Sex: How to Connect

What do I want when I crave intimacy?

Jacques Derrida, the famous (notorious?) French philosopher, is seated in his living room. Evening has settled on Ris-Orangis, the Parisian suburb Derrida called home. He looks tired, but remains patient and attentive. Amy Ziering Kofman, producer and director of the documentary Derrida, puts to him an open-ended question: “If you were to watch a documentary about a philosopher—Heidegger or Kant or Hegel—what would you like to see in it?”

After a long, pensive pause, Derrida names it briefly and decisively: “Their sex lives.”

Kofman is obviously taken aback, so Derrida explains: “Because it’s something they don’t talk about. I’d love to hear about something they refuse to talk about. Why do philosophers present themselves asexually in their work? Why have they erased their private lives from their work?” His interest isn’t prurient (“I’m not talking about making a porno film about Hegel or Heidegger,” he clarifies). It’s a matter of love. “There is nothing more important in one’s private life than love. . . . I want them to speak about the part love plays in their lives.”

Has any philosopher done this more baldly, more vulnerably, or more transparently than Augustine? He not only recounts his past escapades; he’s a bishop who admits his continued wet dreams.1 And, confirming Derrida’s hypothesis, Augustine concludes that what was going on in his sex life, even if disordered, really was about love: “The single desire that dominated my search for delight was simply to love and to be loved.”2 There are hints of euphemism here, and maybe a bit of sublimation (albeit some fifteen centuries before Freud)—a deft deflection that is the stuff of Woody Allen films. Though Derrida was looking for a philosopher willing to talk about his sex life, he might have complained that Augustine overdid it. He could have left more to the imagination.3

But what could we possibly learn about sex from the so-called “inventor” of original sin, this celibate scold and ancient misogynist?4 What could we, liberated from repression, possibly learn from a monk?

Admittedly, to journey with Augustine on these matters is like an awkward road trip to your grandparents’ cottage with a great uncle you hardly know. An hour into the long drive, you realize he holds opinions that seem unfathomable, even revolting, to you. He seems irrelevant to the world you inhabit. But about four hours into the trip, he lets slip an insight you’ve never considered, one that inexplicably sets your world atilt and has you almost hate the fact that you’re rethinking things. There’s something uncanny about his corny metaphors: they speak to your experience. You realize that he too was once young and that his world is not so different from yours. Six hours into the trip, after vociferously arguing with him, confident of all the things he gets wrong, you nonetheless hear in his counsel the hints of a soul who knows something about disappointment, and something about happiness because of that. By the time you reach the cottage, in the bliss of summer’s late twilight, with your extended family bustling around the edge of the lake and guffawing on camp chairs, you thank your great uncle for more than the ride.

I have my own disagreements and frustrations with Augustine on this score. I can still recall the moment when our profound differences came to the fore—and why journeying with Augustine didn’t always look like agreeing with him. While a doctoral student at Villanova University, investigating Heidegger’s debts to Augustine, I had the opportunity to learn from Fr. Robert Dodaro, an Augustinian priest and scholar, then president of the Augustinianum in Rome. Father Dodaro taught summer institutes at Villanova, which were a critical part of my immersion in patristic scholarship on Augustine. It was Father Dodaro who taught me to read the sermons and letters, not just the treatises. So as I was preparing for my dissertation year, we came up with a plan for me to spend the year in Rome, with my family, studying at the Augustinianum. I had set about applying for funds and arranging logistics. I can recall a wide-eyed visit to the Italian embassy in South Philly, where every agent was encased in thick bulletproof glass, shades of Scorsese movies creeping into my imagination. The red tape was arduous and almost dissuaded me.

But another surprise is what would derail the plan. I can still remember the afternoon Deanna came home from work and told me, “I’m pregnant.” This would be our fourth child, and we both immediately knew this meant Rome was out of the question. But we were both perfectly OK with that, grateful and excited for this rather unanticipated expansion of our burgeoning household.

That spring, Father Dodaro was back in Philadelphia for a conference at Villanova, so I was able to tell him the news in person. Apologetically, I told him that I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the year at the Augustinianum because we had just gotten word that we were expecting our fourth child. I remember his eyes widening, albeit with a grin, but one that communicated its own assessment of the situation. Worlds were colliding: the celibate Augustinian scholar, the “fecund” young Protestant. It’s like I was proving Augustine right: sex and marriage and the “affairs of the world” would distract from higher goods. My wife’s and my fondness for bodily pleasure and for one another was stealing the opportunity to focus on matters of the mind.

I didn’t regret a thing. I harbored no inferiority complex. I was answering a call, and it was Augustine who taught me to listen carefully to the unexpected cries of children.5

Sometimes learning from Augustine means deconstructing Augustine. We’d been on the road long enough that I’d mustered the courage to point out some of his missteps. But in the long road since then, I’ve continued to appreciate how much this celibate saint has to teach me about sex.

WHAT DO WE want when we want to have sex? More starkly: what are we hoping for when we imagine happiness looks like having as much sex as possible? What story are we buying into when we believe a dominant narrative that tells us fulfillment looks like the multiplication of orgasms? What does it feel like to live into that story?

Sexual hunger comes naturally and has its own complex of desires embedded in it. We crave an intimacy that blurs the boundary between lover and beloved. We want to give ourselves away, to lose ourselves in a tangle of limbs and folds, to speak our love in tongues, as it were.6 At the same time, it is a hunger that craves satisfaction. Our self is its most self-interested as it seeks the titillation of nerve endings that lie dormant in our workaday lives. We yearn for the release, the exception, the explosion that we hope pours sparks on the mundane we inhabit the rest of the time. Sex is that paradoxical combination of vulnerability and assertion, giving ourselves up and wanting all the more.

When Augustine was a young student in Madauros, all of this was anticipated just over the horizon, as if he’d heard rumblings of possibilities that his body already knew. The lure of sex was haloed with the aura of the unknown, the mysterious, as it so often is in adolescence, causing us to pour into it all the more hope and expectation. Such hunger was in the water, so to speak, and he swam in it like everyone else. It was no wonder, then, that “the bubbling impulses of puberty” asserted themselves.7 What he would later describe as a “lunatic lust” took over; it “had come to lord it over me, after I made a complete surrender.”8 Similarly, when his family finally saved up the funds to send him to university in Carthage, “all around me hissed a cauldron of illicit loves,” and Augustine was more than happy to drink it up. “I was in love with love,” he recalls.9 Retroactively, he recognizes a hunger behind this, a hunger that stemmed from a certain kind of starvation. The soul’s built-in hunger for the transcendent, the resplendent, the mysterious was deflected to the sensual, the bodily, the reverberating shudder of climax. The inherent desire to give himself away settled for giving up his body. Ignoring infinite Beauty, he pursued finite beauties all the more. He traded the cosmic for the orgasmic.

He could recognize what Leslie Jamison calls that “narrowing of repertoire” that nonetheless comes with widening expectations. This helped explain his disappointment and exhaustion. Because the satisfaction of sexual hunger was really a way of trying to stave off a more fundamental, transcendent hunger, it meant he was always expecting too much, asking sex to do something it could never do. And so, the aura of mystery and unparalleled delight that sex had as Augustine arrived on the shores of puberty began to look different a few years later when seen from the other side of disappointment, through the tired haze of a malaise that had hoped for more. Promiscuity didn’t keep its promises.

This is not the conclusion of a detached square, the wishful thinking of a celibate who never got any, like the virginal geek telling the playboy that sex isn’t all that important in some imaginary John Hughes movie. To the contrary, Augustine speaks “from experience,” as we say. And his conclusion, while jarring in a libertine culture (like his own, we might add), is not unheard of from others who tried to find something more in sexual pursuit. Indeed, one might be struck by some remarkable parallels between Augustine and a contemporary like Russell Brand. Having leveraged his fame for a life of philandering, for which he became more famous, Brand looked at his sexual hunger anew when he broke free of other addictions in his life. In a podcast conversation with Joe Rogan, Brand offers his own introspective reading of what he was looking for in his promiscuity: “The great gift of promiscuity,” he told Rogan, “is that you get to experience all of the intimacy with all of these strangers and it seems exciting. And the kind of sexuality that I’ve always had is more about worship than any kind of domination. I adore, I adore, you know?”10 This recognition of an almost liturgical aspect to sexual desire would not surprise Augustine. But, as Brand goes on to ask, just who am I worshiping in this? What am I giving myself away to? Is this devotion, or is it a sacrifice?

Brand confesses to the isolation he experienced in this chase: you acquire “all of these wonderful experiences and encounters,” he says, “but . . . within it, this kind of ongoing seam of loneliness, unignorable.” When he can’t ignore the unignorable any longer, he starts to be honest in his appraisal of just what he’s getting out of this:

And also—this is the thing—when you get the things your culture tells you you should be doing and you experience them now you know you can stop chasing the carrot ’cause you’ve had a bite out of it and it’s like, “Hold on a minute: this is bull——.” It’s a hard one to learn because anything that’s got an orgasm at the end of it, you know, there’s a degree of pleasure to be had. But it takes a while to recognize the emotional cost on me, the spiritual cost on other people, the fact that it’s preventing me from becoming a father, from becoming a husband, from settling, from becoming rooted, from becoming actually whole, from becoming a man, from becoming connected. It takes a while to spot that. I think a lot of people don’t get the opportunity to break out of that pattern. I would never have spotted it had I not first been a heroin addict and gone, “Hold on a minute, you’re doing that thing again.” Same with fame and same with celebrity. . . . Because I had the template and experiences, “Ooooh, this is addiction; you’re expecting this thing to make you feel better.”

Like all of our addictions, promiscuity fails to deliver what we’re asking of it.

PAIN IS HOW the body tells us to stop, to slow down, to attend to a problem. Frustration, sadness, and heartbreak are the pains of a life that’s running against the grain. What’s both sad and endlessly ingenious in a diabolical way is the extent to which we can deny the pain, paper over it with explanations and rationalizations, mute it with louder music and more partners. We are masters of dissimulation; we can construe almost anything as if it were pleasure in order to talk ourselves into being happy. We are great pretenders.

Those superpowers of self-deception are amplified when society tells us that pain is pleasure, that our disappointment is happiness, that we’re living the dream. Getting the emperor out of his clothes is the new lie we’re all complicit in, even if it’s killing us, isolating us, and leaving us lonelier than ever. We don’t just buy the spin; we purvey it.

This dynamic was illustrated in an episode of the HBO drama Succession. The story revolves around the Shakespearean family drama of a Murdoch-like media empire, presided over by the unforgiving, heartless patriarch, Logan Roy. One of the outsiders in the clan is Tom Wamsgans (played masterfully by Matthew Macfadyen). A midwesterner who has somehow fallen in love with Logan’s daughter, Siobhan (“Shiv”), Tom is constantly marginalized, looking for approval, hoping to climb the ladder of the family business only to feel Shiv’s brothers stomping on him each time he tries to grab the next rung. But he is devoted to Shiv and manages to convince her to marry him.

His bachelor party is the occasion for an episode that is sad and dark despite the glitz and glam of lights in the club. Roman Roy, who couldn’t care less about Tom, has taken over arrangements, mostly as a means to a business deal. Their crew is whisked into the underworld of New York to an exclusive sex club with shades of the stories coming out of Silicon Valley of late.11 Taking the ritual of the bachelor party to a new level, the club is a Disneyland of lust, where every man’s dream can come true. You can tell that Tom is trying to talk himself into buying this story, making this dream his own. If this is what everybody dreams of, he assures himself, then look at me: I’m the luckiest guy in the world. But you don’t believe him, and you know he doesn’t believe it himself, despite how many times he keeps telling himself, out loud, over and over. Indeed, he can’t stop calling Siobhan, assuring her, needing her, wanting to hear her voice, longing for her to tell him what he can’t do because he doesn’t actually want to anyway.12 But Shiv only grants permission. The rites of the bachelor party are sacrosanct; the ritual calf must be slaughtered to the god of pleasure.

When he finally feels like he needs to cave into the debauch, he returns to his soon-to-be cousin, recounts the disgusting sex act he just engaged in, and keeps telling everyone, unconvincingly, “It was so hot.” When he sees Shiv the next morning, he’s embarrassed to kiss her with the mouth he used last night.

Augustine tells us that there was a pain that attended his pleasures, and for the longest time he ignored it. But “you were always with me,” he says, looking back, “mercifully punishing me, touching with a bitter taste all my illicit pleasures.”13 Becoming attuned to that pain was like a first revelation, a nudge that gave him permission to say, like Brand, “Hold on a minute: this is bull——.”

What Augustine offers us is a strange new lens to look askance at the story we’ve been suckered into. It’s like Brand’s account of addiction, but it dives even deeper into a spiritual diagnosis. It’s not just that I’m hooked and need a fix, or that I’m overly dependent on external stimuli to try to achieve happiness (and hence doomed to disappointment because of the law of diminishing returns).14 That can all be true yet still an inadequate diagnosis of what’s really going on if it doesn’t recognize that the insatiability of my hunger isn’t a bug but a feature—a signal that I long for something infinite. Wanting more isn’t the problem; it’s where I keep looking for it.

Augustine invites us to look at our promiscuity through the lens of idolatry, not in order to induce shame, but in order to illuminate the depth of the hunger and the significance of its disorder. The problem isn’t sex; it’s what I expect from sex. The problem with promiscuity isn’t (just) that it transgresses the law or that it chews up other people and spits them out as leftovers; it’s not simply the fact that it hollows me out and reduces me to my organs and glands all as a perverted way to feed a soul-hunger. The baseline problem with promiscuity is that it doesn’t work and is doomed to fail. “You can’t get there from here” is what Augustine finally heard Lady Continence telling him. And by that point, after telling himself for years that “this is so hot,” Augustine is ready to listen. The incessant chatter of his loins and the constant inciting of his old habits “was now putting the question very half-heartedly.” The volume of those passions had been turned down just enough that he could hear another voice: the voice of “the dignified and chaste Lady Continence, serene and cheerful without coquetry, enticing me in an honorable manner to come and not to hesitate.”15 Exhausted by his pursuits, Augustine was susceptible to the lure of a different direction for his loves. Restraint looked like release from the frantic chase he’d been on. If the soul-hunger that had been trying to feast on the ephemeral could finally be fed by the eternal, then his expectations wouldn’t be constantly disappointed. He was being wooed by chastity.

BUT PROMISCUITY ISN’T synonymous with sex. Like anything, creaturely goods are gifts when they are enjoyed in the right way. When I stop looking to some facet of finite creation to feed a hunger for the infinite, I don’t have to reject or detest creation. To the contrary, in a sense I get it back as a gift, as something to be (small-e) enjoyed as a way to (big-E) Enjoy the Creator who made it. It’s when I stop overexpecting from creation that it becomes something I can hold with an open hand, lightly but gratefully.

If Augustine overcorrects, it’s because his own demons propelled him to confuse promiscuity with sex. The result is a tendency to collapse his conversion into answering the call to celibacy. The existential struggle in the garden plays out as a question of whether he is willing and able to be celibate for the rest of his life. Lady Continence gets more lines than Jesus, you might say. The infusion of grace is the gift he needed in order to make the “leap.”16

While he might have overcome his old carnal habits, his old habits of mind persisted. At times the vision of healthy sexuality that Augustine extols—prioritizing celibacy—simply looks like the inversion of promiscuity and suggests his failure to imagine a sexual hunger that runs with the grain of a good creation. (This privileging of celibacy would be a primary target of reform when a later Augustinian renewal movement called the Protestant Reformation would revisit the question.)17

The collapsing of the two—identifying sex with sin—is understandable, in a way. It stems partly from his own demons and partly from a lingering Platonic devaluing of the body in vogue at the time—what Kyle Harper describes as the “grand ascetic experiments that are such a stunning feature of late antiquity,” a movement “that originated in the desert and then hurtled itself across the Mediterranean.”18 And, of course, this also stems from an honest wrestling with Scripture, with the exemplar of the unmarried Jesus and the counsels of the apostle Paul that privilege virginity and celibacy in 1 Corinthians 7. In his reading of Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians, Augustine turned what was a strategic eschatological priority—“time is short” (1 Cor. 7:29)—into a metaphysical hierarchy laden with biological disdain. As a result, he backs himself into strange backstories about procreation in the garden of Eden—procreation without passion, intercourse without arousal, genitals copulating like shaking hands: body parts, he envisions, will simply obey the will without the messiness of desire.19 But this ends up demonizing the creaturely per se. Even when Augustine defends the good of marriage in an early tract, the rhythms he recommends look like monastery lite. In fact, in a later debate he castigates Julian for encouraging couples to “jump into bed each time they are overcome with desire, sometimes not even waiting for night to come.”20 There’s no afternoon delight in Augustine’s vision of ordered sexual desire.

Because Augustine felt least in control in the face of his sexual urges, and because of his cold-turkey recovery, he ratifies an all-or-nothing approach that reflects an emerging orthodoxy at the time—a vision that would stay in place, mostly unquestioned, until the Protestant Reformation. But we can demur to this and still learn a lot from him. Don’t let disagreement about celibacy shut down the opportunity to hear wisdom in Augustine’s provocative account of chastity, which might be exactly the sort of peculiar take on sex that we need to hear.

What Augustine offers us is a slant of detachment—a recognition of the power of sexual desire with a resistance to letting it define anyone.21 “Continence”—Augustine’s technical Latin term that Sarah Ruden translates as “self-restraint”—isn’t just for the celibate. Indeed, continence isn’t even just about sex. Continence is a general principle of being held together rather than dispersed, having a center rather than dissolving oneself in a million hungry pursuits.22 Sexual continence—chastity—outside of celibacy looks like a relationship to sex that doesn’t idolize it, doesn’t let it define us, doesn’t let it become a hunger that eats us alive. In other words, the gift of chastity is that it trains us not to need; it grants us an integrity and independence and agency in the face of various drives and hungers.

While Augustine emphasizes procreation as the end of sex, he begrudgingly makes room for a kind of remedial sex life beyond the procreative, yet another aspect of his pastoral realism.23 As he recognizes in On the Good of Marriage, couples will “have intercourse also beside the cause of begetting children.” This, he says, “is not committed because of marriage, but is pardoned because of marriage”; it is “a mutual service of sustaining one another’s weakness.”24 Although I might resist this way of framing it, I can see the counsel of wisdom embedded in Augustine’s point: part of a healthy sexuality will be refusing to let it consume me. There is a freedom that comes from not being a slave to my libido. Indeed, it is also a gift to my partner to learn not to need, not imposing a disordered hunger on our relationship—a hunger that, even in the context of a marriage, can be (if we’re honest) rapacious. As Joseph Clair comments, “By claiming that all conjugal acts not aimed toward the goal of offspring are venially sinful, Augustine intends to highlight how difficult it is to achieve sexual intimacy in marriage without fleeting moments of selfishness—whether in the form of self-satisfaction or domination.”25

I’ve been thinking about this a lot as my wife and I have worked to navigate the realities of menopause. I can still remember the morning when Deanna tearfully explained to me her experience of this natural season in a woman’s life—the way her body felt like it was a stranger, recalcitrant, behaving in ways she couldn’t predict and didn’t like; the way she resented this diminishment of desire, even as she grappled with its chemical reality; the way she worried this would frustrate me and erode the bonds between us. I was immediately ashamed of all my socialization as a male sexual being and admired her courage and transparency. I was humbled by her honesty and pained by her sadness as she mourned her own body and rhythms we’d come to cherish (which, I’ll confess to Augustine, included its fair share of afternoon delight). And in that moment Augustine’s counsels took on a new relevance for me as I realized that in this season of our marriage and in this stage on the road, the kind of detachment Augustine encouraged—the refusal to be dominated by the libido—was exactly the word I needed to hear.

It also strikes me as paradoxical, or at least surprising, that an ancient celibate bishop might have insight that speaks directly to our #MeToo moment, as the systemic monstrosities of male sexual desire are uncovered and named for what they are: domineering, predatory, heedless, abusive. The myth of sexual fulfillment and self-expression doesn’t look like it has coherent resources to curb the habits of the lecherous men of late modernity (men we have made, it should be noted). Perhaps it will be the horrors of abuse that get us to consider the virtues of chastity, monogamy, and even marriage. As Augustine puts it at one point in On the Good of Marriage, “For this purpose they are married, that the lust being brought under a lawful bond should not float at large without form and loose; having of itself weakness of flesh that cannot be curbed, but of marriage fellowship of faith that cannot be dissolved.”26 This theme returns over and over again in Augustine’s defense of the good of marriage: the centrality of friendship, the importance of covenant, both finding expression in exclusivity. What if consent isn’t enough? What if what we’re looking for is covenant? What if only marriage will protect us?27

IN FACT, AUGUSTINE experienced a kind of preamble to reordered love when he made a commitment to a concubine while living in Carthage. Concubinage is not what we tend to project back onto this relationship. Rather than a kind of sophisticated prostitution, as we might think, the arrangement reflects the class structure of the day, and the way ambition infiltrated sex. A concubine was a kind of temporary but exclusive partnership that would be made while someone was climbing the ladder on the way to status or wealth that could secure a more “appropriate” marriage. It’s worth noting, in fact, that right around the time Augustine made a commitment to a concubinage, a church council ruled that unmarried men who made such commitments could receive the Eucharist.28 (It should also be noted that Monica was generally happy with this arrangement for a while, since she harbored high hopes for her son’s marital prospects.)29 “In those years,” Augustine recalls, “I had a woman. She was not my partner in what is called lawful marriage,” he admits. “Nevertheless, she was the only girl for me, and I was faithful to her.”30

In fact, they also had a son together. His name says something about their relationship: Adeodatus, a gift of God. She and Adeodatus would journey with Augustine across the Mediterranean to Rome, would follow him to Milan, faithfully trailing him in his ambitions. Surely Augustine learned something about friendship in this relationship, knew something of covenant. Indeed, the depth and intimacy of their relationship is attested in Augustine’s heartbreak when ambitious Monica finally pressures Augustine into dismissing her for a more promising marital contract. She was “torn away from my side,” as Augustine recalls: “My heart which was deeply attached was cut and wounded, and left a trail of blood.”31 But Adeodatus, the fruit of their union, the gift of God, remained. We see the precocious son participating in some of the early dialogues that emerged from a season in Cassiciacum after his conversion. And when Ambrose would baptize Augustine, he would also baptize his son.

Both his partner and son are effaced from the tradition. These companions that journeyed with him to Rome and Milan, alongside him in his anxieties and struggles, appear nowhere in the iconography of later centuries. They are conspicuously absent from those frescoes by Gozzoli in San Gimignano, nowhere to be seen in that ship braving the Mediterranean, not even in the frame as he departs Rome. Augustine’s later arguments about celibacy end up retroactively rewriting history.

But who are we to spurn the gifts of God? Who is Augustine to do so, to efface the datus deo? What if following Augustine means disagreeing with him? Indeed, as Augustine himself would recognize, the central mystery of the Christian faith, the incarnation of God, says something surprising about sex: “For the same nature had to be taken on as needed to be set free. And lest either sex should imagine it was being ignored by its creator, he took to himself a male and was born of a female.”32 Every saint has been born of lovemaking. It’s when we stop idolizing sex that we can finally sanctify it.