But before he could become the great theologian he's known as today, Augustine faced an internal struggle of his own. Despite the not-inconsiderable influence of Monica, his overbearing mother, Augustine had all his life been a spiritual nomad, joining first one sect, then becoming jaded and joining another. At the age of thirty-three, he was living in Milan, teaching at the local university, while Monica, who had followed him from North Africa, continued to use every available opportunity to harangue her son about his lifestyle. Augustine had been living for some time with a female companion, whose name he never bothered to record, but who had given him his only child, a son. Try as he might, though, Augustine could not bring himself to do as Monica recommended — that is, either send away his concubine, marry a suitable woman and pursue a secular career, or else swear himself to celibacy. (To give some idea of the times, the bishop of Milan declared an adulterer any man who made love to his wife with excessive passion, and that God could do anything except restore a fallen virgin.) After all, as everyone in the ancient world knew, true spiritual seekers have no use for women, other, apparently, than to have their mothers run their lives for them.

As he describes it in his Confessions, Augustine was in a garden in Milan, wrestling with his psychic demons, when he heard a child's voice chanting, "tolle, lege" — "pick up and read." He opened a convenient Bible to Romans 13:13 and read, "Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying." It was a life-changing moment of ecstatic revelation. To his mother's great delight, Augustine accepted the chaste Christian lifestyle.

To our current mores, this seems an irrational and possibly unhealthy rejection of human nature, coupled with the cold-hearted spurning of a woman who had followed him across two continents and borne him a son. To Augustine, though, it was a decisive victory in the struggle for his very soul, on top of which, we can surmise, was added a dose of worldly ambition, for he went on to become the bishop of the city of Hippo, as well as one of the most influential Christian writers of all time.

For Augustine, sex was identified with original sin. Before the apple incident, Adam and Eve were fruitful and multiplied without passion, their bodies presumably performing the deed like clockwork while they discussed whether to name that striped horse-like creature a "zebra" or a "wombat." With the expulsion from Eden, though, came the discovery of lust. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Augustine believed that because sex was created by God, it couldn't be inherently evil. It could, however, be perverted from its intended function.

Sexual sin is a fact of our fallen state, and only divine grace can save us from our corrupt natures.

It was the fact that lust is not subject to the will that particularly bothered Augustine. He observed that, just as Adam and Eve disobeyed God, the sex drive refuses our conscious control. No matter how strongly one resists, the mind inevitably returns to lustful thoughts, distracting the true believer from seeking God. And, as any teenage boy can testify, certain body parts take on a life of their own, frequently at the worst possible moments. Furthermore, original sin, like a hereditary disease, is spread from parent to child, so that no person ever born is without it. Sexual sin is a fact of our fallen state, and only divine grace can save us from our corrupt natures.

For the benefit of those who couldn't quite bring themselves to give up sex, Augustine's solution was that celibacy, or total renunciation of sex, was only to be the rule for some, but that chastity, or the control of sexual desires, would be the law for all. Chaste Christians limit themselves to sleeping with their husband or wife, for marriage is a God-given institution created to control this aspect of human existence. Even sex within marriage is, according to Augustine, only permissible for purposes of having children, never for enjoyment. And, since it is supposed to be for reproductive purposes only, sleeping with people of the same sex, or any method of birth control or abortion, are obviously against God's will.

Augustine had resolved the question of whether good Christians could have sex, but this identifying the mating urge with sin, guilt and corruption has persisted. Christianity's ambiguous relationship with sex means that on the one hand, it's recognized as a God-given necessity for perpetuating the species, but on the other, spiritual "authenticity" — how the virtuous are distinguished from the poseurs — has been based on sexual self-denial. We've been trained to associate the public appearance of continence with virtue.

Thus, the untenable situation of John Edwards, Larry Craig, Vito Fossella and our other fall guys who have been forced to live a lie to further their political ambitions. If you want to appeal to the family-values crowd, you'd better get married. On the other hand, those of us who see the inherent hypocrisy of the situation figure it's better to burn.  n°