The guilt-ridden penitent confessing a sin against chastity in today’s confessional will often be advised with the sincere-but-vapid command to “go and pray about it.”

Lest I sound too harsh, let me clarify that I do not mean to throw the entirety of the American Catholic clergy under the bus, but I do mean to say that pastoral work in this area could be more robust. Consider, for example, how this same advice would sound if applied to other circumstances. My mother is sick. Go and pray about it. There are starving children in Africa. Go and pray about it. My friend is developing a dependence on alcohol. Go and pray about it. Would it not to be better to advise—in addition to the exhortation to pray—administration of medicine, founding a charity, and contacting AA?StAugustine

Our shamefaced penitent therefore needs additional practical advice on how to modify his behavior and some situation-specific prayer instructions, lest he be disheartened and abandon his quest for chastity. Fortunately, many options are available, not the least of which is to be found in the writings of St. Augustine, who was all too familiar with this sort of spiritual battle. The Bishop of Hippo, through prayerful reflection on  his own struggles, developed a full-bodied theological anthropology that accounted for every part of the human person, from his body to his soul to his interaction with God’s grace. He even went to far as to develop a sort of cognitive therapy, promulgated in his sermons, which may be eminently useful to anyone struggling with the sins of the flesh.

St. Augustine recognized that sinful behavior is often provoked by vehement propatheiai, (from the Greek Stoics on whose psychology he relied heavily) or “preliminary passions.” These passions are those which arise spontaneously, independent of any judgment of reason. Anyone who has struggled with such passions knows how overpowering they can be; as they arise they often cloud reason and entice the will toward some forbidden object. The stronger such passions are, the harder they are to resist. For people who genuinely desire chastity but find themselves unable to behave (and feel) appropriately, unruly preliminary passions are often to blame. Recognizing this need to help people master their preliminary passions, St. Augustine prescribes four means of doing so.

The first of these is premeditatio, or “prerehersal” of possible future events. A person who wants his preliminary passions to behave differently can adjust his behavior by imagining the events which give rise to them. He should focus on the stimulus that sparks the passions, or simply on the feeling of the passions themselves, and then imagine how he ought to respond emotionally. By so doing, a person can shape the way his discursive reason (as opposed to his rational faculty) interprets and, therefore, responds to the world around him. For Augustine, this therapeutic method was not just a means of avoiding temptation. He also referred to it as sperare, or “hoping,” by which a person can train himself, for example, to respond more joyfully to the Gospel’s proclamation.

The next therapeutic method, which can work in conjunction with the first, is recordari, or “remembering” the greatness of God and the virtues of Christ. The way this works is simple. When a person experiences distress, he can focus on pleasant and good things to encourage good passions which may override the negative ones. For Augustine, this involves frequent meditation, not on words, but on mental images which reveal to the mind the greatness of God. Of these, Augustine’s favorite was the resurrection, which came out of the crucifixion and thereby produced something wonderful out of something terrible. The analogy to the abolishment of sinful passions is clear.

Then there comes continuous meditatio, or “meditation” on the law. Though not my personal favorite, I have to admit that this method has strong scriptural backing. Consider for example Psalm 1:2, “and he meditates on his law day and night,” Psalm 118:15-17, “I will meditate on your commandments: and I will consider your ways. I will think of your justifications…” Sirach 3:22, “the things with the Lord has commanded you, think about them always,” and Joshua 1:8, “Let not the book of this law depart from your mouth.” St. Augustine taught that such meditation would develop in one a readiness to obey the law, even in difficult circumstances. He also taught that one could add to the law already given in Scripture any specific exhortations that one might find particularly useful.

Finally, St. Augustine recommended referre to the teleological hierarchy. For St. Augustine, all goods had their own place on a hierarchical metaphysical ladder, at the top of which was God.  This form of therapy commands a person to picture the goods that he regularly encounters in his mind in such a way that reflects their hierarchical relationship to one another. Most importantly, however, this method involves a fostering of love (eros) for God, to whom all else is subordinated. The idea is that, by learning to love God above all else, one’s passions will fall into line when one realizes that all temporal things are instrumental (and therefore inferior) to attaining the greatest good, which is communion with God.

Clearly, these methods of St. Augustine will certainly involve prayer. There are, however, many different forms of prayer. Knowledge of the therapy outlined above will help confessors to be more precise in their prescriptions to those who confess sins against chastity. Such methods will help penitents to shape their passions so that, hopefully one day, they will be free of unruly preliminary passions and full of proper passions that bolster their spiritual lives.

For more information on St. Augustine’s theological anthropology, I highly recommend Perception, Sensibility, and Moral Motivation in Augustine: A Stoic-Platonic Synthesis by Sarah Catherine Byers, which I review here.