St.John is quoted above "There is no relationship between men as great as that of a wife to her husband, if they are coupled as they ought to be…" In the marriage we lived, we were coupled " as they ought to be" by the presence of Christ Jesus among us. Without His presence in our relationship there simply would have been no relationship.

As an interloper, I could go on for a long time but will jump out here. I do have a short dissertation on "Marriage as a Christian Vocation". I would be willing to share it if any one requests it in a subsequent post.

Thank you for the interesting read.

Another quote from Aquinas, from the section of the Commentary on the Sentences I suggested you read (if you can read Latin–as one might assume from the assertions you make about Bible translation issues): when nature moves a person to the matrimonial act, it is not entirely without sin, unless the movement of nature is further ordered either in act or in habit to offspring as the good of the sacrament. (In IV Sent. d. 31, q. 2, a. 2, ad 1; emphasis added) That is to say, the marriage must be ordered to building up the body of Christ through one#'s children, but one need not actually intend that in every marital act (though of course one cannot contradict it).

Any neutral readers of the above posts have seen how I showed Aquinas to be actually simply paraphrasing or imitating Augustine on sexual matters and this is crystal clear e.g. on both saying women are of little use outside the role of bearing children:

Augustine:
“ I don’t see what sort of help woman was created to provide man with, if one excludes the purpose of procreation. If woman is not given to man for help in bearing children, for what help could she be? To till the earth together? If help were needed for that, man would have been a better help for man. The same goes for comfort in solitude. How much pleasure is it for life and conversation when two friends live together than when a man and woman cohabitate.” De Genesi ad litteram 9,5-9 Augustine.
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Aquinas, ST, Pt. I. Q.98, art.2 "Moreover, we are told that woman was made to be a help to man. But she was not fitted to be a help to man except in generation, because another man would have proved a more effective help in anything else. (On the contrary..section)."
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That is the attitude of an ex womanizer and then unfortunately, a virgin, Aquinas, proceeds to simply imitate his words. I showed with reference to Augustine where Aquinas was likewise getting his only two ways of having sex without venial sin:if all desire is concupiscence, then of course asking is at least venial sin. But all desire is not concupiscence as we know since love was allowed to enter the act well after these men who never mention it as being within the act itself. Both men thus burdened Catholic men for centuries with thinking that desiring sex without willing children and asking for it was venial sin which the modern Popes rejected when they accepted the use of the infertile periods. Thus Haring in modern times pointed out that the New Testament commanded married men to so ask for sex to avoid fornication and along comes Augustine (then Aquinas) with his left over guilt telling them it was wrong venially to so ask and yet Corinthians told them to ask.
I'm done sir. Neutral readers can decide what just happened here for themselves.

I asked the question about a difference of teaching between the saints I quote, and insisted on an answer, because without an answer to that question, your original point about Augustine is unsubstantiated… in other words, making an attempt to stay on topic.

I do not change or overlook the doctrine of Thomas concerning the Immaculate Conception. Rather, I stick to the point at issue. You said, "he shows a great dependency on Augustine in sexual matters which led him into Augustine's error on the IC." (Emphasis added). You give a dependency on Augustine as the reason for his understanding that Mary had original sin. I cited a text of Thomas that contained his reasons for his understanding, and Augustine's understanding of sexual matters was not among them.

You wrote: "You didn't answer the question about whether you see a difference between the teaching of Augustine and that of St. Anselm, St. John Chrysostom, and St. Alphonsus Liguori Joseph…"
Answer: We all pick and choose which comments of the other we will address….you just did it yourself….you didn't touch the idea in Augustine and Aquinas of woman as good for mainly procreation….and I don't pin you down to it. Otherwise, we'd be writing all night since an asked question or a point expressed is short and takes no time to type but writing the answer can take a hundred times as long as writing the question. I know no writer who answers every point.
Ligouri I remember to be much better than Augustine but he needed Aquinas' citing of Aristotle to get there if I remember rightly… but I'm not going back to those notes. Anselm I do not read. I am sure there are people whom you do not read.

But Joseph, you are cleansing Aquinas and updating him by way of paraphrase. He said that Mary "contracted" original sin and the Church says that God preserved her from contracting it. You keep missing that difference between Aquinas and the Church on the IC…a difference I think even your pastor knows of even if he does not know the details.

And Aquinas said there were only two ways to have intercourse sinlessly and asking for the debt sans childbirth willing was not one of them; and you revamped it to make it look as though he were agreeing with the modern Popes and he was not. He and Augustine are two reasons some in the clergy resisted the new permission for the natural methods beginning in the 1800's when it passed from being folklore into being science. Arthur Vermeesch went back and forth on whether to approve it….but then again he still supported the just titles of the decretals for slavery until at least 1904 and after Leo XIII's encyclical on that matter.
And I love him…Aquinas…. (read the whole Summa) and I love Augustine (read most of him…a greater feat than the former) but loving them means also seeing wherein they were incorrect.
St. John Chrysostom also gave what I consider an awful accounting of Cana and was perhaps the other reason countless writers Protestant and Catholic… saw nothing untoward in our awful sense for sense…not word for word…translations of the account.
What if the Catholic writer, Miguens, M. { Mary “The Servant of the Lord”. Boston, MA.: Daughters of St. Paul, 1978}, was simply correct: Christ was not referring to the wine problem at all but to the fear within Mary that doing this miracle would bring death…"my hour"… on Christ immediately…that month…. and thus the sword which Simeon had predicted would cut Mary's soul. That would perfectly explain why Mary took His words for a yes…I'll help with the wine problem… rather than the no that Augustine and Chrysostom mistakenly saw.

Jerome is cited by John Paul II without ever mentioning that Jerome loved Seneca on marriage matters and Seneca approved of infanticide. No one says boo…. yet if a modern Pope quoted an pro abortion philosopher, we'd all faint. Warning label: Jerome was no virgin and he loved Seneca at one point calling him "our Seneca". In the future of the Church, this area must be cleaned up and presented with its problems since Asia has an awful lot of high IQ people who are going to catch our people on these things. Better we catch ourselves first.

Sorry, I mistyped the number of the article I quoted. It was not article 3, but 2. That is the same article as the article you cite. The difference, however, is that I quote the body of the article, where St. Thomas gives his reasons why Mary's being freed from sin could not have happened before animation (and thus must have happened some time after conception). You quote the reply to an objection, where his intention is to explain why Mary's parents being cleansed of sin would not make her clean of sin. His point is that original sin is passed on not by the fact that one's parents have original sin, but through the generation of human nature (which is the teaching of the Church, not merely St. Augustine's!) to which original sin comes.

You didn't answer the question about whether you see a difference between the teaching of Augustine and that of St. Anselm, St. John Chrysostom, and St. Alphonsus Liguori. Instead you rail against Augustine's real or supposed errors. And why do you mention how (allegedly) Thomas follows Augustine's errors? I don't see the connection.

Nonetheless, since Thomas Aquinas is a particular strong point of mine, I want to clarify his position. It seems you are reading Aquinas out of context, and that in several senses. First, you are apparently reading (since you quote) from the "Supplement", which is composed mainly of excerpts from the Commentary on the Sentences. You thereby risk skipping important points. Secondly, this text comes from the Commentary on the Sentences, which has a particular character, being written as a Commentary on Peter Lombard, and staying in a certain traditional language. The essential meaning of the text you cite from Thomas could be paraphrased: "two married person come together without sin only when they do so for the sake of children, or for the sake of their mutual relationship." If they do so for the sake of pleasure, disregarding the good of the relationship or the other person, it is a venial sin, or even a mortal sin–if one seriously disregards the good of the other.

The fact is that according to St. Thomas's teaching, a spouse is obliged not only to render the debt, but also to ask for it, not only for the sake of children, but also for the sake of the spouse's relationship. See In IV Sent., d. 32, q. 1, a. 4, ad 3. You can find the text at the site Corpus Thomisticum. I suggest you read all of distinctions 31 and 32.

Thanks for your comment. But, um, just what are you saying? Are saints who have sinned and repented unable to judge rightly about the matter in which they sinned?

You say that "we do not distinguish those saints etc.?" To whom do you refer? Many Catholic theologians and historians who write at length about the life and teaching of a saint do reflect on how the saint's life experience shows itself in his or her theology. But since you state this in the context of my blogpost and quotations from the Fathers and saints of the Church–concretely, do you see a general difference between the teaching of St. Augustine or St. Jerome on sexuality and marriage, and the teaching of, say, St. Anselm, St. John Chrysostom, and St. Alphonsus Liguori, who did not have the same sexual history as St. Augustine did?

The reason for St. Thomas's error regarding the Immaculate Conception was certainly not his understanding of sexuality, nor of original sin. His argument is as follows:

The sanctification of the Blessed Virgin cannot be understood to have taken place before her body was animated by a soul. There are two reasons for this: first, the sanctification about which we are speaking is nothing other than a cleansing from original sin, since sanctity is perfect cleanness, as Dionysius says in On the Divine Names XII, and guilt cannot be cleansed except through grace, the sole subject of which is a rational creature. And therefore the Blessed Virgin was not sanctified before the infusion of the rational soul. Secondly, since only the rational creature can be a subject of guilt, offspring conceived is not the subject of guilt before the infusion of the rational soul. Thus, in whatever way we suppose the Blessed Virgin to have been sanctified, she would never have incurred the stain of original sin, and so would not have needed the redemption and salvation which is through Christ, about which it is said in Matthew 1, "He shall save his people from their sins." But we may not deny that Christ is the savior of all men, as is said in 1 Timothy 4:10. Hence the other position follows, that the sanctification of the Blessed Virgin took place after animation. (Summa Theologiae III, 27:3)

Basically there are two arguments, the first philosophical, the other theological. The first argument is that it was impossible for Mary to be made clean of sin at conception, since she did not have a rational soul. The second argument is that if Mary never had sin, than she did not need to be redeemer by Christ, which is false.

In fact, as the Dogmatic definition states, Mary was preserved free from all stain of original sin, "by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ." It was not merely that somehow by chance original sin was not passed on in this case, but she was preserved from the original sin that would in the normal course have been passed on from her parents.