In 370 CE sixteen-year-old Augustine of Hippo was standing naked in a bathhouse with his father, Patricius, in a small village called Thagaste in what is now present-day Algeria. This was not an altogether unusual situation for an adolescent Roman citizen to find himself in. But what happened next would shape the future of Christianity and Western thought for the next two thousand years. Patricius looked down and noticed the boy’s involuntary erection. To make matters more mortifying, the sight of his son’s “active virility” so thrilled the pagan Patricius that he began to extemporize about the joys of one day having grandchildren. He then brought the matter up again that night to Augustine’s devoutly Christian mother, Monica. She was not impressed. In fact, the news of this erection alarmed and worried her. As Augustine had not yet been baptized, she feared his arousal indicated his starting down a crooked path of sin and damnation. That night, she drove home to her son that God was his one true father and that any glory from his restless manhood was to be God’s alone. The whole episode left such an impression on Augustine that he wrote about it in great detail some thirty years later in his treatise Confessions, a work of profound autobiographical candour and narcissism, in which he meditates on the nature of the body and soul and the eternal, divine conflict between the two.

Needless to say, Augustine took the first opportunity he could to leave home and study in the big city of Carthage. He was a bright student but also something of a slacker, preferring to spend his time whoring himself about town: “I went to Carthage, where I found myself in the midst of a hissing cauldron of lust,” he wrote, “[and I] polluted… the shared channel of friendship with putrid rutting.” (For the record, “Putrid Rutting” is on my shortlist of potential drag names.) When Augustine wasn’t getting down and dirty, he spent his time at the theatre. He loved watching plays, especially tragedies. He became preoccupied with the question of why people enjoyed watching events onstage that they would never wish to have invited upon them in real life. What did we seek from vicarious sorrow? What about our pleasure-seeking selves sought to indulge in pain? Later in life, by the time he was writing Confessions, Augustine came to see theatres as “filthy” spaces filled with counterfeit emotions, the role of the actor being little different to that of a prostitute or a temple eunuch, with their lead-painted faces and perfumed hair. Though is it possible that this is what had seduced this village boy in the first place?