Desire and delight

by Margaret R. Miles

"Augustine's Confessions is one of the most powerfully evocative autobiographies of the Christian West. It recounts the complex experiences through which this formative theologian came to renounce the compulsive sexual practice of his youth, reinvesting his attention and affection in a disciplined spirituality. The Confessions is explicitly about desire, longing, passion - physical and spiritual - constantly both, and both most evidently when Augustine most intended to distinguish spiritual from physical. It is an erotic text, preoccupied with bodies, pleasures, and pains. It narrates Augustine's desperate attempt to get, and to keep, the greatest degree of pleasure. Even his conversion to Catholic Christianity is narrated as a seduction to continence, and the model of spirituality he articulated relied intimately and profoundly on his sexual experience." "Desire and Delight explores the erotics of asceticism as described by Augustine, noticing the gendered foundation of his model of s