Terminology Tuesday: Continence

Continence 


Augustine’s conception of continence has undergone a peculiar fate. For ancient philosophers such as Aristotle, and for later Christian moral theologians such as Aquinas, continence was a comprehensive phenomenon of self-control in the face of every evil desire or disorderly appetite. In Augustine’s time, however, Christians were tending to apply the term more narrowly to sexual restraint and renunciation. The peculiarity is that Augustine discerned the place of continence in the whole of the moral life as keenly as any, yet the drama of his own decision to become sexually continent helped greatly to eclipse that broader conception.
According to the narrative of his Confessions, becoming continent and being converted to Christian faith by “putting on the Lord Jesus Christ” (8.12.29; Rom. 13:14) were for Augustine inseparable. Conversion to faith was not simply an intellectual and creedal change, after all, but becoming stable in his love for God (conf. 7.17.23). Continence was crucial for reintegrating the personality he had dissipated through many disparate, disorderly loves (10.29.40). To be sure, sexual renunciation is prominent in the narrative of this reintegration. The Confessions reports that unwillingness to abandon sexual pleasures was Augustine’s last and most intractable impediment to conversion (8.7.17; 7.17.23). Yet, other temptations had and could continue all his life to require continence also.
Amid the drama of his conversion in a Milanese garden, Augustine portrayed the interior movement of conversion itself by recounting a vision of continence personified. Continence appeared as a “chastely dignified” but “virtuously alluring” woman who brought him to an impasse when she beckoned him join and embrace her as others had done (8.11.27). Here was a woman whose “alluring” beauty he could only have by not having her in his usual way. Some goods—all the highest goods—he could only acquire by renouncing private, domineering acquisition. This was the tense logic of continence, which only grace could resolve. For though he needed continence for the salvation that is love reintegrated, the good of continence itself must be had continently. The woman Continence thus insisted that he could not embrace her through his own domineering (and thus incontinent) power, but through a power of continence that God alone could give.
Summarizing the fruits that first emerged from the Milanese garden, Augustine prayed that “you had converted me to yourself, so that I would seek neither wife nor ambition in this world [spem saeculi huius]” (8.12.30). The paired renunciation of marriage and worldly ambition is a clear signal that Augustine believed himself and others to require continence in all of human life, not just in the obviously volatile area of sexuality. J. O’Donnell suggests that Augustine structured the narrative of Confessions 1–9 around his surrender to, then liberation from, the threefold desires of 1 John 2:16: “concupiscentia carnis et concupiscentia oculorum et ambitione saeculi” (1992, 1:xxxv–xxxvi; 2:65, 136; 3:44, 202–8). Certainly when Augustine turned in the latter half of Confessions 10 to analyze the enduring temptations he still experienced as a bishop, the three Johannine categories of lustful desire encompassed sins in all areas of human life (10.30.41–10.31.66; cf. ep. Jo. 2.14). The continence that God commanded but that only God could give was the remedy for healing all sin (conf. 10.30.41). For Augustine the bishop, subtle, secret, but socially respectable temptations of pride, praise, power, and seemingly “benevolent” domination also required a continence for which he still groaned in prayer (10.37.60).
The role of sexual continence in Augustine’s life and thought may itself become clearer if we interpret it in continuity with general continence. Augustine’s assumption that to become a catholic Christian would simultaneously require him to become celibate has puzzled many readers. Augustine apparently accepted a challenge from Ambrose to outdo Platonic philosophers by living out the continence that they claimed but did not practice, and which Ambrose described as the “pedestal” for right worship (c. Jul. 2.7.20; cf. O’Donnell 1992, 1:xxxix). Certainly, insofar as Augustine initially considered his conversion to Christianity a conversion to true philosophy, he saw the complications of married life encumbering a contemplative life (conf. 6.14.24) and the pleasures of the marriage bed distracting one’s soul from contemplation itself and from reason (sol. 1.10.17). Yet to choose contemplative life was implicitly to pass judgment on the pursuit of power and prestige, while to live by reason would be to reject passions that not only dominated oneself but pressed one to dominate others. Deep in the memory of Platonism was the figure of Socrates suffering disdain from the civil order; the succession of converts in Confessions 8 whom Augustine followed was part of a much wider phenomenon of late antiquity in which able men and women throughout the empire were loosening old communal loyalties by disciplining their bodies and rejecting familial duties to procreate (P. Brown 1988). Even when Augustine’s intense inner scrutiny led him to analyze sexual pleasure as a phenomenon in its own right, his grounds for suspicion included the domineering violence so often associated with the (male) sex act (civ. Dei 6.9); this violence tainted—he believed—even the sexual intercourse of faithful, married Christians (nupt. et conc. 1.8.9).
Thus, strictly sexual continence itself found its meaning within a wider web of associations. Though Augustine’s tortured debates with Pelagians concerning the transmission of original sin sometimes obscured the general meaning of both concupiscence and continence, accusations by Julian of Eclanum also prompted him to make the wider meaning and role of continence more explicit. Writing a treatise, De continentia, sometime between 418 and 420, Augustine claimed that he had been saying “for some time” that sexual continence is only one instantiation of a “higher continence” of the “heart” (cont. 2.5). Within the heart or soul lie the roots of all actions, and if one has continence of heart, one will be continent in both word and deed (2.3–4). God must give that continence and we must not claim credit for it, Augustine insisted against the Pelagians, for to do so would be to succumb to the greater incontinence of pride (1.1; 5.13; 12.26).
At its broadest, continence seems to have been integral to the operation of caritas or Christian love, even though Augustine did not always say so explicitly. The underlying grammar or pattern of Augustine’s theory of love apparently worked something like this: caritas and cupiditas (wrongful, lustful love) were a zero-sum equation—the more of one, the less of the other (conf. 13.7.8; doc. Chr. 3.10.16; cf. ep. Jo. 2.14). In preaching, Augustine once explained this with a memorable portrayal of love as “the hand of the soul,” which must let go of what it is holding in order to receive what is given (s. 125.7). Accordingly, the “hand” that opens to embrace and cling (haerere) to God is a love that also receives all good things from God as gifts. In contrast, all concupiscent loves close the “hand of the soul” tightly, privately, domineeringly, and at last destructively on its objects of desire (cf. ep. Jo. 2.10–11; Trin. 12.9.14–12.11.16). Logically, then, the grasping operation of wrongful love is incontinent, while the clinging operation of right love is continent. The nonmanipulative respect that Augustine must show to a woman named Continence in his Milanese garden vision in order to relate to her rightly was a respect that must be present in all right love. The humble trust in God that acknowledged continence itself as a gift was a trust needed to “have” creaturely goods only by loving God as the supreme or common good, and then loving creatures “in God” (conf. 4.12.18; doc. Chr. 1.32.35).
If traditions following from Augustine have associated continence almost exclusively with sexual control and renunciation, he himself may bear some responsibility. Yet in any case, we are poorer for the narrow focus. A more explicit account of Augustine’s broad but subtle conception of continence might have instructed Christian approaches to economics, the natural environment, violence and warfare, as well as sexuality. Perhaps it yet could.→ Clergy, North African; Continentia, De; Sancta virginitate, De; Virtue
BIBLIOGRAPHYG. I. Bonner, “Libido and Concupiscentia in St. Augustine,” SP 6 (1962), 303–14; P. Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); Brown, 1988; O’Donnell, 1992; G. W. Schlabach, ” ‘Love Is the Hand of the Soul’: The Grammar of Continence in Augustine’s Doctrine of Christian Love.” JECS 6/1 (1998): 59–92.

Schlabach, G. W. (1999). Continence. In A. D. Fitzgerald (Ed.), Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia (pp. 235–237). Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

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Mark A. Lester has been a dedicated movie reviewer since the age of 13, from the classics of the golden age to the blockbusters of the 21st century. He currently lives in the western suburbs of Chicago.

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