Still wearing his hairshirt as he recalls his adolescence and youth, Augustine again brings to mind the pursuit and meaning of Boethius’ aspirations of the mind and spirit and their potential danger from the body. Here he stresses the difference between love and physical lust:
The single desire that dominated my search for delight was simply to love and be loved. But no restraint was imposed by the exchange of mind with mind, which marks the brightly lit pathway of friendship. (II: 2)
And then emphasizes the toll it takes on the more proper pursuit of wisdom and truth, and good:
I had become deafened by the clanking chain of my mortal condition, the penalty of my pride.
Augustine then recognizing his errors in wasting time and effort on the physical, still admits to the pleasure as a part of man’s nature and God’s gift:
Even so, I could not have been wholly content to confine sexual union to acts intended to procreate children, as your law prescribes, Lord. For you shape the propagation of our mortal race, imposing your gentle hand to soften the brambles which were excluded from your paradise. (II:3)
His disagreement then, is not with God, but rather with "His" laws as handed down by man, or the church. Augustine believed, perhaps, that as God intended it, sex would be a spiritual as well as a physical union that would serve to elevate rather than bring people to denigrate themselves and others as can happen.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology