Augustine oh Augustine...

1. Augustine, Akin, And Rape

   In a fascinating dialogue with historians Virginia Burrus and Thomas Laqueur, Sarah Morice-Brubaker reveals how Akin's views on rape relate to early Church theology. Recalling Augustine's views on the rape of Lucretia, Burrus notes that he too "blamed the victim" by arguing Lucretia must have consented:
   

   Lucretia was a Roman woman renowned for her extreme virtue, known to have killed herself after she was raped in an effort to restore her honor by making it clear that she in no way colluded with her rapist. That itself is sufficiently telling testimony to the burden that rape places on its victims! But Augustine—in one of his lowest moments—makes it worse. For what he does is essentially to blame the victim nonetheless, much as Akin seems to do. He suggests (while acknowledging that only Lucretia herself could have known this) that Lucretia must have been "so enticed by her own desire that she consented to the act" (City of God 1:19). And in this she is, in Augustine’s eyes, condemned.
   Augustine was defending himself in the face of critics who asked how it was that Christian women could suffer rape if God was looking after them.... Augustine himself, however ambivalent the results were, was in his moment trying to defend the dignity of rape victims by insisting that the physical rape itself could not implicate them in sin, that sin is a matter of the will or desire, not of physical defilement, as some argued. He did not want these women to make martyrs of themselves as Lucretia had.
   

   Burrus also notes the burden of "purity" that the Church foists on the female body:
   

   [I]f we think of the emphasis placed on the figure of the Virgin Mary, and on virginal figures more generally, as symbols of the closed nature of the church, defended against heresy or paganism—or whatever else might seem to present a threat. So there the female body carries a huge burden of representation: her ability to protect the boundaries of her body, and to maintain her purity, reflects the church’s ability to do the same. In the case of a raped woman, we cannot deny that a boundary has been violated, so then we have to imagine that in another sense it has not really been violated; conception has not occurred.
   

   (Painting: Lucretia by Andrea Casali, c. 1750.)