Feminist Interpretations of Augustine

10 To Remember Self, to Remember God: Augustine on Sexuality, Relationality, and the Trinity

10 To Remember Self, to Remember God: Augustine on Sexuality, Relationality, and the Trinity Julie B. Miller The general emphasis on relationality and experience in feminist theology has engendered a thorough examination of Christian teachings on two seemingly unrelated topics in recent years: the Trinity and sexuality. In the former instance, Christian feminist theologians have repeatedly turned to the doctrine of God, and specifically to the Trinity, in attempts to forge new, liberating models of relationality in contrast to the often authoritarian, hierarchical, and individualistic models offered by malestream theology. While some theologians have denied the possibility of recouping this doctrine for feminist purposes, others have seized upon the intrinsic internal relationality of the Trinity in order to ‘‘make the doc- 244 Feminist Interpretations of Augustine trine of the Trinity exemplify the kind of relations, and the kind of society , that we most admire.’’1 In the latter case, with regard to sexuality, many theologians have attempted to recoup the positive aspects of sexuality and eroticism, the most maligned but also, seemingly, the most intensely intimate, powerful, and ‘‘relational’’ of all human experiences.2 Not surprisingly, then, several feminist theologians have taken up the complex task of examining what, if anything, the experience of sexuality and the doctrine of the Trinity have to do with each other.3 As Sarah Coakley has suggested, there appears to be an intrinsic, yet ‘‘messy,’’ entanglement between our experience of sexuality and our experience of God.4 And Margaret Miles has argued that ‘‘the sexual is a way the soul speaks.’’5 If this is so—and even if it is only so in the traditional Augustinian Christian construction of it—it is incumbent upon theologians not only to understand and to critique how sexuality and the divine have been related through traditional patriarchal theologies, but also to construct new paradigms for both in order to allow for a more just and liberating experience of sexuality and divinity for women and men alike.6 In the past forty years or so, many traditional scholars have used psychoanalytic theories to unravel the apparent correlations between Augustine ’s seemingly abject fear of intimate relations (resulting from the overbearing presence of his mother, Monica) and his construction of a ‘‘fail-safe’’ God, yet none of these has ventured so far as to depict in detail how this fail-safe God has been constructed.7 Hence, it is my intention in this essay to explicate just how Augustine’s doctrine of the Trinity is ultimately reflected in his experience of sexuality, and vice versa. Thus, I examine the connection between Augustine’s formulation of God as a trinity of memory, understanding, and will and his anxious suspicions of intimate human relations, including, but not limited to, sexual relations. It is my belief that by depicting God as a trinity that is perpetually remembering , knowing, and loving itself, Augustine belies his fear of relations that obliterate the self, relations in which one forgets and loses oneself. Since Augustine believes this loss of self is most apparent in sexual relations, actual human sexual relationships are deemed highly ambivalent in his theology.8 However, he maintains and uses both the model and vocabulary of passionate, sexual pleasure to express his euphoric experience of spiritual connection with God. It appears that, for Augustine, in the safety of divine-human relation, in which neither party is vulnerable to the loss of self, unabashedly passionate and, some might say, even erotic relations between God and human can exist. Unfortu- To Remember Self, To Remember God 245 nately, for Augustine, at least, the same passionate experiences cannot be shared between two human beings, for these relationships inevitably end in loss. It is my further intention not only to explicate how his teachings on both these subjects have been significantly shaped and constructed by the discourse of Neoplatonism, but also to offer a feminist psychological critique of Augustine’s early relationship with his mother in order to suggest an alternate reading of that relationship to the ones offered by traditional neo-Freudian analyses. In this essay I argue that neither Neoplatonic theory nor the patriarchal culture in which Augustine and Monica lived and breathed could sufficiently allow for a full-bodied love of God, let alone a full-bodied love for another human being, particularly a person of the opposite sex.9 Together, these factors not surprisingly resulted in a...