Thread by @add_hawk

The funniest argument I have ever read is Augustine's theory of sexual shame in City of God. It somehow starts with a totally reasonable question ("Why is our nudity shameful?") and ends up someplace beyond gonzo... about the agility of our genitalia in Paradise. Thread:

So here's Augustine's question: why is our nudity supposed to be shameful?

It can't be because our bodies are shameful, because they're made in God's image.
It can't be because sex is bad, because God told us to reproduce.

It can't be because pleasure is bad, because there's plenty of other pleasures that are fine.

So what is it?

(At this point, in intro-type classes, already some of my Christian students' minds are blown because it never occurred to them to even ask this question. And here is an actual Christian saint, and unquestioned key figure in theology is straight up dismissing fave options.)

So then Augustine says: whatever it was had to have *changed* about us when Adam and Eve fell, because our bodies weren't shameful beforehand. But our body shape didn't change, including the shape of our genitals. So what was it?

Answer: our sexual parts aren't shameful in and of themselves. It is that they *display our weakness of the will* by *running out of our control* - along with the sexual passions behind them.

Augustine literally says: our weakness of the will is displayed when we are sexually inflamed when we think we ought not be, or when we cannot be sexually inflamed when rationally, we think we should. (!!!)

So this must have changed during the fall - because we weren't shameful before hand. So it must be the *God inflicted on Adam and Eve sexual weakness of the will as our punishment for disobeying him*. But why?

Augustine says: *God made our parts disobey us, as a mark of the FORM AND CONTENT OF OUR SIN, because we disobeyed him, and he wants us to forever remember what disobedience feels like*.

Fucking mic drop.

So, Augustine says, if we hadn't fell, we would have... and these are his words... have had as much direct control over our sexual members as an artisan does his hands.

And we will again, in Paradise.

This is from a chapter of City of God called "On the Justice of the Good Lord's Punishment for the First Man and Woman" or something like that. I found discovered it as a chapter in Solomon's Philosophy of Love and Sex reader, which is just full of great stuff.