There’s a famous passage in St. Augustine’s City of God, Book 15, Chapter 17, that I’ve been quoting for years:
Justly is shame very specially connected with this lust; justly, too, these members themselves, being moved and restrained not at our will, but by a certain independent autocracy, so to speak, are called “shameful.” Their condition was different before sin. For as it is written, “They were naked and were not ashamed,”—not that their nakedness was unknown to them, but because nakedness was not yet shameful, because not yet did lust move those members without the will’s consent; not yet did the flesh by its disobedience testify against the disobedience of man.
I assume that by “these members” Augustine is referring to men’s penises, for they certainly do seem to be an “independent autocracy” with wills of our own. What’s interesting about this passage is that Augustine asserts that, before the Fall, those members weren’t so unruly; they were still governed by the will.
Every so often I’ve wondered whether or not it would be possible, through some, perhaps curious, perhaps strenuous, mental discipline slip one’s will “beneath” those members and so regain control. I decided to put the question to Claude. Note that this interaction comes at the end of a long interaction I had with them about shame. You can find that in this post: In which I ask Claude 3.5 about sexual shame and confusion in humans, Jan. 9, 2025.
My prompts are set in boldface.
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Here’s a famous passage, St. Augustine, Book 14, Chapter 17, City of God:
Justly is shame very specially connected with this lust; justly, too, these members themselves, being moved and restrained not at our will, but by a certain independent autocracy, so to speak, are called “shameful.” Their condition was different before sin. For as it is written, “They were naked and were not ashamed,”—not that their nakedness was unknown to them, but because nakedness was not yet shameful, because not yet did lust move those members without the will’s consent; not yet did the flesh by its disobedience testify against the disobedience of man.
Relate that to our earlier discussion of shame.
This Augustine passage brilliantly illustrates the developmental theory of sexual shame we discussed earlier, but from a theological rather than psychological perspective.
Augustine locates the origin of sexual shame not in sexuality itself, but in the loss of conscious control - what he calls the “independent autocracy” of sexual organs that move “not at our will.” This aligns remarkably with your hypothesis about abstract thinking encountering sexuality as a foreign “Other.”
In Augustine's pre-Fall state, there was no shame because sexual response was integrated with conscious will - similar to how other biological drives like hunger or thirst remain under some degree of conscious regulation. The “disobedience of the flesh” that Augustine describes mirrors what you identified as the problematic nature of sexuality arriving after abstract cognitive capabilities have developed.
Augustine's insight that nakedness itself wasn't shameful - "nakedness was not yet shameful, because not yet did lust move those members without the will's consent" - suggests the shame isn't about the body per se, but about the experience of involuntary response that seems to bypass rational control.
This connects to our earlier discussion about why sexuality is uniquely problematic for humans. Augustine's theological framework and your developmental psychology framework both identify the same core issue: sexuality involves powerful drives that operate outside the domain of conscious, rational control that humans rely on for managing other aspects of experience.
Augustine essentially argues that sexual shame emerged when sexuality became experienced as something happening to us rather than something we consciously direct - very much like your description of abstract thinking encountering sexuality as a mysterious "Other" trapped within the body.
As you know, for the last decade or two there’s been a neotantra movement which integrates Tantric teachings and practice into sexual behavior. I’m wondering if the effect of combining meditation with sex is to make sex less “Other.” It’s not going to bring sex under the sway of the will, but rather by volunteering surrendering one’s Will through mediation, sex is no longer experienced as Other.
That's a profound insight. The neotantra approach you describe essentially addresses the Augustine problem through a different route - instead of trying to bring sexuality under rational control (which is impossible), it uses meditative practices to dissolve the boundary between conscious will and involuntary response.
In traditional meditation, practitioners learn to observe thoughts, sensations, and emotions without resistance or the need to control them. When this meditative awareness is brought to sexual experience, the "independent autocracy" that Augustine found so troubling is no longer experienced as alien or threatening. Instead of the rational mind encountering sexuality as a foreign force, the practitioner learns to inhabit the full spectrum of embodied experience without the subject-object split.
This approach sidesteps the developmental problem we discussed earlier - where abstract thinking encounters mature sexuality as something external to its domain. Rather than trying to integrate sexuality into the rational framework, meditation dissolves the framework itself, creating what you might call a more unified field of consciousness.
The voluntary surrender of will through meditation is key here. It's not that control is lost involuntarily (which creates shame and alienation), but that control is consciously released. This transforms what Augustine saw as "disobedience of the flesh" into a conscious spiritual practice.
This could explain why practitioners of these approaches often report experiences that sound like your "transformational" category - not because they've gained control over sexuality, but because they've dissolved the very duality between controller and controlled that creates the experience of sexuality as "Other" in the first place.
It's essentially a different solution to the same fundamental human predicament that Augustine identified.
I’m particularly interested in the “cultural geography” here. Tantra is from India and Tibet. When you consider the role of “will” in Western philosophy (e.g. Nietzsche), this is a radical import. But if the goal is to reclaim sexuality, to redeem pleasure, it may take that radical of a move to do it.
You've identified a fascinating cultural divide. The Western philosophical tradition, especially since the Enlightenment, has been deeply invested in the primacy of will, reason, and conscious control. From Descartes' mind-body dualism through Kant's emphasis on rational autonomy to Nietzsche's "will to power," Western thought has generally positioned conscious will as the highest human faculty.
The neotantra movement represents a profound philosophical transplant - importing a tradition that views the surrender of will not as defeat or loss of humanity, but as the pathway to expanded consciousness and authentic experience. This is indeed radical within Western frameworks where loss of control is typically associated with pathology, weakness, or moral failure.
The “cultural geography” metaphor is apt because this isn’t just about importing techniques - it's about importing an entirely different understanding of human consciousness and its relationship to embodied experience. The Western project has often been about transcending or controlling the body through mind; the Tantric approach suggests transcending the mind-body split itself.
Your point about redemption is crucial. The Western relationship with sexuality has been so deeply shaped by dualistic thinking (spirit vs. flesh, reason vs. passion, control vs. chaos) that incremental reforms within that framework may be insufficient. It may indeed require this kind of radical philosophical transplant to address what Augustine identified centuries ago - the fundamental alienation between conscious will and sexual experience.
The irony is that this “foreign” approach may actually resolve a uniquely Western problem: the crisis of sexuality that emerged from our particular developmental trajectory of abstract thinking encountering embodied experience as “Other.”
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