St. Augustine, lust, and the pride of life

“Pride Month” disappeared into the rearview mirror a month ago, so it’s easy to wonder whether it ever really arrived at all, so muted was the celebration this year. Over at Daily Wire, my colleague Matthew Petrusek wrote a perceptive piece on the fading of the pride rainbow, a trend observed not only by conservatives but also in the mainstream media, from Newsweek to CNN to CNBC.

Needless to say—if anyone was in doubt—for corporations, it was clearly always about the money, and when the bottom line took a massive hit, so did their pride.

Yet the movement remains a key battleground in the campaign to “develop” the Catholic Church’s sexual teaching and vindicate that which the Church has always condemned. Pope Francis’s emphasis on mercy and inclusion emboldened many Catholic progressives to embrace the rainbow flag, and some Catholic priests—and in at least one case a bishop—have even celebrated “Pride Masses.” As the movement continues to drain cultural cachet and a new pope takes hold of the helm, in what direction should the barque of Peter move?

To answer that, it behooves us to spend some time with the new pope’s favorite saint: Augustine of Hippo. After his election, Leo XIV introduced himself on the loggia as “a son of Saint Augustine,” and indeed, since May, he has quoted this great Doctor of the Church at a rate of at least once every 1.5 days. What might an Augustinian approach to the pride movement look like? If the Doctor of Grace—who skewers the sexual immorality of decadent pagan Rome in the first part of the City of God—were transplanted into 2025 and given a brief tour of the culture, what would he say?

At America magazine, Kathleen Bonnette, a theologian at Georgetown and onetime fellow at the Augustinian Institute of the pope’s alma mater, proffers a perplexing answer. She admits that, in Augustine, we find a thinker oriented toward “certainty and stability,” and “a hierarchy that orders and maintains reality”—in short, “an unchanging order of truth . . . amidst the chaos of the world.” Augustine saw that this eternal truth can “only be found through community because God, truth itself, is communal.” So far, so good.

But from here, Bonnette turns this recognizably Augustinian paradigm on its head. Truth risks becoming “an abstract, stagnant principle,” an effort “to find (or impose) certainty,” used to “oppress those who do not have a say in discerning its meaning.” Thus, truth needs to evolve in community—not so much for the sake of the former, it seems, but for the sake of the latter. She cites first, as an example, “the pink smoke set off in Rome by the Women’s Ordination Conference during the conclave to protest the exclusion of women from the process.” From there, she argues that the perspectives of “L.G.B.T. individuals and other historically marginalized people” should be included “in the development or interpretation “ of the Church’s teaching, later adding that, according to Augustine, “the particular moral norms that express love can and should change.” In sum, the stability inspired by the Augustinian tradition is specifically one of “communal support, service and humility,” and an ordering of reality through “evolutive interconnection.”

A surprising inversion like this is possible only through the conspicuous absence of a theme relentlessly emphasized by Augustine—namely, human sin and divine grace. Augustine did not, as his later Jansenist and Calvinist interpreters held, teach a “total depravity” of human nature, but he did very much underscore human wretchedness. This included, of course, a very clear and consistent condemnation of sexual immorality. To offer just one of many examples: “Those sins which are against nature, like those of the men of Sodom, are in all times and places to be detested and punished. Even if all nations committed such sins, they should all alike be held guilty by God’s law” (Confessions 3.8).

In light of this central theme of Augustine’s—as well as his deep love of Scripture (the starry firmament to guide us; see Confessions 13.15) and his talents as a rhetorician—we should turn instead to the saint’s emphasis on the “threefold concupiscence” first defined by Saint John: “For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world” (1 Jn 2:16). This was an organizing principle for Augustine, one that got past the surface arguments over particular sins and down to the deeper reality of sin itself.

This threefold lust features prominently in the Confessions, where Augustine maps the disorders against Plato’s tripartite soul: the lust of the flesh corresponds to our appetitive part (our physical needs and desires); the lust of the eyes corresponds to our rational part (our intellectual insights and pursuits); and the pride of life corresponds to our spirited part (or our passionate emotions and drives). In 1.10, he laments his past love of “play” (lust of the flesh); of the theater, games, and shows (lust of the eyes); and of “the vanity of victory” (pride of life). And in 5.3, he writes that the philosophers “do not slaughter their self-conceits like birds [pride of life], nor the curiosities—by which they voyage through the secret ways of the abyss—like the fish of the sea [lust of the eyes], nor their carnal lusts like the beasts of the field [lust of the flesh].”

Then, in a lengthy section of book 10 (30–41), which runs about twenty pages, Augustine painstakingly analyzes the way this threefold lust continues to assail him even after his conversion, including the temptation toward sexual immorality that besets him in sleep. “Under the heads of that threefold concupiscence,” he concludes, “I have considered the damage wrought in me by my sins, and I have called Thy right hand to my aid. For in my wounded heart I have seen the shining of Thy splendour” (10.41). Even the very structure of the Confessions, one commentator notes, reinforces the same theme: books two through four look at the disordered state of these three parts of the soul, while books six through eight look at their proper ordering.

This theme of the threefold lust isn’t limited to the Confessions; it recurs throughout Augustine’s writings, including on marriage and grace. In Sermon 162, Augustine ties John’s admonition to Paul’s in 1 Corinthians 6:18:

It is only by the evil of fleshly and general lust that the soul fornicates away from God in every way. As though bound hand and foot to bodily and temporal desires and enjoyments, it sins against its own body; becoming in every respect the slave of its lust, it bows down to the world and is estranged from God; which is the meaning of The beginning of the pride of man is to apostatize from God [Sir. 10:12]. In order to beware of this evil of general fornication, the apostle John admonishes us . . .

Then, in a sermon on First John itself, he preaches,

The river of temporal things hurries one along: but like a tree sprung up beside the river is our Lord Jesus Christ. . . . Are you rushing down the stream to the headlong deep? Hold fast the tree. Is love of the world whirling you on? Hold fast Christ. . . .

By not having concupiscence of the world, neither shall the lust of the flesh, nor the lust of the eyes, nor the pride of life, subjugate you: and you shall make place for Charity when she comes, that you may love God. Because if love of the world be there, love of God will not be there. Hold fast rather the love of God, that as God is for ever and ever, so you also may remain for ever and ever: because such is each one as is his love. Love earth, you shall be earth.

Christian sexual ethics, Hans Urs von Balthasar once wrote, ought to “keep to the quite simple outline of the New Testament. For this is as unchangeable as the nature of the divine love which has become flesh in Christ.” And when it comes to the pride movement, the Church faces a simple question: What do we see in it, ultimately? Do we see an expression of that simple, unchangeable outline in the Gospels and Saint Paul, rooted in the Torah? Or do we see, on the contrary, a pronounced expression of the threefold lust that Scripture so clearly condemns?

The question answers itself. Despite the good intentions of those involved, the melodious emphasis on love, and the noble aims of diversity and inclusion, the pride movement, ultimately, is a celebration of the behaviors, the spectacles, and—quite literally—the pride of life that Scripture warns against.

There’s no wounded heart in which the divine splendor cannot shine, and so the Church must always reach out to todos, todos, todos—with love, mercy, and compassion. This, too, is an elemental truth of Scripture. But when it comes to pride as a movement, the only real question is whether the Church will stop letting the world position the Word of God, and again let the Word—and its ablest defenders, like Augustine—position the world.