FOR ABOUT twenty-five years I have been writing about and teaching courses in the philosophy of sexuality. 2 During that time I have frequently lectured about the philosophy of Augustine along with the sexual views of his predecessor Paul, his contemporary Jerome, and his successor Thomas Aquinas. In these lectures, before getting on to Augustine's theology of sexuality (for example, that Adam's prelapsarian erection would have been under his voluntary control; that the passionate, troubling, disobedient sexual impulses we experience in our postlapsarian existence are part of the punishment visited on humankind by God; that sexual activity between married spouses, if done for its own pleasurable sake and not for procreation, is a sin but forgivable), I provide a short outline of Augustine's life: his early allegiance to [End Page 545] Manichaeism; his living with a woman and having a child with her out of wedlock; his reputation for having been sexually promiscuous; his intellectual turmoil over the Problem of Evil; his conversion to Christianity; and his subsequent life as bishop of Hippo.
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