Augustine, feminist?

Augustine defends Abraham in his fathering a child with Hagar on several grounds ( Contra Faustum 22).  His intention was to father a child, not to satisfy lust.  Since evil is in the will, and Abraham acted with good will, his action was not adultery.  Sarah shows the same virtue: She doesn’t cling to her husband with carnal desire but instead encourages him to father the child that she cannot give him.

More interestingly, Augustine cites 1 Corinthians 7:4 (wife has power over the husband’s body) to defend the claim that “Although in the other acts that pertain to human peace, a wife owes obedience to her husband, in this one aspect by which the two sees are distinguished in their flesh and joined together by fleshly intercourse, a husband and a wife have similar power over each other.”  A bit later he adds, Sarah “in no way abandoned her marital fidelity or denied the authority of her husband [while in Pharaoh’s harem], just as he was not an adulterer when he obeyed the authority of his wife and consented to father a child from her maidservant.”  Abraham doesn’t sin because he is submitting to proper authority in the use of his body, the authority of his wife.

This doesn’t give blanket permission to couples to have “open” marriages: “whoever took as an example in his own defense the action of Abraham’s sleeping with the maidservant of his wife, because he fathered a child by Hagar, would be corrected  - chastised not just with rods but even with clubs, so that he would not meet with eternal punishment along with other adulterers.”