Back when Christianity was halfway cool

One of the great things about New York, or the trendier parts of Brooklyn anyway, is that you can find just about any book that’s ever been printed for 50 cents or a dollar at a stoop sale. Today I picked up a beautiful leather bound collectors edition of The Confessions of Saint Augustine for a buck in Red Hook. I’ve only read a few pages of the introduction but thought I would share this little piece of knowledge about the early Christians that is not widely discussed today.

Back in Augustine’s time (early 400’s) Christians were generally not baptized into the faith until they were in their mid-thirties or so. It was taken for granted that young men were too horny to be proper Christians . Augustine kept a concubine who bore him a child, but marriage to such a person of low social stature was, of course, out of the question. Although some may be shocked at such apparent hypocrisy, it’s really just another example of the more things change the more they stay the same. No one expects Rush Limbaugh to marry any of the whore’s he fucks on his Viagra-fueled sex vacations to third world countries. That doesn’t make him any less of a saint, at least to his followers.

Augustine later repudiated his early indiscretions and claimed to be celibate, so that made it all okay and he was eventually canonized. Knowing what we know now, it’s probably safe to infer that “celibate” was synonymous with either “impotent,” or more likely “only wanted to have sex with young boys.” He is, after all, one of the most influential personages in the Catholic faith.