St Augustine on the Function and Pleasure of Sex
The real cost of pure pleasure
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St Augustine on the function of pleasure
The best explanation I’ve ever found of what’s wrong with our technological culture comes from a monk who lived 1500 years ago in the deserts of Algeria: St Augustine, bishop of Hippo, his views on what pleasure should be, and a very modern critic of our age of machines.
St Augustine, of course, knew nothing of chemistry or modern factories. But he knew something about sex and its pleasures, and being a Christian bishop, he was rather wary of it.
Sex, the Saint said, has a function, and that function is, in principle, good: it allows us to make children and keep the human race alive. Certainly, God has wanted it that way, and so there could be nothing wrong with that. So where’s the problem with sex?
For St Augustine, the pleasure inherent in any activity is good as long as the activity is performed because of its intended function. When we try to get the pleasure without the function of the activity, we are violating the order of nature and committing a sin.
It’s not sinful (or in any other way bad) to have sex in order to make children. All the problems with people’s sex lives begin at the moment when we forget what sex is for and start doing it for fun. It’s even worse when we have cheap and effective contraceptives available because then we can have the fun _all the time, _without ever utilising our sexual pleasure the way it was meant to be used: as an incentive to make children and keep our genes alive.
St. Augustine of Hippo. Source: Wikipedia
Now, we don’t need to buy into St Augustine’s theologically-motivated aversions. There are much better examples of what he was at, and they are vitally relevant today for our lives, and perhaps for our survival as a species.
If you look back at the development of modern, technological society, what we have done in all areas of life is systematically to separate pleasure from function, and then to suppress the function and take the pleasure alone.
Think of sugar.
St Augustine and the pleasure of sugar
Originally, sugars in fruits are there to make us eat the fruit. Plants stuff their fruits with sugars because then mammals like us will eat them and distribute their seeds. That’s the sugar’s function. And we, on the other hand, have developed those sweetness receptors because we need sugar, and the energy it provides, to survive. That’s the point of having a sense for sweetness: our taste leads us towards those foods that are good for our survival, and away from plants that are poisonous or not edible (and that often taste bitter, sour, or in other ways unpleasant).
Photo by Robert Anderson on Unsplash
As long as we eat only foods as they are found in nature, everything is fine. We get our sugars, the plants get their propagation. Sugars are always accompanied, in the fruit, by all the other goodness of eating plant material: vitamins, minerals, fibres.
But then we learned to extract the sugar and make it into a white powder. When we now eat something sweet, it is not any more a bit of fruit — it is, more likely, a piece of chocolate, a concoction made of fats and sugars, containing no vitamins or fibre to speak of. Or it is a soft drink, stuffed with almost ten teaspoons of sugar in each small can.
Considering the context of actions
Separated from its context, everything pleasurable becomes a threat, a weapon of destruction. Wood is a great fuel as long as I cut one tree and plant another. Fossil fuels become deadly drivers of global heating when we take them out of their context, extract them from the ground into which they belong, and burn them, refined and isolated and used to feed our energy-consuming pleasures: driving around in cars, heating our houses, powering our factories. We have removed the pleasure of powering our lives from the original goodness of the tree, from the proper function of wood and coal in the circular economy of living things on Earth. And by doing so, we have weaponized energy, we have lost the measure for the right amount that we can use, and we have destroyed the planet.
Photo by Andrew Reshetov on Unsplash
It’s amazing how often we can do this thought experiment, how often we can see what’s wrong with us through the eyes of that ancient, Algerian monk. Even thought itself was originally just a tool that some mammals applied in order to make their survival in nature a bit easier. But we took it out from its context, separated it from its original purpose, and made it into a fetish: the thing that is taught as philosophy, mathematics, or quantum physics in our universities, a perverse and useless exercise in manipulating meaningless symbols just for the sake of doing so.
Or, even worse, to use it as a tool that will allow us to rip even more things out of their context, to destroy even more of the connecting tissue of the world, just because we want to have what’s shiny and fun, but without all the context and meaning that hangs on it.
What we overlook, and what St Augustine knew about pleasure, is that this context, this meaning, is necessary. It’s an integral part of the whole nature of everything that has evolved together on Earth. All rocks, plants, animals, and ourselves are here at this moment only because we’re all together on this ride. Plants supply energy to animals, animals fertilise and pollinate plants, and we are supposed to be right in the middle of it all, doing our part, a cog in the great machine of life on Earth. But instead, we’ve learned to take the machine apart, to steal a screw from here and a piece of metal from there, and we’ve brought the whole system to the brink of collapse by doing that.
St Augustine, the saint of lost meaning
None of the things that we value really works without the context it’s meant to be embedded in: Sugar without fruit makes us fat and kills us. Fuel without a forest fills the atmosphere with CO2 and will eventually kill us. Sex without procreation becomes porn, trafficking, and exploitation. Thought without a purpose becomes analytic philosophy. And even our everyday chores, now done by machines, washing machines, dishwashers, computers, cars, leave us with so much empty, useless time, that we don’t know what to do with it except to kill it surfing the Internet and watching TV.
The truth is that the plan is still there, waiting for us to finally realise it, to throw out all the functionless pleasures that have replaced the meaning in our lives, and to take up again our position in the great, delicate, balanced, and amazingly beautiful system that is life on Earth.
And Augustine knew it, and he warned us of it all. For me, this is why he’s still, and will ever be, the saint of all who try to find that lost meaning in life.
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