy.” Even more suited to raising eyebrows is his subsequent claim that, “God himself suffered ecstasy through love,” making all other loves, which are ultimately participations in the Divine love, necessarily ecstatic as well. There is no ambiguity in Aquinas’ claim: ecstasy is an essential characteristic of love.
Given the boldness of the claim, one must be clear about the definition of the key term. Characteristically, Aquinas is concerned to provide that sort of clarity. He spends the first half of the responsio carving out his definition:
To suffer ecstasy means to be placed outside oneself. This happens as to the apprehensive power as to the appetitive power. As to the apprehensive power, a man is said to be placed outside himself, when he is placed outside the knowledge proper to him. This may be due to his being raised to a higher knowledge; thus, a man is said to suffer ecstasy, inasmuch as he is placed outside the connatural apprehension of his sense and reason, when he is raised up so as to comprehend things that surpass sense and reason: or it may be due to his being cast down into a state of debasement; thus a man may be said to suffer ecstasy, when he is overcome by violent passion or madness. –As to the appetitive power, a man is said to suffer ecstasy when that power is borne towards something else, so that it goes forth out from itself, as it were.

While ecstasy in its simplest form means to be placed outside oneself, Aquinas hones his definition by differentiating between the operations of ecstasy as they relate to the powers of the soul. Considered according to the ratio of the apprehensive power, love is ecstatic insofar as the experience surpasses connaturality. Transcending connaturality in this way can be either good (i.e. being raised up to knowledge too lofty for natural capacities), or bad (i.e. being debased by destructive passions or the eradication of the mind in madness). Aquinas’ distinction at this point is unique because he does not dismiss all experiences that in some way outstrip the reason. Although Aquinas seems to agree with Augustine that reason is that which is considered most properly human, he makes room for the possibility of an ecstatic relation to that which is above or outside the normal bounds of sensory and intellectual comprehension. This is an important allowance that will be explored in more detail below. For the moment, it is worth noting that Aquinas’ allowance seems to open up the requisite space to account for important human experiences that transcend ordinary perception.
Based on his discussion of mutual indwelling as an effect of love in the previous article, Aquinas claims that the apprehensive form of ecstatic love is “caused by love dispositively, in so far, namely, as love makes the lover dwell on the beloved.” This movement is ecstatic in that “the lover is not satisfied with a superficial apprehension of the beloved, but strives to gain an intimate knowledge of everything pertaining to the beloved, so as to penetrate into his very soul.”
Given the level of intimacy involved in mutual indwelling, ecstatic love in terms of an encounter with an object that transcends connatural capabilities seems inevitable. If the object is considered to be something worth knowing beyond superficiality, allowing for a certain mystery or “otherness,” love must be transcendent and ecstatic. Furthermore, it would seem that the degree of ecstasy involved in a particular love would depend on the degree of remoteness between the love and beloved. The more the beloved is transcendently other, and the more intensely it is loved, the greater the degree of ecstasy that result from that love. For this reason, the infinite difference between the divine/human relationship and all others would seem to put divine ecstasy in a category of its own.
Considered under the ratio of the appetitive power, love is ecstatic insofar as it bears one out from oneself toward something else. Because most loves have an object requiring a movement away from the self, yet not every object transcends connaturality, the appetitive aspect of love is the most common way in which humans experience the ecstatic nature of love. This type of ecstasy is caused directly by love in two ways: by love of friendship, simply, and by concupiscence in a restricted sense.
One is placed outside of oneself by love of friendship simply because “he wishes and does good to his friend, by caring and providing for him, for his sake.” The motion of friendship love is unidirectional. It is a well wishing that seeks the other’s benefit for the sake of the other, without any concern for pleasure on the part of the lover.
In concupiscible love the motion is not simple “insofar, namely, as not as not being satisfied with enjoying the good he has, he seeks to enjoy something outside himself. But since he seeks to have this extrinsic good himself, he does not go out from himself simply, and this movement remains finally within him.” The good intention does not only extend itself to another, but seeks to return to the lover as delight. It is in this way that concupiscible love “is not satisfied with external or superficial possession or enjoyment of the beloved; but seeks to possess the beloved perfectly” —in other words, although the object of love is external, concupiscible love has internal results when it returns to the lover in the form of delight.

Objections
Before he makes his case, Aquinas opens his discussion of ecstasy with three intriguing objections. Although he does not cite an authority for the first objection, a complex interaction with Augustine’s City of God seems to be in the background: “It would seem that ecstasy is not an effect of love. For ecstasy seems to imply a loss of reason. But love does not always result in loss of reason: for lovers are masters of themselves at times. Therefore love does not cause ecstasy.” The logic of his first objection seems to be as follows: Ecstasy cannot be an effect of love because ecstasy implies a loss of reason, and this is self-evidently not true at all times.
This objection seems to be fairly weak, quibbling over whether ecstasy in every case involves a loss of reason. The rhetorical impact of the questions leads the reader to think “of course lovers are capable of exhibiting self control at times,” revealing the objection to be a self-evident assertion. This rhetorical effect suggests two things. First, Aquinas’ intends to demonstrate that ecstasy is primarily concerning the externality of love’s motion, a motion that need not imply anything about reason. Second, it seems to reinforce Aquinas’ notion of the apprehensive dimension of the ecstatic effects of love, which can either involve a violent loss of reason, or an encounter with a power that the lover’s sensible powers. As noted by the objection, there is a potential for a destructive loss of reason; however, in the latter case, there is not a bestial loss of reason, but the sort of supra-rational experiences that are uniquely human. These would include mystical experiences, or radically intimate expressions of interpersonal relationships that tend toward perfect knowledge of the other.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of the first objection is something that is left unsaid. Although no authority is cited for this objection, the formulation immediately calls to mind Augustine’s construal of sexual passion in The City of God. Sexual passion “disturbs the whole man, when the mental emotion combines and mingles with the physical craving, resulting in a pleasure surpassing all physical delights. So intense is the pleasure that when it reaches its climax there is an almost total extinction of mental alertness; the intellectual sentries, as it were, are overwhelmed.” Given his affinities to Cicero’s account of the emotions and its wariness of all perturbationes of the soul, even by “positive” emotions and pleasures, this assessment of the pleasures of sex are not surprising. Any emotion that exceeds the bounds of wisdom, or worse yet, manages to extinguish the light of reason, is fundamentally dangerous and out of character for the virtuous soul. While this is all internally consistent, if the discussion is framed in this way, there is no way to account for sexual desire or activity of any type, except as lust. For Augustine, it is an irredeemable passion.
Clearly, the structure of the first objection does not allow it to undo Augustine’s analysis of the sexual act. The furthest extent to which the objection can be pushed is to claim that ecstasy, defined as loss of reason, is not always the effect of love. Nevertheless, the objection does put the issue of the centrality of reason on the table; setting up the subsequent claim that reason can be transcended in a way that does not result in debasement. The self-evident tone of the objection may also seem to question the absolute identity of love, ecstasy, loss of reason, and sin.

Relation to Augustine and Sexuality
One might wonder what exactly is at stake in the present discussion. With respect to Augustine’s construal of the sexual passions, it is essential that one find a way to redeem sexuality while taking Augustine’s critique seriously. Sexual actions and their attending passions are essential components of the marital state. If he is correct that any passion that transcends reason is by definition sinful, and if sexual passion is the chief example of such a passion, then the legitimacy of married life is called into question. There is no easy way around his critique. One could undermine his anthropology, but doing so would have far reaching, and unappealing, consequences. One could also take the modern escape route and dismiss Augustine on psychological grounds, denouncing his theology as the product of repression or an unhealthy attachment to his mother; however, his biography is too complex, and his theology too rich, for such a simplistic reading.
Aquinas’ account is appealing because it starts with presuppositions that are nearly identical to Augustine’s, yet it opens up a possible means to account for rightly ordered sexuality. Aquinas’ superiority can be seen along two lines. First, the category of ecstatic love seems to offer an alternate account of the role of the intellect. In Aquinas’ construction, the intellect is central, but can encounter an object that transcends its powers of knowing. In such an instance, the intellect is raised above itself toward the object that is greater than itself. If one applies this category to interpersonal relationships, then the degree of intimacy in a relationship and the corresponding degree to which the other is transcendently mysterious, makes possible an ecstatic love between humans. This construction of interpersonal relationships does not negate the role of reason; rather it recognizes the limits of reason when dealing with the mystery of human community. Surely this is all the more true in the most intimate of relationships, the mystery and sacrament of marriage.
The language Aquinas uses to describe the mutually indwelling nature of love and the ecstatic nature of the concupiscible powers, has overtones that are nicely suited to speak of marital relations: the lover existing in the beloved, intimate knowledge of everything pertaining to the beloved, not superficial possession or enjoyment but possessing perfectly and penetrating into the heart. It would seem that the ecstatic is well suited to describe the appropriately erotic—the impulse for union with another.
Another way in which Aquinas seems to solve an impasse presented by Augustine is found in his description of friendship love. In describing the simplicity of the ecstasy involved in friendship love, Augustine describes a friend as one who is appropriately treated as an end, one whom is the simple recipient of the well wishing intentions of love. This seems to counter Augustine’s distinction between frui and uti, which assert that the only proper object of such simple love is God. Aquinas makes room for appropriate love of the other as an end. While this is less directly significant than his category of the ecstatic, it would seem that making space for treating other human beings as ends (relatively speaking) is an important step in describing how interpersonal relationships with others created in the image of God might also result in an experience of transcendence and ecstatic love.

Conclusion
Admittedly, there are problems to be addressed concerning the account given above. First, although Augustine is frequently cited as an interlocutor in the Summa, he is not mentioned by name in either 28.2 or 28.3. For this reason, the only evidence of a direct connection between Augustine’s account of the sexual passions, and 28.3 is the high degree of conceptual affinity. Equally problematic is that in all his discussion of the mutual indwelling and ecstatic effects of love, the sexual act is nowhere mentioned.
Both problems could be countered directly. Concerning the first issue, one might point out that Aquinas is often moderate in his critique of those with whom he disagrees. It is not unthinkable that Aquinas could address the substance of a point on which he diverges from Augustine’s account without mentioning him by name. Regarding the lack of explicit mention of sexuality as an example of the ecstatic dimension of love, it does not seem unreasonable to appeal to a sense of modesty. While Aquinas is not a prude and often mentions the pleasures of the table and the sexual act interchangeably, he could easily have been elliptical in his language regarding love, especially since his concern was to describe the general nature of love.
Whether or not these rebuttals stand, the issue is less about whether Aquinas had Augustine in mind when structuring his argument, and more about whether the present analysis makes appropriate use of Aquinas’ description of the mechanics of love. It is entirely possible that Aquinas had no thought of the transcendent nature of the “other” in human relationships. Nevertheless, it does seem that when something like Buber’s I-Thou dialectic is proposed to Aquinas’ construct, the categories of mutual indwelling and ecstatic love account well for the nature of such relationships. Perhaps most importantly, Aquinas seems to redeem what would seem in Augustine to be irredeemable. He makes room for love that transcends reason without effacing it, opening up the possibility for legitimate mystical experience in the overwhelming encounter with the divine Other, and legitimate intimacy in the marital encounter, even in its sexual expression.

Bibliography

St. Augustine. City of God. Trans. Henry Bettinson. London: Penguin Books, 1984.

St. Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica. Vol. II. Trans. Fathers of the English
Dominican Province. Notre Dame: Christian

Augustine on Sexuality and the Passions

A Paper Submitted in Partial
Fulfillment of the Requirements for
PHI 5311 – Cicero, Augustine, & Aquinas
Robert C. Miner, Ph.D. – Professor
Baylor University

By
Cameron H. Jorgenson

Waco, Texas
October 18, 2004

Introduction
While Augustine is by all accounts one of the most important theologians in the history of the Church, his influence on the subsequent theology of sexuality has not always been assessed positively. His magnum opus, City of God, explores the topic of sexuality primarily in connection with his assessment of the passions. In keeping with the great moral philosophers of his day, most notably Cicero, Augustine saw the passions as an essential area of concern. Given his own struggle with sexuality prior to his conversion, Augustine understands sexuality to be the perfect illustration of an especially obstinate desire. More than any other passion, sexual lust embodied the elements of the human soul that resist the proper ordering of the human person: being subject to reason, wisdom, and charity.
What follows is an attempt to provide a close reading of the sections of City of God that deal with sexuality. Following a close investigation of Augustine’s arguments, I will offer suggestions about how his insights can be seen as relevant for the contemporary conversation, and offer a critique of his conclusions according to his own logic. It is hoped that the insights of this paper could be exemplify a via media between those who have strong reservations about Augustine, largely on the grounds of his views about sexuality, and those who wish to defend his thought at all cost.

City of God, I.16, 18
The first extended discussion of sexuality is offered in the first book of the City of God. The topic is addressed primarily to offer pastoral counsel concerning the problem of Christian women being raped by pagan captors, and what may have been seen by some as an appropriate response: suicide. Augustine makes clear that suicide is never a valid option for the Christian, declaring that Christian women should “not add crime to crime by committing murder on themselves in shame because the enemy had committed rape on them in lust.” Beyond this, however, Augustine makes a distinction about the nature of lust that both assuages whatever feelings of guilt Christian victims of rape may feel, and lays the foundation for his extended treatment of sexual passions in Book XIV.
Augustine makes clear that rape does not violate chastity. He argues that virtue is that which rules over the body, “from her throne in the mind, and…the consecrated body is the instrument of the consecrated will.” This being the case, if another sins against the body, it can in no way be a detriment to one’s virtue. If the will is untainted, neither is chastity. Augustine clarifies the issue even further: “for if purity is lost in this way, it follows that it is not a virtue of the mind; it is not then ranked with the qualities that make up the moral life, but is classed among physical qualities, such as strength, beauty and health.” Virtue is not, therefore an issue of physicality, but purely an interior condition of the will. No externally imposed act can in any way violate the goodness of a will unable to avoid the act without sin (i.e. suicide or murder). To reinforce this point, Augustine provides the example of the midwife who, “whether by malice, or clumsiness, or accident,” destroys a virgin’s maidenhead during a manual examination. He claims that no one would be stupid enough to claim that the virgin had lost any bit of chastity due to the accident. In stark contrast is his second example of the corrupt woman en route to fornicate. Even though the act has not yet taken place she is not chaste. Since her mind is unchaste, so is her body; just as the woman chaste in mind is chaste in body, even if she has been physically violated.
One enigmatic sentence appears at the end of chapter sixteen. Its difficulty may foreshadow a strand of thought that would not be picked up again until Book XIV. Augustine says,
And so whenever any act of the latter kind has been committed, although it does not destroy a purity which has been maintained by the utmost resolution, still it does engender a sense of shame, because it may be believed that an act, which perhaps could not have taken place without some physical pleasure, was accomplished also by the consent of the mind.

The problem is the shame associated that results from the rape. Augustine suggests that the source of this shame may be a belief in the mind of the victim that an act resulting in some physical pleasure must also have been the result of some consent. It may give pause to a contemporary reader that Augustine associate pleasure with rape, and this as being the source of shame. Beyond this, however, is the question Augustine leaves unresolved: whether physical pleasure must be accomplished by the consent of the mind. This intriguing question is left unanswered in Book I. It is not until Book XIV that related issues are raised and the mechanics of lust are more fully explored.

City of God, XIV.16-19, 23-26
Lust, which can refer to all sorts of inordinate desires, is most properly connected to sexual lust, the type that excited the “indecent parts of the body.” Augustine makes much of the shameful nature of the genitalia, referring several times to the etymology of the common term “pudenda (‘parts of shame’).” While the primary reason given for the shameful character of lust is its resistance to the will, as will be explored below, Augustine gives a few other reasons as well.
One reason sexual passion is problematic is its connection to pleasure. Lust “disturbs the whole man, when the mental emotion combines and mingles with the physical craving, resulting in a pleasure surpassing all physical delights. So intense is the pleasure that when it reaches its climax there is an almost total extinction of mental alertness; the intellectual sentries, as it were, are overwhelmed.” Given his affinities to Cicero’s account of the emotions and its wariness of all perturbationes of the soul, even by “positive” emotions and pleasures, this assessment of the pleasures of sex are not surprising. Any emotion that exceeds the bounds of wisdom, or worse yet, manages to extinguish the light of reason, is fundamentally dangerous and out of character for the virtuous soul. While this is all quite consistent, it should be noted at this point that according to this way of framing the discussion, there is no way to describe sexual desire except as lust—it is an irredeemable passion.
A second strand in Augustine’s account of sexual passions comes in connection with his description of the Garden of Eden. He maintains that in the Garden Adam and Eve felt no shame for their nakedness until after their sin, at which point the “grace that prevented their bodily nakedness from causing them any embarrassment” was removed. “The consequence was that they were embarrassed by the insubordination of their flesh, the punishment which was a kind of evidence of their disobedience,” and they immediately made for themselves clothes out of fig leaves. Augustine goes on to conclude: “thus modesty, from a sense of shame, covered what was excited to disobedience by lust, in defiance of a will which had been condemned for the guilt of disobedience.” Augustine seeks to establish a direct link, perhaps even a causal relationship, between the first sin and lust. While the connection between the first sin and all subsequent sins is a commonplace, it is not entirely clear in what way the special emphasis on sexuality is established.
A third part of Augustine’s account of the sexual passions involves the privacy connected to the sexual act. These insights are an extension of the above discussion of the first humans. Just as the first sin resulted in covering the “parts of shame,” the sexual act itself became cloaked in secrecy. Whether the act is the sort of debauchery that could result in public censure, or whether it is the consummation of a marriage, the sexual act requires privacy. As with the covering of the genitals, modesty in the sexual act is the result of shame. This is the point of Augustine’s rhetorical question: “What can be the reason for this, if it is not that something by nature right and proper is effected in such a way as to be accompanied by a feeling of shame, by way of punishment?” The impulse toward privacy is evidence of something more sinister, tainting even the holiness of marital relations.
The fourth, and most prevalent emphasis in Augustine’s theology of the sexual passions, is the rebellion between sexual impulses and the will. Because of the emphasis Augustine places on the will, that which defies subordination is especially problematic. The sexual drives are the human actions par excellence that demonstrate this mutiny in the body. Without sin, the sexual parts would be as subject to the will as any other part. The act of procreation would be as voluntary as any other human work: “(had there been no sin) the man would have sowed the seed and the woman would have conceived the child when their sexual organs had been aroused by the will, at the appropriate time and in the necessary degree, and had not been excited by lust.” As it is, the sexual organs are notoriously stubborn, refusing willed arousal even for those who are motivated by lust. This sort of inner contradiction, and the shameful refusal of a lower part to be ruled by that which is higher, is evidence of a creature badly disordered. It is this theme to which Augustine returns time and again throughout his account.

Implications and Critique
Much can be learned from Augustine about sexuality, especially in a culture as unreflectively affirmative about sex as ours. First, Augustine’s cautious stance toward the power inherent in the sexual act, clouding reason, and motivating actions incompatible with virtue, are well founded. There is no shortage of anecdotal evidence to support this claim. Furthermore, it seems right that he would sound a note of caution regarding lust in marital relationships. Certainly, given the powerful forces at work in a marriage—the convergence of two lives and wills—there is a risk of sinful desires to skew the appropriate expression of love and invading the relationship with destructive effects. Above all, Augustine’s words are a helpful reminder that right reason and a will shaped by faith is the intended motivating principle in a human life. Self-control is possible. While he makes clear that self-control in sexual matters is supremely difficult, it is a possibility that can be realized. The recognition of the real struggle, and potential for real victory, is encouraging.
While there is much to commend about Augustine’s account, several points of critique can be made, often employing his own logic elsewhere. First, it seems odd that sexuality is characterized by an emotion Augustine considers irredeemable. Earlier in Book XIV Augustine argues that “the important factor in those emotions is the character of a man’s will.” He goes on to clarify that “a rightly directed will is love in a good sense and a perverted will is love in a bad sense.” Augustine makes a final beautiful move to redeem the emotions, “Christians…the citizens of the Holy City of God…feel fear and desire, pain and gladness in conformity with the holy Scriptures and sound doctrine; and because their love is right, all these feelings are right in them.” It is not entirely clear why Augustine does not choose to use this same type of argumentation to redeem sexual love in marriage, making room for even the ecstatic pleasure of conjugal relations. By stating that all sexual desire is by nature lust, Augustine has little constructively to say about the physical aspects of marriage. Apart from achieving apatheia, lust is bound up in the fabric of marriage itself. Rather, it seems that by his own logic, Augustine could say that sexual love, motivated by a rightly ordered love for the spouse could appropriately express itself physically. Perhaps such a move would also validate sexual relations beyond those specifically motivated by a desire to procreate. If part of a well-ordered love for ones spouse, such mutual pleasure should not be considered sinful.
A second brief point of criticism is Augustine’s direct link between modesty and shame. It does not at all follow that a couple’s desire for privacy is inevitably linked to a sense of shame or a desire to escape punishment. Given the intimate, personal, and (in the case of the marriage act) holy, nature of sexual relations, they should be expected to be conducted in privacy. Just as one does not have their most intimate conversations over a loudspeaker for all to hear, one would not want to perform the most intimate of human activities without privacy—even in the Garden.
Finally, the problem of the involuntary nature of sexual drives must be addressed. As mentioned above, it is the unwilled character of lust that makes it so problematic. It seems that this has in part to do with Augustine’s characterization of biological processes. He notes that the sexual organs ought to work according to will as do the hands and feet as even the lungs obey the will, enabling breathing and speech. But this picture of the human body is not entirely correct. While breathing can be regulated to a certain extent, after a strenuous run, breathing is unavoidably heavy. The eyes can be opened and shut at will, but one blinks thousands of time each day apart from any conscious decision. Countless other examples of involuntary physical processes can be noted, none of which have negative moral implications. While sexual desire is certainly problematic, and resistance to the control of the will is a complicating factor, it seems to be an overreaction to categorically reject all sexual desire as lust because of the biological necessities involved.

Conclusion
Augustine offers some brilliant insights concerning the nature of sin and the passions. He also offers some soothing pastoral advice to those who have been raped, or who are facing such horror, by assuring them that their virtue is not threatened by such violence. His emphasis on the well ordered soul and the primacy of reason are helpful constructs in discerning the nature of the moral life—but even in the midst of his strengths there are points at which Augustine could be positively modified. It is his genius as a thoughtful pastoral theologian that makes it possible to provide most of these corrections out of his own work.

Works Cited

St. Augustine. City of God. Trans. Henry Bettinson