restless time

"You have made us for yourself and our heart is restless until it rests in you." So says Augustine in his Confessions. This restlessness is evident in a lot of contemporary society, most notably in the area of sexual conduct. I found it a bit surprising at first that sex is a major topic in the Confessions, considered to be a spiritual classic. All this proves, I guess, is that sex is a spiritual matter. Some theologians have noted that sexual yearning is a sign or symbol of our desire for something more than our insular selves, a desire to join in some kind of physico-spiritual bond that transcends simple physical pleasure. Concupiscence is not simply a concern of the body but also of the soul. Augustine pulls no punches in describing his struggle with his sexual desire. After his conversion to Christianity, his view of sex was a favourable one, namely that sex provides for the survival of the human race through procreation and that this procreative impulse is a gift of the creator.
There are in my view four options regarding sex (there are others I’m sure, but my imagination is a bit limited). I) Unbridled sex anytime with anybody for any reason and damn the consequences ii) Sex within a monogamous, non-marriage relationship, with changes in partners at various times iii) Sex within a faithful, marriage relationship iv) chastity. The fourth option can be seem to be a difficult one. Whether it is a struggle may depend on what passes through one’s mind at any given time. But there is a peculiar phenomenon that occurs that can take the edge off some difficulty. Augustine also refers to nocturnal emissions in Book X. This seems to be the body’s method of housecleaning, just as dreams may be the mind’s method of mental housecleaning. That fact that erotic dreams and emissions invariably occur together may also point to the physico-spiritual nature of sex (assuming the mind is a component of the soul and not merely the byproduct of the brain, in which case mental and spiritual phenomena can be reduced to merely physical processes. I think though, that there are good reasons for believing in the existence of the soul.)
There are two things that all people have in common: sex and time. Every person has a sex (not has sex, but has a sex), either male or female. Every person exists in time. What is time? Good question. Augustine’s view was rather prescient given the fact that he didn’t have the benefits of modern physics. Time is a created entity (ie. it had a beginning. This was confirmed by Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose about 35 years ago) and God sees all of time as an eternal present. This brings to mind the debate among philosophers about what is God’s relationship to time. Is He timelessly eternal or temporally eternal? Is He wholly outside of time or does He exist within time? These sorts of discussions can get rather abstruse, what with all the talk about the correctness of the A-theory or the B-theory of time, etc. and I’m not really smart enough to evaluate their merits, but reading various philosophers’ views on the matter is an interesting mental exercise (and trust me, my mind needs the exercise. Sometimes I think my mental flabbiness is an irreversible trait.)