Struggling with Sin

Editor’s Note: This is the eleventh in a series of articles on St. Augustine, one of the greatest of Church Fathers, and how his writings still apply today.

“I must now carry my thoughts back to the abominable things I did in those days,” writes Augustine at the very beginning of Book II, “the sins of the flesh which defiled my soul.” He has left his boyhood behind, the period during which he first went off to school, where pupils were regularly beaten by their teachers (“my one great bugbear,” is how he describes it); despite which the young Augustine, an unusually gifted child, manages to acquire enough knowledge and skill to justify the sacrifices his parents made to send him there. And while the memories remain bitter, he nevertheless needs to tell God in order, as he puts it, 

to savor your sweetness, the sweetness that does not deceive but brings real joy and never fails. For love of your love I shall retrieve myself from the havoc of disruption which tore me to pieces when I turned away from you, whom alone I should have sought…

And why, exactly, had he turned away from God? It certainly brought him no real happiness, no abiding sense of peace or fulfilment. “What harvest did I reap,” he asks, quoting St. Paul (Romans 6:21), “from acts which now make me blush.” So, what were these defilements that drove him, in his words, “wild with a lust that was both manifold and rank,” leaving him “foul to the core, yet pleased with my own condition and anxious to be pleasing in the eyes of others”?

There is little point in dressing it up, or tricking it out in the language of euphemism, or what nowadays we would call “mature self-acceptance.” It is simple, garden variety lust, which, when one is in its grip, fornication follows. There is no glamour in giving in, its fleeting attractions have no lasting appeal, no staying power once we have fallen. “Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action,” is how Shakespeare puts it, who would not have needed Augustine to describe its fevered lunacies. “Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight. All this the world well knows, yet none knows well. To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.”

Nor would the Buddha himself have needed to consult the Bishop of Hippo when, in his “Fire Sermon,” we are told that “The eye is burning: visible things are burning…With what fire is it burning? I declare unto you that it is burning with the fire of lust.” And that only by “conceiving an aversion” for such deceits and lusts of the flesh, will the spirit undergo the necessary regeneration.  

Dante, too, has given apt and memorable expression to the sin, the example of poor Paolo and Francesca providing the perfect backdrop to a lust in action that will perdure in sheer hellish intensity for all eternity—their damned souls twisted together as they whirl about the fetid air. “There is no greater grief,” she tells Dante, “than to recall a time of happiness / while plunged in misery…” But because the lost souls can no longer love, both she and her partner in sin will forever be reminding themselves of the evil each visited upon the other.

And for a time—such a long time, too, following the period of his boyhood—Augustine will know this hell. Forced, like so many in thrall to sexual sin, to learn wisdom, if we learn it at all, through agony, through the pain of seeing how we’ve caused pain to ourselves, to others. And, to be sure, to God. “I deserted you, my God,” Augustine will lament. “In my youth I wandered away, too far from your sustaining hand, and created of myself a barren waste.”

Augustine, of course, will not have been the first to chart the cycle of lust, as anyone for whom the body/soul connection remains a work in progress well knows; from madness in the beginning, to the brief spasm of bliss in the moment, to the lengthening despair in the end. To quote Petronius, the Roman poet who lived before Augustine: “Doing, a filthy pleasure is, and short; / And done, we straight repent us of the sport” (translation courtesy of Ben Jonson). Or back to Shakespeare, who, in “The Rape of Lucrece,” features a most villainous character asking himself before his sin, “What win I if I gain the thing I seek? / A dream, a breath, a froth of fleeting joy. / Who buys a minute’s mirth to wail a week? / Or sells eternity to get a toy?”

And yet, all too often, as human depravity will confirm, it is not repented of at all, as in the case of the young Augustine, who, by his own abject admission, “floundered in the broiling sea of fornication” for a very long while. “I was in a ferment of wickedness,” he tells God. “I deserted you and allowed myself to be carried away by the sweep of the tide.” 

In fact, he goes on quite specifically to ask God to tell him, 

how far was I banished from the bliss of your house in that sixteenth year of my life? This was the age at which the frenzy gripped me and I surrendered myself entirely to lust, which your law forbids but human hearts are not ashamed to sanction. My family made no effort to save me from my fall by marriage. Their only concern was that I should learn how to make a good speech and how to persuade others by my words.

And so the weeds of wantonness and lust grow thicker and higher about his head, and there are none to cut away the brambles. Certainly not any of his friends, on whom he appears to have been most slavishly dependent. So blind to right reason had he become, in fact, that in their company he feels great shame lest he be seen as less depraved than they. 

For I heard them bragging of their depravity, and the greater the sin the more they gloried in it, so that I took pleasure in the same vices not only for the enjoyment of what I did, but also for the applause I won. Nothing deserves to be despised more than vice; yet I gave in more and more to vice simply in order not to be despised. If I had not sinned enough to rival other sinners, I used to pretend that I had done things I had not done at all, because I was afraid that innocence would be taken for cowardice and chastity for weakness.

Is this the stuff of sanctity? Is this a future Doctor of the Church speaking? Well, actually, it is. And just as there are no saints without a past, nor are there sinners without a future. As that marvelous and holy Dominican Vincent McNabb used to say, “When God looks at a sinner, he is no longer a sinner; he only used to be a sinner.” It is certainly an aspect of the appeal readers have for Augustine that here was a great sinner—a repeat offender, no less, against God and man—who struggled mightily against all the odds to become a great saint.