The History of Sex: South of France -- The Ultimate STD -- (Chap. III, Pt. 4)

At the time, you see, the future saint was living in sin with a concubine who'd even given him a son.

Eventually, Augustine's mother convinced him to come back to the fold and get married, so he rather un-Christianly dumped his lover of fourteen years and got engaged to a more respectable prospect—a ten-year-old virgin.

Unlike the founder of Islam, though, the 'Father of Christian Psychology' (God help us) never deflowered his prepubescent fiancée: unable to wait the two years until she came of age, Augustine took another mistress.

And before he could get married at the age of thirty-three, he miraculously got religion.

The new convert embraced celibacy and spent the rest of his life telling Christians to do as he said, not as he'd done.

RE-ENACTING THE FALL

Tormented by fantasies and wet dreams (not to mention his early Manichean leanings), Augustine pinpointed lust as the manifestation of original sin—and its means of transmission. Sin became the ultimate sexually transmitted disease.

According to the newly chaste Augustine, copulation was necessary to produce more Christians, but it should be a passionless, lust-free affair: you could have sex; you just couldn't enjoy it. The truly Christian couple should 'descend with a certain sadness' into intercourse, as if re-enacting the Fall from grace.

Old-fashioned nightshirts:
note the strategically-placed slits

Not surprisingly, it took nearly a thousand years for the Church's take on chastity and celibacy to bed down.

In denying the flesh, though, the first Christian theologians inadvertently made it all the more desirable. By forbidding sensuality, they helped fetishize it, inspiring generations of monks, nuns and other ascetics to make the earth move by flagellating and mortifying themselves into ecstasy.

The first attempt to impose a sex ban on the clergy came around 306 AD at a church council in Spain near Granada.

The same meeting also instituted a female 'pact of virginity' that involved a bishop cloaking a woman's head and pronouncing her 'a chaste virgin to Christ.'

The veiled woman was then locked away—an odd parallel with the Islamic harem—to become what we now know as a nun.

St. Augustine and Monica (his mother)
by Ary Scheffer