St. Augustine might be a respected church father, and the idea of reading his “Confessions” might seem so boring it’d be preferable to go get a few teeth pulled, but his confessions are, well, something on a whole other level. The New Yorker says that it was this respected, revered saint who “invented sex,” and while that might be a bit of an exaggeration, it’s not by much.
Augustine wrote about some pretty lurid affairs, and while things like having a child out of wedlock might not be too surprising to our 21st-century sensibilities, there’s no denying that he treated the women he professed to love pretty badly. Aleteia says that after almost two decades of sampling all the fleshy pleasures the world had to offer, he settled down with a woman who bore his son. He records his son’s name — Adeodatus — but never hers. They never married, and when he refused on multiple occasions, she left.
It was enough to make Augustine wonder if there was something to this marriage thing after all, but before he could marry the younger women who had been promised to him, he ended up hooking up with still more women. (He was in his 30s, and he needed to wait until she was old enough to legally marry. So, there’s another yikes.) It was so bad that even his mother intervened and asked him to please, please, please stop seducing married women.
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