As a monk back in Africa, the now-celibate Augustine devoted himself to a lifelong inquiry into the nature of sexuality and lust. Why are we so driven by these carnal appetites? And why would God bestow us with them in the first place? Augustine’s mind continually returned to his adolescent bathhouse erection that had made his father crow with delight. How was it that we had control over every other part of our bodies except this one? These preoccupations lead him, in his twilight, to become fixated on Adam and Eve, and in the course of examining this fable he conjured an idea that would have a profound and lasting impact on countless lives, including my own, for millennia to come: original sin. Augustine reasoned that the lust that manipulated our bodies against our will was the residue of this first, great disobedience of God, whereafter Adam and Eve looked down upon their naked bodies in shame. The original shame. Like the original shame of Augustine’s bathhouse arousal, where unlike his primordial ancestors he had no fig leaf to cover himself. Augustine believed that, ever since this original shame in the Garden, humans would forever be defiled to our core, even as newborn babies. That everything from the most vanilla missionary-style procreation to the most lascivious deviance would be suffused with this evil. The evil that unexpectedly lifted our cocks and wet our vaginas and allowed our flesh to supersede our reason. The original shame that allowed our bodies to assert themselves as things of their own accord.

The original fear of being a body.