#seducing augustine

. . . if my will is God's altogether, and if God's will is of God's essence, then the I-God distinction fails to hold well either, or, to quote Eckhart, "God's existence must be my existence and God's is-ness is my is-ness, neither less nor more."

In Book 11, [Augustine] moves deeper into his meditation on time and also seems to lean more heavily forward, as the urgency of his desire intensifies: desire for the absent but anticipated presence of the other is also desire for the otherness of the future, desire for the otherness of one's ever-becoming self. On fire for God, catching us with his heat, Augustine is also on fire for truth—the truth about time, as it happens. "My mind blazes to solve this most intricate puzzle. Do not close it off, my lord God, good father, by Christ I beg you, do not close off from my desire these things both familiar and secret, lest I be kept from penetrating them!" Indeed, for God to deny his ardent desire to penetrate would be unjust, since it is God who has aroused this desire, by displaying the seductive mysteries of creation so openly. "Give me what I love," pants Augustine, "for I love, and you gave me this".

Time's stretch is ever in danger of becoming a grasping, a futile attempt to hold onto what was or will be. Eternity's reach is not a grasping but an opening, an opening to the depth of the moment. This is the difference, perhaps, between desire and... desire. Yet how is that difference fleshed out, so to speak? In his bold attempt to conceptualize eternal bodies—which does not, it is by now clear, simply mean bodies that last forever—Augustine finally engages in a radical deconstruction of the Platonic doctrine of transcendence as he takes desire around another turn. Eternity is disclosed not in the overcoming but in the intensification of corporality, he suggests—in the spiraling joy released as love and beauty exceed one another, "through bodies in every body". Eternity is harbored within the flux of temporality, then, even as God is secreted within the abyssal capacity of bodies to smell, taste, feel, hear, see—finally, to love—the abyssal beauty of bodies.

God is [Augustine's] ideal reader, his most desired reader, but this too presents a problem. For God is his ideal and most desired reader precisely because God already knows him more intimately and fully than he knows himself. God can interpret correctly both what he writes and what he leaves out, what he gets right and what he gets wrong, because God has seen it all. Why, then, does God need to read him? Why does he need to write?

In its very disturbing monstrosity, Augustine's terra infirma—his terra informis—exposes the ambivalence of desire. Unmasked, its very invisibility may force us to avert our gaze. We desire what seduces us by hiding from us, but in the nihil aliquid we apprehend that there is no stable "whatness" at all, no thing to elude us, only an unending flux of becoming. There is too much (to) desire—and also not enough—as transience melts into eternity. This abysmal fecundity within creation is, intriguingly, mirrored not only in the disturbing play of images surfacing from the depths of Augustine's memory but also in the overwhelming multitude of interpretations welling from the font of scripture, as he perceives it. Like the sound that precedes and gives rise to all forms of song, scripture's sonority may engender a diversity of resonant truths, asserts Augustine. Its bottomless deep evokes both wonder—"mira profunditas!"— and awe-full desire: "It is a horror to attend (intendere) to it, a horror of honor and a trembling of love".

The present absence of one body—His Body—may be seen to haunt Augustine’s entire corpus with longing.

In the life of eternal bliss, as it unfurls in Augustine's imagination, desire and pleasure are ever exceeding one another, thus ever increasing, in a spiral of beauty and praise. Paradise as it might have been thus turns out to be a pale image of heaven as it surely must be. Satisfaction cannot kill a desire that is unnecessary to start with, any more than vision can attenuate a beauty that exceeds both sensation and imagination. Praise is given not as to an admired or beloved object, but within a loop of divine self-delight. More, desire thus drawn together, thus concentrated, is explosive, a single spark bursting the boundaries of the self. The praise of God drawn forth from all these gorgeous bodies is also God's own joyful desire, concentrated into the flesh. Augustine struggles to glorify desire right out of existence, even as he attempts to transform what is in excess of both nature and will into the beautiful, the fitting, the proportionate, the proper. But the too-much of corporality keeps on overflowing. We face the question not only of where the body ends, but when, as eternity folds the past of Paradise into an infinite future. The beauty discovered in such fleshly plenitude persists in linking itself to desire, which bursts out into praise for the creator yet is somehow not supposed to touch the bodies themselves, for they can never be possessed. Still, it remains the beauty of bodies that draws us in, and the excess of desire, divinely overwhelming the autonomous will, that breaks us apart.

Augustine's confessions are seductions. Ostensibly addressed to God, they beat gently against our ears, enticing us to listen in. They deliberately lead us astray; they actively lead us on. "One cannot seduce others, if one has not oneself been seduced," notes Jean Baudrillard. Augustine is infinitely seducible, as he so boldly confesses, and his seducibility draws us. He seduces more by what he does not show and tell of his own seductions than by what he does, however. Although he repeatedly speaks of spilling himself out, the pornographic "money shot" remains outside our angle of vision . . . It is even possible that he is faking the whole thing. But why would he do that? For the joy that inheres in the sheer intimacy of confessing to another, of confessing oneself as other, perhaps—as he himself hints. If so, he is not completely faking it. The sexual content of the confession may begin to seem nearly irrelevant, having already, by the time we read it, been doubled and displaced by a confessional performance in which Augustine has, yes, spilled himself out. Yet it is a different spilling than the one we were expecting. Repeatedly, he redirects our attention, diverting us from the course of anticipated revelations.