Augustine's Confessions is a text that seduces. But how often do
its readers respond in kind? Here three scholars who share a
longstanding fascination with sexuality and Christian discourse
attempt to do just that. Where prior interpreters have been
inclined either to defend or to criticize Augustine's views,
Virginia Burrus, Mark Jordan, and Karmen MacKendrick set out both
to seduce and to be seduced by his text. Often ambivalent but
always passionately engaged, their readings of the Confessions
center on four sets of intertwined themes-secrecy and confession,
asceticism and eroticism, constraint and freedom, and time and
eternity. Rather than expose Augustine's sexual history, they
explore how the Confessions conjoins the erotic with the hidden,
the imaginary, and the fictional. Rather than bemoan the
repressiveness of his text, they uncover the complex relationship
between seductive flesh and persuasive words that pervades all of
its books. Rather than struggle to escape the control of the
author, they embrace the painful pleasure of willed submission that
lies at the erotic heart not only of the Confessions but also of
Augustine's broader understanding of sin and salvation. Rather than
mourn the fateful otherworldliness of his theological vision, they
plumb the bottomless depths of beauty that Augustine discovers
within creation, thereby extending desire precisely by refusing
satisfaction. In unfolding their readings, the authors draw upon
other works in Augustine's corpus while building on prior
Augustinian scholarship in their own overlapping fields of history,
theology, and philosophy. They also press well beyond the
conventional boundaries of scholarly disciplines, conversing with
such wide-ranging theorists of eroticism as Barthes, Baudrillard,
Klossowski, Foucault, and Harpham. In the end, they offer not only
a fresh interpretation of Augustine's famous work but also a
multivocal literary-philosophical meditation on the seductive
elusiveness of desire, bodies, language, and God.
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