Texts on lust by the early Church Fathers Saint Augustine, Saint Jerome and Clairvaux  

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Texts on lust by the early Church Fathers Saint Augustine, Saint Jerome and Clairvaux.

Augustine of Hippo

"There seethed all around me a cauldron of lawless loves. I loved not yet, yet I loved to love, and out of a deep-seated want, I hated myself for wanting not. I sought what I might love, in love with loving, and I hated safety... To love then, and to be beloved, was sweet to me; but more, when I obtained to enjoy the person I loved. I defiled, therefore, the spring of friendship with the filth of concupiscence, and I beclouded its brightness with the hell of lustfulness." --Augustine of Hippo , Confessions 3.1.1, translation by Edward Bouverie Pusey[1]

Jerome

"How often when I was installed in the desert . . . I would imagine myself taking part in the gay life of Rome! . . . Although my only companions were scorpions and wild beasts, time and again I was mingling with the dances of girls. My face was pallid with fasting and my body chill, but my mind was throbbing with desires; my flesh was as good as dead, but the flames of lust raged in it." --Jerome, recalling his life of desert asceticism, quoted in J. N. D. Kelly, Jerome: His Life, Writings and Controversies, page 52., translation F. A. Wright

Bernard of Clairvaux

"To be always with a woman and not to know her carnally, is not this more than to raise the dead?" --Bernard of Clairvaux as cited in Heresies of the high Middle Ages

Examples

• Inter faeces et urinam nascimur, attributed to one of the early church fathers, usually to Bernard of Clairvaux or Saint Augustine.
• Man is nothing else than fetid sperm by Bernard of Clairvaux in Meditationes Piissimæ

See also

• On the beauty of the human genitalia
• Contemptus mundi
• On the Misery of the Human Condition
• Catholic theology of the body