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 Carthage Didn’t Burn Hot Enough: Saint Augustine’s Divine Seduction K A R M E N M A C K E N D R I C K At the opening of Book 3 of Saint Augustine’s Confessions, the author enters into young adulthood and into the city of Carthage, where all about him famously simmers a burning cauldron of unholy loves. Yet the ultimate object of his desire, in these years when he indulges in theater and prays for chastity to come at some more convenient time, is neither theatrical nor narrowly sexual—nor is it God, who might have been the reader’s first suspicion. ‘‘I was in love with love,’’ Augustine writes, though he adds that he is a bit confused about what ‘‘love’’ might mean. He distinguishes love from lust, contrasting ‘‘love’s serenity’’ to the search and struggle of ‘‘lust’s darkness.’’1 What we expect, if we don’t know enough to know better, is that his religious conversion several books later will neatly free him from lust, leaving him in the pure and serene state of love, directed appropriately and rewardingly toward a God who keeps him always satisfied. But if this simple story were true, even Augustine’s rhetorical brilliance would be hard-pressed to save him from the fate of being boring—and, whatever else we may think of him, boring he most decidedly is not. In fact, the relation he finds or creates with the Christian God, in constant tension between love and lust, seems rather closer to his characterizations of the latter, with their striving and frustration and bewilderment. I want to suggest that Augustine stays in love with love—more exactly, that he seeks a constant and potent seduction of and by his God, and that the Confessions is mutually illuminating when read with contemporary 206 兩 t o wa r d a t h e ol o g y o f e ro s theory on seduction. Only seduction will allow Augustine to retain his love of the created world as good while refusing to immerse and gratify himself in its beauty. Augustine’s relation to God exemplifies at least three characteristics of seduction: the manipulation of the will beyond a simple opposition of consent and coercion; the persistence of the elusively promising within the representational and discursive; and, relatedly , the necessary incompletion of both meaning and desire. The fires of worldly lust are too easily quenched for one who wants to be seduced, and the complexities of seduction in relation to desire, complexities of coercion and pleasure alike, are fully present in Augustine’s complicated quest. To make this argument properly, perhaps I should begin with a definition of seduction, which turns out to be quite an elusive term. The Latin seducere indicates being led aside or away. Augustine himself uses the word fairly restrictively, to suggest being led astray and not merely turned aside—for example, ‘‘To tie me down the more tenaciously to Babylon’s belly, the invisible enemy tramped on me (Ps. 55:3) and seduced me because I was in the mood to be seduced.’’2 His use is a neat fit as well with the first sense given by the OED, ‘‘To persuade (a vassal, servant, soldier, etc.) to desert his allegiance or service’’—Augustine is turned from the position of a ‘‘slave to lust,’’ as he says, to an urgent quest for enslavement by God. Once seduced by the world (turned away from his proper allegiance), he seeks a stronger seduction (a return of all his service to his master). The term indicates both turning around and drawing toward, and a duality of force and direction: being turned toward something by being drawn away from something else; toward the seductive object and away from some other demand upon one’s time or attention or desire. It implies will and resistance , not simply between seducer and seduced but within each party involved, because no one who enjoys seduction wants to accomplish it too soon. Ultimately this distance and distinction is itself to be overcome, at least on certain models of seduction: ‘‘The activity of seduction,’’ writes Alicia Ostriker, ‘‘is quite a subtle matter. It differs on the one hand from the act of rape, where X subdues Y by force, and on the other from the proposal, where X promises Y an exchange of goods and services: come live with [3.21.97.61] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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