Bishop Augustine of Hippo, Floria Aemilia the Mistress & The Bitch

Bishop Augustine of Hippo, Floria Aemilia the Mistress & The Bitch
Floria Aemilia Aurelio Augustino Episcopo Hipponiensi Salutem

The New Testament is the work of neurotic philistines, who regarded human sexuality not as a source of joy, but as a source of anxiety; not as a means of expressing love, but as a means of expressing sin

St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Thomas Aquinas are really the two most important saints of the Catholic Church in reference to doctrine. Aquinas modified and adapted Aristotle's concept of the unmoved mover as his "proof" of the existence of God. I always saw God as a very special bowling ball that somehow moved all the other bowling balls in a row (as they are automatically returned) without It moving at all. The three finger holes on the ball are sheer coincidence and have no bearing to the Holy Trinity.

I have told Rebecca the story of St Augustine thinking on the problem of the Holy Trinity while walking on a beach. "How could God be three distinct persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost and somehow all be (and certainly not share as that would be heresy) the nature of God?" He spotted a little boy (sometimes in my story he is naked) who was running to the sea with a sea shell where he would scoop some water and then run back to the sand where he had dug a little hole. He would then empty the shell into the hole and repeat his procedure. Thinking this a bit strange, Augustine stopped the boy and asked him what he was doing. "Sire, I am emptying the sea into the hole." "Child, that is clearly impossible," Augustine retorted. The little boy then said, "Far easier for me to finish my task than for you to find an answer to your problem." And then I tell Rebecca the little boy vanishes in a poof.

It was a few years ago in 1997 that I found a little book called That Same Flower by Norwegian author Jostein Gaarder. This book is a translation from the Latin into Norwegian and then into English by Ann Born. The book is supposed to be the letters that St Augustine's mistress, Flora Aemilia wrote to him.

How did Gaarder find the letters?

In 1995 Gaarder was browsing in an antiquarian bookshop in Buenos Aires' old district of San Telmo. It was there that Gaarder claims he found the letters in a box labeled Codex Floriae. Inside he found an introductory greeting:

Floria Aemilia Aurelio Augustino Episcopo Hipponiensi Salutem

We do know that Augustine did have a mistress called Floria who was the mother of his only son. They lived together for over a decade in Africa and then in Italy, until Augustine banished Floria with the intention of marrying a woman of higher social status. He never did and chose a path of asceticism.

From the book I copy:

You thought I bound you to the world of the senses, leaving you no peace and quiet in which to concentrate on the salvation of your soul. As a consequence, nothing came of that proposed marriage either. God desires above all that man should live in abstinence, you write. I have no faith in such a God........But why? Well, because you loved the salvation of your own soul more than you loved me. What times, Esteemed Bishop, what manners! (O tempora, o mores!)

The book is a delightful one night read and what is most interesting is that our concept of the terrible mother-in-law has not changed in the least with time. It seems that while Monica was a good mother and a saint she was a bitch.

_________________________________________________________________

For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
Genesis 3:5

Since the earliest times Christians have experienced difficulties with sexual matters. One of the first difficulties was that of Jesus" own sexuality. It has often been asked whether he had ordinary conventional sexual desires. Some scholars have suggested that he was married , while others, including some bishops, have suggested that he may have been homosexual*. In all probability we shall never know. Early Christians made great efforts to find and destroy records giving details of anything of which they disapproved, or that did not explicitly support their image of what Jesus should have been. From a few remaining documents it is possible to conclude that Jesus" interest in certain disciples may have been more than spiritual. There are for example references to nude baptism in a letter from Clement of Alexandria *, all night private initiation ceremonies, and a disciple explicitly identified as the one whom Jesus loved*. Whatever Jesus" sexual orientation might have been, the Early Church soon developed an extreme distaste for all matters associated with sex and women. St Paul is well known for his views on these matters. It is not difficult to find examples of Paul advocating sexual abstinence:

Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote to me: It is good for a man not to touch a woman.
1 Corinthians 7:1

I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, It is good for them if they abide even as I.
1 Corinthians 7:8

At an early stage sex was associated with evil, and virginity with goodness. No such connection is made in the gospels, though suggestions of it find their way into other New Testament writings (e.g. Revelation 14:3-5). The link is attributable to the predisposition of the men who fashioned the early Church. Their view was that human bodies, especially the sexual organs, were filthy and degrading. They regarded sex as a punishment for Adam's sin. As Gibbon said of them:

It was their favourite opinion that if Adam had preserved his obedience to the Creator, he would have lived forever in a state of virgin purity, and that some harmless mode of vegetation might have peopled paradise with a race of innocent and immortal beings*.

One twentieth century ex-pastor sums up the New Testament outlook in less guarded terms:

The New Testament is the work of neurotic philistines, who regarded human sexuality not as a source of joy, but as a source of anxiety; not as a means of expressing love, but as a means of expressing sin*.

Apocryphal writings from early Christian times describe sex as "an experiment of the serpent"* and marriage as "a foul and polluted way of life"*. According to one Gnostic view women were wholly creations of the Devil, as were men from the waist down*. Such views enjoyed considerable currency in the early Church. The extremity of the opinions of Church Fathers is well illustrated by the man who exercised such a great influence in the early centuries of Christianity, Origen of Alexandria. He castrated himself because he thought that by denying himself the possibility of temptation he could be assured of a place in Heaven*. He was apparently relying on a biblical passage:

...and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake ...
Matthew 19:12

The practice of self-castration seems to have become common in early times, and it became necessary to curb the practice. The First Ecumenical Church Council, held at Nicæa in 325, excluded from the Christian priesthood men who had castrated themselves. However, there seems to have been some ambiguity to the acceptability of the practice. In later centuries God was given to sending angelic surgeons to carry out spectral castrations on holy men as they slept, apparently as a special favour*.

St Augustine of Hippo had for nine years embraced the Manichæan religion, which taught that all flesh was inherently evil. These views, it seems, were easily accommodated by Christianity for he proposed, without any evidence, that no sexual intercourse had ever taken place between Joseph and Mary, and that sexual continence was the highest good in marriage*. To him concupiscence, as manifested in lust, was the root of sin, and this proposition forms an essential element of Roman Catholic doctrine to this day. As a Catholic theologian has noted:

That sin declares itself mainly in the realm of sex remains the view of the celibatarian Catholic establishment and is rooted in Augustine's antisexual flights of fancy*.

Women in the Church seem to have been generally despised, except when they were large contributors to church funds or when they proved useful for missionary work. There were numerous Fathers of the Church, but no Mothers of the Church, certainly not after later Fathers had edited the texts. The views of another of the Church Fathers, Tertullian, on women were fairly typical:

Do you not realise that Eve is you? The curse God pronounced on your sex weighs still on the world. Guilty, you must bear its hardships. You are the devil's gateway, you desecrated the fatal tree, you first betrayed the law of God, you who softened up with your cajoling words the man against whom the devil could not prevail by force. The image of God, the man Adam, you broke him, it was child's play to you. You deserved death, and it was the son of God who had to die*!

Here is St John Chrysostom:

What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature painted with fair colours!.... *

And St Jerome:

As long as a woman is for birth and children, she is different from man as body is from soul. But when she wishes to serve Christ more than the world, then she will cease to be a woman, and will be called a man*.

Jerome regarded cosmetics to be poultices of lust* and considered that marriage was tolerable only because new virgins were generated as a result*. Women were gateways to the Devil, the way of evil, the sting of the scorpion. As one modern biblical commentator has noted "The letters of Jerome teem with loathing of the female which occasionally sounds deranged"*.

St Ambrose (339-397) held views similar to those of St Jerome and St Augustine, and it was primarily through their combined influence that Church views on sexuality developed in the way that they did. So it was that in early Church art Satan was often represented as being female, so too the need to emphasise the virginity of Jesus" mother. It was simply too much to accept that Mary might ever have indulged in such a sordid practice as sexual intercourse. St Augustine said that sexual intercourse was fundamentally disgusting, St Ambrose that it was a defilement, Tertullian that it was shameful, and St Jerome that it was unclean; in the views of other leading figures it was unseemly (Methodius) and filthy and degrading (Arnobius)*. For St John Chrysostom the loss of virginity brought trouble and death*.

The views of these early Church Fathers determined the path taken by Christianity. As Pope Gregory I asserted "Sexual pleasure can never be without sin"*. Pope Innocent III enlarged on Gregory's views: "Who can be unaware that marital intercourse can never take place without lascivious ardour, without the filth of lust whereby the seed conceived is sullied and corrupted"* The great theologian of the Middle Ages, Albertus Magnus, considered sex to be an evil and a punishment, and he described it as filthy, polluting, nasty, shameful, unwholesome, spiritually debasing, vile, disgraceful, demeaning, brutish, corrupt, depraved and infected*. He held that too much sex led to senility and death*. His famous pupil, the Angelic Doctor, Thomas Aquinas, characterised marital intercourse as repugnant; it was filth, a stain, foulness, vileness, degeneracy, a disgrace and a disease*. It was boasted that Aquinas, wearing his magic girdle provided by angels, would not so much as speak to a woman except under compulsion*. Views such as these found their way into the widely influential Malleus Maleficarum, the witch-hunters" handbook, which in Part I, question 3 confidently asserted that "the power of the devil lies in the privy parts of men"

Christian theologians and teachers are still characterising genitalia by terms such as "vile" and "obscene". The Christian concept of sin stems from the teachings of men with unusual, sometimes pathological, sexual attitudes. It was they who invented the notion of Original Sin — a sort of disease associated with and transmitted through sexual activity. Until recent times the Churches have consistently talked of sex in terms of sin, never in terms of love. Marriages were contracted for financial, dynastic or political reasons among the property-owning classes, with no evidence of love before the marriage, or expectation of it afterwards. This was entirely in line with orthodox Christian belief, in which there was no need for love to play a part in marriage — indeed it could be sinful if love did play a part — this was one reason that medieval churchmen so hated the troubadours. According to some theologians, experiencing intense passion for one's own wife amounted to adultery*. Even now the Anglican marriage service reflects traditional ideas, identifying three reasons for marriage: procreation, the avoidance of fornication, and mutual society. Love simply does not come into it. The Roman Catechism is even more traditional: the section on the sacrament of matrimony states that really it would be desirable for all Christians to remain unmarried. As canon 277 of the 1983 Roman Catholic code of canon law affirms: Celibacy is a special gift of God.
_________________________________________________________________
St Augustine of Hippo (354-430). Augustine was brought up as a Christian, but took a mistress and abandoned his religion. He considered the Old Testament to be a collection of old wives" fables , though he himself was unusually gullible, even by standards of the day*. In 374 he converted to a rival religion, Manichæism, and managed to convert some friends as well. But he never managed to graduate as one of the elect. Some nine years after his conversion he became a neoplatonist and then converted back to Christianity, in response to an oracle. He introduced new doctrines into the Church, drawn largely from his Manichæan phase. His views about the evils of sex seem to be due partly to guilt about his mistresses*, and partly to his Manichæan training, a fact recognised by at least one of his contemporaries. His views on contraception are not consistent with those of the Roman Church*. He was frankly predestinarian (believing people are powerless to change their destiny). He also mentioned the death of the Virgin Mary, not remarkable at the time, but now contrary to Roman dogma. He was also open to charges of a heresy called Sabellianism or Modal Monarchianism. His consecration as coadjutor bishop in 395 was illegal, contravening the eighth canon of Nicæa.