Wednesday 12 April 2017

AUGUSTINE AND POPE GREGORY ON THE EROTIC


The man then (Before the FALL), would have sown the seed, and the woman received it, as need required it, the generative organs being moved by the will, not excited by lust .....So in those days, the wife would receive into the womb her husband's seed without rupture of the hymen. (The City of God, 14.24)


The erect penis was the instrument that passed the first sin. (Sermons 151:5)



REASON: What about a wife? Would you not be delighted a fair, modest, obedient wife, one who is educated or whom you could easily touch, one who would bring along just enough dowry so that she would be no burden to your leisure?
AUGUSTINE: No matter how much you choose to portray and endow her with all good qualities, I have decided that there is nothing I should avoid so much as marriage. I know nothing which brings the manly mind down from the heights more than a woman's caresses and the joining of bodies without which one cannot have a wife. (Soliloquies: The Nature of the Good, chap 18)


"In Paradise, it would have been possible to beget offspring without foul sexual passion. The sexual organs would have been stimulated into necessary activity by will-power alone, just as the will controls other organs. Then, without being goaded on by the allurement of passion, the husband could have relaxed upon his wife's breasts with complete peace of mind and bodily tranquility, that part of his body not activated by tumultuous passion, but brought into service by the deliberate use of power when the need arose, the seed dispatched into the womb with no loss of his wife's virginity. So, the two sexes could have come together for impregnation and conception by an act of will, rather than by sexual passionful cravings" (City of God, Book 14, Chapter 26).



"For it was not fit that his creature should blush at the work of his Creator. But by a just punishment, the disobedience of their genitals was the retribution to the disobedience of the first man, for which disobedience they blushed when they covered with fig-leaves those shameful parts which previously were not shameful . . . They were suddenly so ashamed of their nakedness, which they were daily in the habit of looking upon without embarassment, that they could now no longer bear those sexual members naked, but immediately took care to cover them! Did they not thereby perceive those members to be disobedient to the choice of their will, which certainly they ought to have ruled like the rest (of their body) by their voluntary command?" (Against Two Letters of the Pelagians 1.31-32)


"The question before us, then, is not about the motion of bodies, without which there could not be sexual intercourse; but about the shameful motion of the organs of generation, which certainly could be absent. And yet the fructifying connection could still be there, if the organs of generation were not obedient to sexual passion, but simply to the will, like the other members of the body. Is it not even now the case, in "the body of this death", that a command is given to the foot, the arm, the finger, the lip, or the tongue, and they are instantly set in motion at this intimation of our will? And (to take a still more wonderful case) even the liquid contained in the urinary vessels obeys the command to flow from us at our pleasure, and when we are not pressed with its overflow; while the vessels, also, which contain the liquid, discharge without difficulty, if they are in a healthy state, the office assigned them by our will of propelling, pressing out, and ejecting their contents. With how much greater ease and quietness, then, if the generative organs of our body were compliant, would natural motion ensue, and human conception be effected . . . ” (On Sexual desire, Book II, chap. 53.)



POPE GREGORY THE GREAT (died AD 604)
The carnal company between man and wife is for the sake of procreation of children, not satisfaction of lusts. (Bede's Opera Historica 1.145)


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