Sunday, November 3, 2013

Augustine on Youthful Lust and Marriage

I really enjoyed these thoughts by Augustine from the confessions on youthful lust and marriage. I am blessed to have "found the shore of marriage".

"I did not keep the moderate way of the love of mind to mind- the bright path of friendship. Instead, the mists of passion steamed up out of the puddly concupiscence of the flesh, and the hot imagination of puberty, and they so obscured and overcast my heart that I was unable to distinguish pure affection from unholy desire. Both boiled confusedly within me, and dragged my unstable youth down over the cliffs of unchaste desires and plunged me into a gulf of infamy....I was tossed to and fro, and wasted, and poured out, and I boiled over in my fornications...If only there had been some one to regulate my disorder and turn to my profit the fleeting beauties of the things around me, and to fix a bound to their sweetness, so that the tides of my youth might have spent themselves upon the shore of marriage! Then they might have been tranquilized and satisfied with having children, as they law prescribes, O Lord..."

I love the contrast between the "hot imagination of puberty" and the solid real shores of marriage! I read this from a book called "Readings in Christian Thought" by Hugh T, Kerr. It compiles snippets of writings from throughout church history, and I believe this one is compiled from both the confessions and "enchiridion". The ending paragraph is also worth quoting...a biting revelation of the disgustingness of sin:

"Such was my heart, O God, such was my heart- which thou didst pity even in that bottomless pit. Behold, now let my heart confess to thee what it was seeking there, when I was being gratuitously wanton, having no inducement to evil but the evil itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved my own undoing. I loved my error- not that for which I erred but the error itself. A depraved soul, falling away from security in thee to destruction in itself seeking nothing from the shameful deed but shame itself."

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