1) Augustine believed that the purpose of marriage is procreation, and that lust during sex—even among married Christians—was wrong. In his Confessions, Augustine talked openly about his losing battle with sexual lust during his youth.
That Augustine might not be subject to any such complaint or calumny, before speaking of the superiority of Virginity, he thought it well to write on the Good of Marriage.
More than just a theological giant towering above the other Church Fathers, St. Augustine was a fearless and uncompromising defender of the Faith against heresies, a tireless pastor of his flock, and a perfect model of a true penitent; an inspiration to Christians throughout the ages.
The City of God (De Civitate Dei), considered by many as the saint’s most important work, was written over a time span of 13 years (AD 413-426). The pagans’ charges that Christians brought about the fall of Rome [more precisely, the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths in AD 410] prompted Augustine to begin writing this work.
Augustine concludes, “the union (copulatio) of male and female for the sake of having children is, then, the natural good of marriage.”[vi] The union of husband and wife in marriage is potentially procreative, which means the call to marry is also a call to parent. Husband and wife are also father and mother.
In fact, in Book 3 of De doctrina Christiana, Augustine says love is "the impulse of one's mind to enjoy God on his own account and to enjoy oneself and one's neighbor on account of God." The human person, therefore, is to be enjoyed if this other is loved with reference to God.
Alypius of Thagaste steered Augustine away from marriage, saying they could not live a life together in the love of wisdom if he married.
Augustine argues that God does not allow evil to exist so much as we choose it by our actions, deeds, and words. Later, he came to the conclusion that it is impossible for us to understand the mind of God, and therefore we cannot come to a proper comprehension of why suffering exists.
Augustine is perhaps the most significant Christian thinker after St. Paul. He adapted Classical thought to Christian teaching and created a powerful theological system of lasting influence. He also shaped the practice of biblical exegesis and helped lay the foundation for much of medieval and modern Christian thought.
Augustine and Philosophy He is convinced that the true philosopher is a lover of God because true wisdom is, in the last resort, identical with God, a point on which he feels in agreement with both Paul (1 Corinthians 1:24) and Plato (cf.
There, he quickly discovered the joys of sex, and he soon fell deeply in love with a woman who became the mother of his son, Adeodatus. Augustine never married this woman, but she remained his mistress for many years, a common arrangement in the fourth century.
The birth of Saint Augustine in 354 is celebrated on this date. He was a Black North African Saint, Philosopher, and Doctor. He was the eldest son of Saint Monica of Saint Augustine.
When he was young, he came under the influence of Manichean philosophy which taught that matter and the body were evil. The high level Manicheans, the elect, remained celibate so that they would not increase the amount of evil in the world by procreating.
“There is no saint without a past, no sinner without a future.” without wondering. ”
AUGUSTINE: THE SELF HAS AN IMMORTAL SOUL. A soul can't live in this world without a body for it is considered as a unity of body and self. It is an important element of man which governs and defines himself. We all know that we are created in the image and likeness of God for we are geared towards the good.
Augustine's Confessions provide significant insight into the first thirty-three years of his life. Augustine does not paint himself as a holy man, but as a sinner. The sins that Augustine confesses are of many different severities and of many different natures, such as lust/adultery, stealing, and lies.
Despite his brilliant mind and Christian upbringing, Augustine, ceding to the seductions of the half- pagan city and the licentiousness of his fellow students, embraced a life of hedonism, immorality, and false beliefs. For nearly 15 years he kept a concubine with whom he had a son, Adeodatus. Worldly ambitions, intellectual pride and a life of sin and impurity darkened Augustine’s mind, making him seek the truth in all the wrong places. So blinded became his understanding that he abandoned the faith of his mother and (by AD 373) enthusiastically embraced the dreadful Manichaean heresy. (Rather than a Christian heresy Manichaeism was actually a pagan religion, based on dualism, which borrowed elements from Christianity, Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, etc.)
At 17 he went to Carthage to study rhetoric and, lauded for his powerful intellect even at such early age, soon became filled with vanity, ambition and pride.
The Donatists were against the Church’s readmission of those who, during the Roman persecutions, denied or renounced their faith (traditores). They held that even after lengthy public penance such people could not be received back into the Church. Thus the Donatists refused sacraments and spiritual authority of clergy who had at some point apostatized under persecution, claiming that the validity of the sacraments depended on the moral character of those administering them. Perpetrating many outrages and violence, the Donatists murdered large numbers of Catholics; St. Augustine himself was the target of several of their assassination attempts.
Augustine was restless in his search for the Truth. His pride – cause of his displeasure with the Sacred Scriptures, the humility and simplicity of which he found offensive to his intellect – was flattered by the Manichaeans who promised knowledge of nature and its laws, and answers to all the philosophical and spiritual questions, in particular to the “problem of evil” that Augustine had been troubled by.
Opening his Bible Augustine read the first thing his sight fell on, and it applied perfectly to his disordered life. It was St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, chapter 13, verse 13-14: “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and impurities, not in contention and envy.
The following year Augustine wrote his first book, On the Holiness of the Catholic Church. Augustine, Monica and Adeodatus then left Milan to return to North Africa; it was during this journey that his mother Monica died, in Ostia (AD 388). She was followed not long after by Adeodatus.
Marriage is necessary to establish a Christian society. Augustine stressed that God created all humans from one couple, the first bond of human society thu s being the union of husband and wife. Sex is not an end in itself but is ordered to the common good of society.
For there was a greater good in their marriage, than is the proper good of marriage: to which without doubt the good of Continence is to be preferred: because they sought not sons from marriage by such duty as these are led by, from a certain sense of mortal nature requiring succession against decease.
Therefore the first natural bond of human society is man and wife. Nor did God create these each by himself, and join them together as alien by birth: but He created the one out of the other, setting a sign also of the power of the union in the side, whence she was drawn, was formed.
The right question plainly is, not whether a virgin every way disobedient is to be compared to an obedient married woman, but a less obedient to a more obedient: forasmuch as that also of marriage is chastity, and therefore a good, but less than virginal.
But as the repasts of the Just are better than the fasts of the sacrilegious, so the marriage of the faithful is to be set before the virginity of the impious. However neither in that case is repast preferred to fasting, but righteousness to sacrilege; nor in this, marriage to virginity, but faith to impiety.
To such a degree is that marriage compact entered upon a matter of a certain sacrament, that it is not made void even by separation itself, since, so long as her husband lives, even by whom she has been left, she commits adultery, in case she be married to another: and he who has left her, is the cause of this evil. 7.
Source. Translated by C.L. Cornish. From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 3. Edited by Philip Schaff. ( Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887.) Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. <http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1309.htm>.
28. Therefore, if we compare the things themselves, we may no way doubt that the chastity of continence is better than marriage chastity, while yet both are good: but when we compare the persons, he is better, who has a greater good than another. Further, he who has a greater of the same kind, has also that which is less; but he, who only has what is less, assuredly has not that which is greater. For in sixty, thirty also are contained, not sixty also in thirty. But not to work from out that which he has, stands in the allotment of duties, not in the want of virtues: forasmuch as neither is he without the good of mercy, who finds not wretched persons such as he may mercifully assist.
Having clarified the fact that the fundamental purpose – not to be a subordinated purpose – of marriage is children, Augustine goes on to say that the second blessing is mutual faith.
The covenant of marriage is an agreement between Christ and the married couple. They do their part and He will do His.
For St. Augustine, when God became man He raised marriage to a level it had never had before. Christ made marriage the living witness of the New Testament. This meant that Christian marriage was to reveal to the world the Savior’s New Commandment of selfless love.
One of the surprises in St. Augustine is that he wrote so extensively on marriage and always associated marriage with consecrated chastity. Those blessings for Augustine, as for the Church (using Augustine’s language ever since) are three: children, mutual faith, and sacrament.
Over the centuries, Augustine has been quoted in his classic statement: “The procreation of children is the first, natural, and legitimate purpose of marriage.”
Having clarified the fact that the fundamental purpose – not to be a subordinated purpose – of marriage is children, Augustine goes on to say that the second blessing is mutual faith.
We should not expect Augustine, in the beginning of the fifth century, to have a fully-developed theology of the sacraments in general or of matrimony in particular.
We have much to learn from Augustine, but not the least is that the teachings of the Catholic Church have not substantially changed in the past 1500 years. Today, as in his day, we need to recover the clarity of his faith which saw in Christian marriage the real test of Christianity.
Partly famous because they were written by Eliot, they are also famous because of who and what they allude to: the sexual fires that burned in the youthful Augustine. From adolescence to the age of 32, as he later detailed in the Confessions, Augustine was a frequent loser in the battle with lustful passions.
As an 18-year-old student at Carthage, Augustine reveled in promiscuity. Sex had become an obsession for him. “From a perverted act of will,” he wrote, “desire had grown, and when desire is given satisfaction, habit is forged; and when habit passes unresisted, a compulsive urge sets in.”.
2) Augustine believed that the use of contraception to prevent children was perverting the purpose of marriage, “committing adultery within marriage” and “turning the bed-chamber into a brothel.”. Here’s what Augustine said about preventing the birth of children within marriage (that is, the use of contraceptives):
The Shocking Beliefs of Augustine. A spiritually minded man will never come to you with the demand—“Believe this and that”; but with the demand that you square your life with the standards of Jesus. We are not asked to believe the Bible, but to believe the One Whom the Bible reveals (cf. John 5:39–40). ~ Oswald Chambers.
3) Augustine believed that if you are going to teach Scripture, you must have a knowledge of the natural world, mathematics, music, science, history, the liberal arts, and a mastery of dialectics (the science of disputation). 16. This standard would rule out most Bible preachers and teachers today.
Among orthodox christians, Augustine is considered as a minor Father because of his numerous inventions and errors or just for an heretic.
In his Confessions, Augustine talked openly about his losing battle with sexual lust during his youth. At age thirty-two, he became celibate. For Augustine personally, being a Christian meant abandoning marriage. Significantly, asceticism was popular during the time in which Augustine lived.13.
They take wives, as the law declares, for the procreation of children; but from this erroneous fear of polluting the substance of the deity, their intercourse with their wives is not of a lawful character; and the production of children, which is the proper end of marriage, they seek to avoid.
Knowing that the heroes of our faith sometimes got it wrong will empower us to treat our fellow Christians with grace rather than disdain whenever we disagree over theology.