Desire and Delight: A New Reading of Augustine's Confessions

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. 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 spiritual aspiration. Going beyond the tormented, self-conscious Augustine of conventual interpretations, one discovers in this book a man impelled by the eros that defines human beings as the pursuit up the scale of pleasures to the ultimate Pleasure. The pursuit is analyzed here in the text, context, and subtext, with such intellectual and emotional engagement that the Confessions becomes a text of pleasure.

Genres: Theology

144 pages, Paperback

First published September 25, 1992

Reviews

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Few authors are able to speak about a classic in such a way that the reader feels like he is not being lectured, but rather reading alongside. The fruit of years of thinking and an intense bout of re-reading, Desire and Delight is both an interpretation of Augustine's Confessions and a lesson in how to read. Her theme is Augustine's search for true pleasure as related in Confessions, a text of pleasure. Her oscillation between "obedient" and "disobedient" reading, the latter including a gendered reading, allows her to treat Augustine both sympathetically and critically, his text as both timeless and timely.

In my opinion, this is simply the best short book on Confessions one can read. It was a pleasure.