OUT of an interest in Western civilisation, I have been reading St Augustine’s The City of God, and the saint would have a hard time finding employment as a crisis counsellor today. He writes, of course, at a time when the women of a conquered city must expect to be raped by their conquerors. Even so, his attitude is startlingly misogynistic. Provided you were not aroused by the experience, he taught, your chastity was not violated, and so you have kept your treasure. This is of a piece with his more general objection to sexual desire, which is that, ever since the fall, it has been outwith our conscious control. Our bodies do their thing, and the reasoning self is swept off its feet.
But why should a just God have allowed this outrage in the first place? Augustine’s answer is, to me, even more shocking. “Perhaps you took too much pride in your virginity and continence or purity. Perhaps you took delight in human praise and even envied others in this regard.”
And, in that case, says the saint, you have been taught a lesson about vanity. If not, he has an answer, too: “It may be that these women, who are fully sure in their conscience that their heart never swelled with pride at the good of chastity but who still suffered the enemy’s violence in their flesh, had some hidden weakness which might have swollen into the arrogance of pride if they had escaped this humiliation during the sack. Just as some people were taken away by death to prevent wickedness from changing their understanding, then, so something was taken away by force from these women to prevent good fortune from changing their humility.”
Still, if you’re going to believe in a God whose benevolence is comprehensible in this world, Augustine’s style of mental gymnastics becomes unavoidable; and, if you’re going to claim that it’s completely incomprehensible, then that removes the opportunity to learn from our misfortunes.
The other startling discovery I made while reading the book is just how anti-natal the Church Fathers were. If virginity is preferable to marriage, and he is absolutely clear that it is, then childless women are morally superior to those disfigured by motherhood. This is an extraordinary reversal of the contemporary conservative Christian attitude — look at J. D. Vance’s contempt for “childless cat ladies” — but I have never understood the attractions of celibacy; and nor do many of those who preach its virtues, at least to judge from their court appearances.
Jonathan Fletcher did not actually make an appearance at his trial, which ran from 5 to 11 May. He is incapacitated by dementia, and the court was shown a brain scan to prove this. I suppose Augustine would say that he has been robbed of the ability to remember his sins, and so cannot repent of them, and that this is a worse punishment than any that the court could have inflicted. This reasoning is yet another example of how easy it becomes to prove that other people’s sufferings serve God’s purpose, once we set our minds to it.
In any case, the details of Fletcher’s trial revealed a quite astonishing capacity for self-deception. I cannot get over the bit where he demanded that his victim masturbate in front of him, and then did it himself when the poor man proved unable to perform on demand, as reported by Evangelicals Now.
In a very odd and unexpected way, this brings me back to Augustine’s view of rape. What matters, he says, is not the act, but the effect on the victim. When young men are beaten to teach them humility, the corruption is not only the pain of the act itself, but the humiliation of the victim and the pleasure that the torturer feels.
When I look back on the culture of the schools where I was beaten, this distinction was quite clear, if never explicit. The aim of the boys was to endure pain without humiliation; that of the masters — most of them, at least — was to inflict it without enjoyment. The great perversion of people such as Smyth and Fletcher is to look at physical acts, and not at what those acts communicate.