The man who forged Catholic guilt
Augustine, the great self-flagellist, blamed the sexual incontinence of his youth on the lust in us all. A terrible piety was born
This is Who made our minds?, my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024). Join the journey!
Next Thursday: The Arabs before Muhammad
AUGUSTINE was born on 13 November 354 CE in Thagaste (now Souk-Ahras), about 100 kilometres from the ancient city of Hippo Regius, in Numidia (today’s Algeria).
He would later reflect on a happy childhood spent in a respectable Christian family, ‘when I had in a manner sucked with my mother’s milk, that name of my saviour, Thy Son’.
Augustine’s childhood piety did not survive into adolescence.
The boy grew into a youth of unbridled licentiousness, whose sexual conquests would drench in shame and guilt the life of his indomitable mother, the future Saint Monica.
We find him, at sixteen, immersed in the carnal pleasures of Cartha…