Augustine on the Question of Marriage and Celibacy

In the modern day, marriage is indisputably endorsed by the Christian faith. In the fourth century, however, marriage and its moral status were a hot topic of debate among Christian thinkers. Arguments as to the moral suitability of marriage were often grounded in interpretations of Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth, written in the latter half of the first century CE. In this letter, Paul frames marriage mainly as a tool for the management of sexual desire and relations. While he presents marriage as a necessary solution to inevitable human drives, he also states that in an ideal world all would be “as I myself am,” meaning celibate (1 Cor. 7:7). This statement insinuated that marriage was inferior to celibacy, thus sparking debate between theologians as to the ultimate moral standing of marriage. The fourth-century monk and theologian Jerome believed that marriage was morally inferior at best, whereas Jovinian, the fourth-century monk turned critic of asceticism, rejected the notion that celibacy was a more holy way of life than marriage. It would fall to Jovinian and Jerome’s famous contemporary, Augustine, to find the middle ground between their views, arguing that while both marriage and celibacy were to be praised, celibacy was deserving of particular veneration in a way that did not disparage the value of marriage.

Augustine argued that the central benefit of marriage was its ability to contain human sexual drives and channel them towards procreation. He noted that marriage had “the benefit that sensual or youthful incontinence, even though it is wrong, is redirected to the honorable purpose of having children, and so out of the evil of lust sexual union in marriage achieves something good” (Augustine, 35). While he still condemned sex as a lustful and therefore evil act, he portrayed marriage as a means of channeling sexual energy towards the religiously condoned act of procreation. Even without the expressed purpose of childbirth, Augustine suggested that members of a married couple could engage in intercourse without moral consequences, as husband and wife “owe each other a mutual service to relieve each other's weakness, and thereby avoid illicit unions” (38). He presented marriage as a practical union, one in which each partner had a duty to fulfill the sexual needs of the other in order to channel the couple’s sexual energy into a controlled relationship and prevent the sins of adultery and fornication.

Love was largely left out of Augustine’s discussion of marriage, however when it was mentioned he presented it as something that existed separately from the passion-driven sexual relationship between husband and wife. Augustine noted that “in a good marriage...although the passion of youth between man and woman has waned, the relationship of love between husband and wife continues strong, and the better persons they are, the earlier they begin by mutual consent to abstain from carnal union” (35). He frames love as a non-sexual corollary of passion: as passion decreased in a union, love took its place. The transition from passion to love thus facilitated the transition from a sexual union to a celibate one. Husband and wife had a duty to fulfill each other's sexual drives. However, once these drives dissipated, they were meant to assist each other in mutually maintaining a celibate existence. Although the need to control sexual passions may have been the initial purpose of a marriage, the ultimate goal was a celibate bond held together by a non-sexual, and therefore more holy, kind of affection. This would seem to complicate the binary division between marriage and celibacy, suggesting that both were ways of avoiding actions defined as sexually immoral and that marriage could in fact be a path to the ultimate goal of abstinence from sexual relations.

Augustine clarified his perspective on the hierarchy between marriage and celibacy by stating that “marriage and fornication are not two evils, one worse than the other, but marriage and abstinence are two good things, one better than the other” (39). This statement solidified the moral standing of marriage, compromising between Jovinian’s praise of marriage and Jerome's exaltation of virginity. However, Augustine noted that there was one case in which this hierarchy dissolved: that of the fathers of the Old Testament. According to Augustine, these men “had intercourse because it was their duty, and their natural enjoyment of it was never let go to the point of becoming irrational or sinful passion” (47). When the fathers of the Old Testament had sexual relations due to procreative necessity rather than personal desire, that action was morally comparable to celibacy. This would seem to confirm that the sexual act itself did not hold any inherent moral valence in Augustine’s eyes. Rather, its valence was determined through the context and motivation that surround the act. Augustine expanded upon this logic when he said that the “natural inclination of a mortal being has its own kind of chastity” and that “when it is accompanied by worship of God it is destined to be fruitful thirty times over” (50). By noting that the sexual act when committed under the right circumstances could be comparable to chastity, he portrayed chastity as something more complex than the complete avoidance of intercourse. While Augustine clearly condemned sexual passion and saw marriage as a safeguard against the potential sins those desires could elicit, he did not directly condemn the sexual act, the morality of which appeared to be contextually dependent.

 Another year, another issue of Love, Medieval Style. Join me and our new staff writer, Ciara Hervas '21, for more stories of how sex, love, and marriage have changed--and stayed the same--over the past millennia!