Seducing Augustine: Bodies, Desires, Confessions by Virginia Burrus (review)

This coauthored book (“first authors” of specific sections are identified in the preface) originated in a three-person colloquium on desire in Augustine, convened by David Boyarin at the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture at UCLA in 2006. The collaborators’ interest in Augustine and sexuality is framed by their three disciplines, Early Church History, Divinity, and Philosophy. Charismatic speakers and writers who share a fundamental commitment to spirituality, they integrate that formative outlook with a tradition of twentieth-century French thought, including Barthes, Baudrillard, Derrida, and Foucault, that is emphatically secular. As did the Christian existentialism of the 1950s, this alliance between metaphysics and deconstruction creates an interesting intellectual space that results in work that is widely admired—for instance, John D. Caputo’s weak theology—because it allows us to move beyond the increasingly breached distinctions of speculative versus realist, or spiritual versus intellectual. Although the book is clearly intended for specialists, and I imagine its ideal audience is a graduate seminar on Augustine, I write this review from the position of a nonspecialist in a cognate field, French literature and critique.

While the French writers mentioned above kept the writings of mystics at their bedside (Barthes) or worked in a Dominican library when the public library made them feel unwelcome (Foucault), they made a different use of the connection between the spiritual and the present than do Burrus, Jordan, and MacKendrick. For example, in Barthes’s Sade, Fourier, Loyola, the three great utopians of the title are put on equal footing, to a deliciously heretical effect. No such thrills are warranted by this book. Having said that, however, the thinking is rigorous and careful, and the writing strong. This is, naturally, self-evident for anyone acquainted with other work by the three authors.

The main point of the book is that sexuality in Augustine (mainly in the Confessions) is subsumed within a dialectic of denied desire as an offering to God: God endows men with sexual desire that they overcome for God, making sex essential to the expression of that higher love. Almost as if he were reproducing this imbricated mechanism as a symptom in the shaping of “self ” through the text, Augustine veils and unveils his persona, sometimes boringly (in the authors’ own assessment), sometimes seductively (116).

The value of this book lies not in one single idea or overarching system, but rather in the way the individual points are argued and amplify one another. As such, it is a difficult text to summarize. At the peril of walking over some elements of design with the thick boots of a nonspecialist, I will point out some passages rather than describe the structure and goals of the chapters, which are more often latent and allusive rather than explicit.

The Introduction defines four chief points of interest: (1) secrecy and exposure, (2) asceticism and eroticism, (3) constraint and freedom, and (4) time and eternity. A reference to Margaret Miles constitutes one strain of reading: “It is not enough for the temptation to read without a body—or, alternately, with a merely metaphorical male one—to be resisted; it must be actively opposed ” (4). Thus, the goal of this book would be to get as much “body” as possible from Augustine’s texts in order to rise up to Miles’s challenge. Having read mostly the nasty bits of Confessions (in fourteenth-century French translation, which somehow made them seem dangerous), I was very excited to begin reading this book, but the farther I read, the more I realized that, to my regret, this will not be the rock and roll version of the Confessions. The authors of Seducing Augustine apologize that Augustine is not the steamiest reading in the canon. He names among his chief transgressions stealing unripe pears as an adolescent from a neighbor’s orchard. Yes, he abandoned an illegitimate child and the mother, at the price, as Seducing Augustine suggests, of a...