The history of Christian teaching on this vice is one where a historical account has to record the harm as well as the doctrine. Ascetic suspicion of the body, the identification of women with temptation in a great deal of patristic and medieval writing, the treatment of sexual sin as uniquely defining, and the disciplinary regimes built on all three, have caused documented damage, and this is acknowledged within the churches as well as outside them. At the same time the tradition's own logic, that the disorder is in the will rather than in the body, and Aquinas's ranking of the spiritual vices above the carnal, has always been available as a counterweight and has been drawn on in modern reappraisals. The atlas records the doctrine as the tradition states it; a reader is entitled to both the statement and the record of its effects.
Augustine's own theological formulation of concupiscence in the Confessions, shaped explicitly by his account of his own pre-conversion sexual life, became the template much later medieval penitential literature built on; the early medieval penitentials, manuals assigning specific tariffs of penance for particular sins, devoted disproportionate attention to sexual transgression compared with other categories of wrongdoing, a documented imbalance historians of medieval religion cite as evidence of how far pastoral practice outran the more measured theological position Aquinas would later articulate. Modern Catholic moral theologians, Margaret Farley among them, have argued for reconstructing sexual ethics around relational justice rather than the older act-centered casuistry, a reappraisal that remains contested within the church rather than settled.