Sexual Psychology – Critical Reflection #4 – Due Fri 12/3

EQ 91.2 (2020), 114-132

M e m o r i a a n d t h e L u s t D is e a s e : A n A u g u s t i n i a n

E n q u i r y i n t o P o s t - C o n v e r s i o n S e x u a l H a b i t

E rn ie Laskaris

Ernie Laskaris is a recent graduate o f M elbourne School o f Theology, Melbourne, Australia.

K e y W o r d s : A u g u s t i n e ; C o n c u p i s c e n c e ; C o n f e s s io n s ; L u s t; M e m o r y ; S e x ; S e x u a l i t y ; S in ;

T e m p t a t i o n .

I. Introduction The prevailing attitude toward sexuality in the twenty-first century West can be summarised by the strange (and rather paradoxical) maxim: 'Sex is everything, and, at the same time, sex is nothing. '1 On the one hand, sexuality has come to be understood as essential to a human being’s personal identity, and yet, on the other hand, it has come to be so trivialised— used as a kind of casual 'happiness drug'— so as to remove all sense of the sacred. 'The combined effect [of these paradoxical statements]’, according to Jonathan Grant, is the ‘tendency toward hypersexuality, empowering social phenomena that threaten to entrap much of a generation.’2

As such, the average professing Christian in the West, especially the teenagers and the young adults, will find it increasingly difficult, if not wholly impossible, to avoid the influence of an awfully sex-saturated culture. One cannot listen to their radio without hearing popular songs proudly declaring the thrills of casual sex, nor can they walk the streets of the cities without having to behold images of scantily- clad bodies. Recent studies have claimed that, despite the vast majority believing it to be morally wrong, a large number of self-identified ‘evangelicals’ are having sex outside of marriage. 3 While the accuracy of these studies has been challenged, it is at least demonstrably true that our churches have a significant issue to address.4

1 Russell D. Moore and Andrew Walker, The Gospel and Pornography, The Gospel for Life Series (Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 2017), 18.

2 Jonathan Grant, Divine Sex: A Compelling Vision fo r Christian Relationships in a Hypersexualized Age (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2015), 96 (emphasis added).

3 Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think about Marrying (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1; Tyler Charles, ‘(Almost) Everyone’s Doing It’, Relevant Magazine 53 (2011), 64-69 (65). Indeed, some as young as fourteen and fifteen from among the evangelical churches have testified: T never realised how powerful passion can be.’ Shari, a fifteen year old girl, quoted in Ron Luce, Battle Cry fo r My Generation: The Fight to Save Our Friends (Colorado Springs: Cook Communications, 2006), 41.

4 See, for example, Kevin DeYoung, Premarital Sex and Our Love Affair with Bad Stats’, The Gospel Coalition, 13 December 2011.

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This article will focus, however, on a particular category of Christians—namely, the ones who, prior to their Christian conversion, have a sexual history (of sexual acts outside of marriage) stored in their memory. Consider the testimony of Scott Farhart and Elizabeth King:

Many of us became Christians after we had already begun our sexual lives ... It seems for many of us that, when Paul (Rom. 12:1) says to present our bod­ ies as living sacrifices, it really means sacrificing a fulfilling and exciting sex life. We envy those ‘role models’ on television and movie screens who seem to enjoy sex with great abandon. We escape into the fantasy world of romance novels, soap operas, or pornographic videos to become spectators of a life we may never enjoy as Christians. This is especially difficult for those of us who carry memories o f a pre-conversion sexual life?

Much has already been written about this category in terms of an existential strug­ gle to 'fit in,’ so to speak, among other Christians. Wes Markofski, for example, speaks of a girl, pseudonymously named Elle, who professes to have converted to Christianity in high school, but was alienated from campus evangelical groups dur­ ing her undergraduate studies due to her 'pre-conversion sexual life’. She testifies,

...the first time that I went to Campus Crusade for Christ, they played this game called I Never. There were hundreds of freshman kids at this meeting. Someone would say, "Run around the circle if you’ve gotten a tattoo," and because I'd gotten a tattoo, I’d run around the circle. So... this one girl yells, "I've never had sex!’’ So I take off running, and I’m the only one running, out of hundreds of kids! And I was like... "I don’t belong here. What am I doing here? I miss my stoner friends.”5 6

One could certainly argue that 1 Never is a terrible game to play with campus evan­ gelicals, but nonetheless, Elle ended up forsaking her church altogether and be­ coming involved with a small communitarian movement (namely, the Urban Mon­ astery). It is indeed cases like these that prompted Veronica Zundel to say in 1990, ‘What sense does it make... to laud virginity to the new convert who has already got through several sexual partners?’7 The question this article will address, how­ ever, relates to the apparent religious connection between post-conversion sexual temptation and memories of a pre-conversion sexual life. Precisely what role do the memories of past sexual activity play in the experience of post-conversion sexual temptation? In search of a philosophically and theologically rigorous answer, this article will investigate Augustine’s philosophical treatment of memoria (‘memory’) and morbo concupiscentiae (‘the lust disease’) in his Confessions, with the objective of providing a framework for Christians dwelling in the hypersexualised West to address the incessant reality of sexual temptation.

5 Scott A. Farhart and Elizabeth King, 'Sacred Sex’, in The Christian Woman's Complete Guide to Health (Lake Mary: Sloam, 2008), 122-32 (126, emphasis added).

6 Wes Markofski, New Monasticism and the Transformation o f American Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 175.

7 Veronica Zundel, ‘Carbon Dating’, Third Way 13/1 (1990), 16-18 (17).

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II. Puddly concupiscence of the flesh Augustine's Confessions is a unique blend of the theological, and the philosophical, and the personal, addressing a broad range of cross-discipline subjects [from the problem of evil, to the nature of time itself). One of the most im portant of these, however, is the theme of sexual desire—his comments on which have sparked a wide range of scholarly opinion. For some, such as Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Au­ gustine’s treatm ent of the doctrine of ‘Original Sin’ made him ‘the man who fused Christianity together with a hatred of sex and pleasure', supposedly ruining sex for the Western world.8 And yet, for others, considering the focus given to 'the elusive lure of endless pleasures ever longed for and never quite reached, his Confessions is an irreducibly erotic text'.9 There is certainly a significant degree of truth here. In her analysis of the book's rhetorical features, Margaret Miles concludes that Au­ gustine, by means o f‘partial disclosures, vivid sensual metaphors, [and] tantalising gaps', possessed a ‘remarkable skill in engaging readers’ erotic curiosity, only to refuse to satisfy it’.10 In any case, James O'Donnell’s assessment, th at those who have ‘the slightest possible familiarity with Augustine’s name often think of him obscurely as a paragon of promiscuity’, is right on target.* 11

Of course, Augustine's own morally suspect sexual history and struggle with sexual desire is well documented. In Book Two of the Confessions, he focuses on his sixteenth year; a year in which he had 'dared to grow wild in a succession of various and shadowy loves’ [C onf 2.1.1).12 It is here that Augustine would come clean, so to speak, about his youthful lusts. He writes [Conf. 2.2.2),

But w hat was it th at delighted me except that to love and to be loved? Still... the mists of passion steamed up out of the puddly concupiscence of the flesh, and the hot imagination of puberty, and they did so obscure and overcast my heart th at I was unable to distinguish pure affection from unholy desire. Both boiled confusedly within me, and dragged my unstable youth down over the cliffs of unchaste desires, and plunged me into a gulf of infamy.13

The technical term ‘concupiscence’ [concupiscentia, a late Latin term), central to Augustine’s theological anthropology, merits elucidation. It is first used in the works of Tertullian, who asserted th at all sins are the direct result of concupiscentia saeculi ('worldly concupiscence’), where concupiscentia is tantam ount to a vitiosa

8 Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs fo r the Kingdom o f God: Women, Sexuality, and the Catholic Church, trans. by Peter Heinegg (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 75-76.

9 V. Burrus, M. D. Jordan, and K. Mackendrick, Seducing Augustine: Bodies, Desires, Confessions (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 2.

10 Margaret Miles, 'The Erotic Text: Augustine’s Confessions’, Continuum 2/1 (1992), 132-49 (132).

11 James J. O'Donnell, Augustine: A New Biography (New York: Harper Collins, 2005), 38. 12 Augustine, 'The Confessions of Saint Augustine’, in Augustine: Confessions and Enchiridion,

ed. and trans. by A. C. Outler, The Library of Christian Classics, 7 (London: SCM Press, 1955), 50.

13 Ibid., 50-51.

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animi passio (‘corrupted desire of the soul’).14 For Augustine, this ‘corrupted desire’ was the direct result of the fall—or, more precisely, the direct result of the postlap- sarian withdrawal of God’s grace. Augustine scholar Peter Burnell explains it as the foundational 'nucleus [of the] anti-divine disposition of the soul ... a comprehen­ sively ruinous "disharmony” at the core of the person', permeating the entire hu­ man being (a la the later Reformed doctrine o f ‘total depravity').15 The underlying ‘force’, so to speak, th at manifests this depravity in one’s perceivable life—whether in thought or in deed—is consuetudo (‘habit’). Augustine writes, 'For the law of sin is the tyranny of habit, by which the mind is drawn and held, even against its own will, but still deservedly so, for it so willingly falls into the habit’ (Conf. 8.5.12).16 As the late Hannah Arendt puts it, ‘The inclination to sin springs more from habit than from passion itself, because the world man has founded in concupiscentia is consolidated in consuetudo.’17

Now, the above is primarily concerned with those who, having been born ‘dead’ in sin (Eph. 2:1), remain ‘dead’ in sin—i.e. the unconverted, who are wholly con­ cupiscent. Augustine describes the existential experience of this as he opens Book Three (Con/ 3.1.1):

I came to Carthage, where a cauldron offlagitiosorum amorum (unholy loves) was seething and bubbling all around me. I was not in love as yet, but I was in love with love ... Because of this, my soul was unhealthy; and, full of sores, it exuded itself forth, itching to be scratched by scraping on the things of the senses ... To love and to be loved was sweet to me, and all the more when I gained the enjoyment of the body of the person I loved. Thus I polluted the spring of friendship with the filth of concupiscence, and I dimmed its luster with the slime of lust.13

The meaning of the imagery here is clear. An 'itch' does not cause disease; an ‘itch’ is the symptom of disease. In this case, the ‘itch’ to be 'scratched by scraping on the things of the senses’, here referring to the satisfying of his sexual desires, is the symptom of something that he would later call morbo concupiscentiae, typically translated as ‘the lust disease’.19 For Augustine, such a 'disease' was persistently in­ trusive, in the sense th at it metastasises, so to speak, to all things—even ‘the spring of [platonic] friendship’.20 Like a tyrannical dictator, lust spreads its influence across every sphere under its control, and thus, Augustine deems it appropriate to refer to himself as Libinis Servus (‘a slave of lust’), 'in bondage to a lasting habit’ (Conf.

14 Timo Nisula, Augustine and the Functions of Concupiscence, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae, 116 (Boston: Brill, 2012), 28-30.

15 Peter f. Burnell, ‘Concupiscence’, in Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. by Allan D. Fitzgerald (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1999), 224-27 (224).

16 Augustine, ‘Confessions’, 165. 17 Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, ed. by Joanna V. Scott and Judith C. Stark

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 83. 18 Augustine, 'Confessions’, 61. 19 See Conf. 8.7.17, in ibid., 169. 20 Margaret Miles, Augustine and the Fundamentalist's Daughter (Eugene: Cascade, 2011), 77.

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6.15.25; cf. John 8:34; Rom. 6:20).21 What, then, of the Christian convert? Does ‘the lust disease’ continue to pollute the one who is no longer ‘dead’ in their sin (Eph. 2:4-5)?

In order to answer this question, we ought to briefly consider Augustine’s con­ version. Comparing the process of conversion to the process of giving birth, Au­ gustine understood his own conversion as the climactic point to a lengthy period of painful gestation, especially for his mother, who ‘suffered greater pains in [his] spiritual pregnancy than when she bore [him] in the flesh’ [Conf. 5.9.16).22 The nar­ rative of Augustine’s conversion to Christianity, found in Book Eight of the Confes­ sions, is not w ritten as a story of sudden regeneration [in the style of the apos­ tle Paul's conversion in Damascus), but as a story th at presupposes an incessant, unabating obstacle that stood between Augustine and religious faith—and that obstacle was incontinence.23 As Gerald Schlabach puts it, ‘Becoming continent and being converted to Christian faith ... were for Augustine inseparable’, and the ‘un­ willingness to abandon sexual pleasures was Augustine’s last and most intractable impediment’ to true and devout religious faith.24 This particular unwillingness is plainly dem onstrated throughout the Confessions, but for the purposes of this arti­ cle, a few examples will suffice, beginning with Book Seven. Therein, one reads of Augustine’s disenchantment toward Manicheism and rejection of astrology [both of which involved w hat he called phantasmata, ‘fantasms’), leading him to study Neoplatonist cosmology, but only to discern within it an idolatrous perversion of Judeo-Christian cosmology.25 Here, it could be said th at Augustine had successfully hopped over the intellectual hurdle between him and Christian conversion. There was, however, a more onerous obstruction th at Augustine would now have to ad­ dress [Conf 7.17.23):

And I marvelled th at 1 now loved thee, and no fantasm in thy stead, and yet I was not stable enough to enjoy my God steadily. Instead 1 was transported to thee by thy beauty; then presently torn away from thee by my own pondere (weight), sinking with grief into these lower things. This pondus (weight) was carnal h a b it... 1 was not ready to cleave to thee firmly. For the body, being corrupted, pressed down the soul, and the earthly dwelling weighs down the mind, which muses upon many things.26

In other words, his intellectual ‘ascent’ (to use the language of the Neoplatonists) to God was being hindered by the ‘weight’ of something at the bottom of this ladder,

21 Augustine, ‘Confessions’, 132. 22 Ibid., 106; cf. Martha Ellen Stortz, 'Where or When Was Your Servant Innocent? Augustine

on Childhood', in The Child in Christian Thought, ed. by Marcia J. Bunge (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2001), 78-102 (87).

23 Henry Chadwick, Augustine: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 27-28.

24 Gerald W. Schlabach, 'Continence', in Fitzgerald [ed.), Augustine through the Ages, 235-36. 25 Augustine: Confessions, Books V-IX, ed. by Peter White, Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 195. 26 Augustine, ‘Confessions’, 150-51.

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so to speak, which was none other than concupiscentia manifested as consuetudo carnalis (‘carnal habit’).27

Book Eight, then, functions as Augustine’s account of his battle with this 'carnal habit'. He confesses that, even though many of his former passions and desires (e.g. the lust for power) had ceased to excite him as they once did, he remained tenac- ite r alligabar ex fe m in a , ‘tightly bound to woman' (C onf 8.1.2).28 Even though he was longing to devote his life wholly to Christ as a celibate Christian, he remained bound to the 'puddly concupiscence of the flesh’; that tyrant ruling over his will.29 In his own words [Conf. 8.5.10-11), ‘I was bound by the iron chain of my own will ... For out of the perverse will came lust, and the service of lust ended in consuetudo (habit), and consuetudo, not resisted, became necessity.’30 Due to this ‘necessity’, he would go on to say th at he ‘was as much afraid of being freed from all entangle­ ments as we ought to fear to be entangled’.31 Augustine finds support for his ideas here in Paul’s epistle to the Romans, wherein Paul is most explicit regarding the w ar between two opposing ‘laws’ within every person—the ‘law of [his] mind’ and the 'law of sin' (Rom. 7:22-23). Of course, th at such a war existed within Augus­ tine is evident from his prayer for a delayed subjugation of his sexual desires [Conf. 8.7.17).

But, wretched youth th at I was—supremely wretched even in the very outset of my youth—I had entreated chastity of thee, and 1 had prayed, 'Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.’ For I was afraid, lest thou shouldst hear me too soon, and too soon cure me of my lust disease, which I desired to have satisfied, rather than extinguished.32

It is also worth noting his poetic description of the internal battle between his ‘two wills’ as two opposing voices.33 The first was the memory of his past sexual part­ ners [Conf. 8.11.26).

It was my old mistresses—trifles of trifles and vanities of vanities—who still enthralled me. They would tug at my fleshly garments and softly whisper: ‘Are you going to p art with us? And from th at moment will we never be with you anymore? And from th at moment will not this and th at be forbidden you forever?'34

The second voice, however, is continence, who ‘arrives on the scene in all of her allegorical splendour just before Augustine is completely a t his w it’s end’.35 She ap-

27 Brian Dobell .Augustine's Intellectual Conversion: The Journey from Platonism to Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 197.

28 Augustine, ‘Confessions’, 158. 29 Nisula, Augustine and the Functions o f Concupiscence, 287. 30 Augustine, 'Confessions’, 164. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., 169. 33 P. Rigby, The Theology o f Augustine’s Confessions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2015), 62. 34 Augustine, ‘Confessions’, 174. 35 James Wetzel, Augustine: A Guide fo r the Perplexed (London: Continuum, 2010), 101.

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pears to him as one who is ‘chastely dignified’, but Virtuously alluring’—a woman whose beauty he was not able to have in his ‘usual way’.36 She beckoned him with a smile, pointing to those who, in the strength provided to them by God, embraced the call to continence (Conf. 8.11.27): ‘Can you not do w hat all these young men and maidens can?’37 Still, he hesitates.

And I blushed violently, for I still heard the muttering of those trifles and hung suspended. Again, she seemed to speak, 'Stop your ears against those unclean members of yours, that they might be mortified. For they tell you of delights, but not according to the law of the Lord thy God.’ This struggle—rag­ ing in my heart—was nothing but the contest of self against self.38

Finally, however, upon hearing the mysterious voice of a child calling out to him to open the Bible, he reads the text of Rom. 13:14—'But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to gratify the lusts thereof’—and immediately, ‘there was infused into [his] heart something like the light of full certainty, and all the gloom of doubt vanished away’ (Conf. 8.12.29).39 Augustine was converted, and now, he testified to a new relation to concupiscence: 'Now was my soul free from ... wallowing in the mire and scratching the itch of lust. And 1 prattled like a child to thee, 0 Lord my God—my light, my riches, and my salvation' (Conf. 9.1.1).40 As such, the voice of continence prevailed against the voice of his past sexual partners calling out to him from his memory. Moving forward, Augustine committed him­ self to an ‘ascetic’ form of Christianity, no longer desiring ‘wife, children, wealth, or worldly honours'.41 As James Wetzel notes, however, while the newly converted Augustine had, at least for the time being, ‘stopped listening to old habit, he [had] yet to realise just how weak the resolve is th at comes from that’.42

III. Into the spacious halls of memory Now, for Augustine, it would appear th at the ascetic renunciation o f ‘sex' in all of its forms was somewhat of a self-imposed condition for his own conversion, and thus, it is perhaps reasonable to suggest, as Elizabeth Clark does, th at Augustine considered his conversion to be ‘as much to continence as it was to Christianity’.43 Of course, he indeed managed to pass through the rest of his life, from the point of his conversion, in strict sexual abstinence, but this in itself does not say much about the issue of sexual temptation.44 That is, to assess Augustine’s post-conversion sex-

36 Schlabach, ‘Continence’, 236. 37 Augustine, ‘Confessions', 175. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 176. 40 Ibid., 179. 41 Possidius, quoted in Elizabeth A. Clark, ‘Asceticism’, in Fitzgerald (ed.), Augustine through

the Ages, 67-71 (68). 42 Wetzel .Augustine, 101. 43 Clark, Asceticism', 68. 44 J. A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of

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ual purity solely on w hether or not he engaged in sex acts is somewhat rudim en­ tary, for what would ensue from his commitment to sexual abstinence was a ‘long stretch of years of disappointment, alienation, and tem ptation’, things which ‘he did not and could not yet see in those [early post-conversion] days’.45

Book Ten of the Confessions marks the end of the autobiographical section, and the beginning of a section of self-analysis. Speaking to God, he asks, 'I have seen and spoken of my harvest of things past (i.e. his former sins], b ut w hat am I now, at this very moment of making my confessions?’ (Conf. 10.3.4),46 He then speculates how he will be received by his future readers, and in so doing, reveals part of the answer to what he is now, at the very moment of writing (Con/ 10.4.5]: 'Will they wish me happiness when they learn how near I have approached thee by thy gifts? And will they pray for me when they learn how much I am still kept back by my own pon- dere [weight]?’47 Now, if this 'weight", which is ‘carnal habit’, still manifested itself in Augustine’s post-conversion life, and if 'carnal habit' is the manifestation of ‘the puddly concupiscence of the flesh’, then it follows that the Christian convert, while delivered from the guilt of Original Sin, remains concupiscent to some extent (con­ tra the theological anthropology of the Pelagians], Burnell puts it this way,

Because of residual concupiscence, moral perfection is impossible for a human being in this world ... concupiscence is steadily diminished (though only by grace] in the [converts] who make spiritual progress, b u t ... is not abolished until the saved are established in a state of perfection at the end of time.48

Indeed, Augustine would say this much himself in one of his treatises against the Pelagians: 'Still concupiscence remains, although its guilt is now taken away; and remain it will, until our entire infirmity be healed by the renewal of our inner man advancing day by day, when at last our outward man shall be clothed with incorruption.’49 Later, in his Enchiridion, his understanding developed further along the lines of the eighth chapter of Romans:

[Christians], as long as they live this mortal life, are in conflict with death ... even as they are being led by the Spirit of God (Rom. 8 :14-17]... they are also being led by their own spirits, so that, weighed down by the corruptible body, and influenced by certain human feelings, they fall a w a y ... and commit sin.50

Until the last day, then, concupiscence will continue to exist in the Christian, b ut no longer in the same manner. Prior to conversion, concupiscence reigns in the body (cf. Rom. 6:12], but the ‘converted’—i.e. the one who now 'wishes not to lust, but still lusts’—is delivered from the tyranny of concupiscence through the divine work

Chicago Press, 1987), 100. 45 O’Donnell, A New Biography, 76. 46 Augustine, ‘Confessions’, 203. 47 Ibid. 48 Burnell, ‘Concupiscence’, 225. 49 Augustine, ‘On Marriage and Concupiscence’, in The Anti-Pelagian Works o f St. Augustine,

ed. by Marcus Dods, 3 vols (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1872-1876), II, 126. 50 Augustine, ‘Enchiridion’, in Confessions and Enchiridion, " i l l .

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of regeneration.51 That is, while sexual concupiscence is inseparable from fallen sexuality, the ‘converted’ one is now, only by divine enablement, able to refuse to give consent to its allurement.

The problem, however, is that, as Paul says, T do not do what I want, but 1 do the very thing I hate' (Rom. 7:15).52 Here, Paul confesses to doing the evil th at he hates without giving his consent to it—the action itself being rooted in the m o w concupiscendi (impulse of concupiscence].53 ‘We sin', Augustine interprets, 'not by having this perverse desire, but by consenting to it.'54 He illustrates with the exam­ ple of one who experiences sexual desire upon seeing the wife of another man, and in response to the temptation within, he says to himself, ‘I w on't do it. Granted, it would be delightful, but 1 won’t do it.'55 In light of this reality of residual m o w con­ cupiscendi, Augustine admits the deficiencies in his own capacity to resist sexual temptation.56 Consider his prayer below (Conf. 10.4.5; 10.5.7),

And, 0 Lord ... have mercy upon me, according to thy great mercy, for thy name’s sake. And do not—on any account whatsoever—abandon what thou hast begun in me. Go on, rather, to complete what is yet imperfect in me ... [for] I know th at thou cannot suffer any violence, but I myself do not know w hat tem ptations I can resist, or to which I will succumb.57

What is dem onstrated in Book Ten, then, is a post-conversion division within the Christian self. As Wetzel puts it, Augustine’s 'feelings of self-division suggest th at he wears his carnal desires close to his heart. They do not fade away ... instead, they bide their time, and wait, like so many hungry stowaways, to plead exigency.'58 In his Soliloquies, this Augustine qua the divided Christian self is put on full display. Consider the following dialogue between Augustine and Reason (i.e. his own ra­ tional thoughts), wherein Reason says [Sol. 1.14.25),

Do you not observe how, only yesterday, we announced, as if secure, that we were no longer hindered by any fleshly plague, and that we loved wisdom alone, and th at we sought for and desired other things on her account only?

51 Augustine, 'On Man's Perfection in Righteousness', in Dods (ed.), The Anti-Pelagian Works o f St. Augustine, 1, 336; cf. Rom. 7:16.

52 There is, of course, debate as to w hether or not Paul is speaking of himself prior to or following his conversion here. In fact, Augustine himself changed his mind on the issue, initially believing Paul to have been speaking of his life prior to conversion. For more on Augustine’s interpretation of this text, see Patout Burns, 'Augustine’s Changed Interpretation of Romans 7 and His Doctrine of Inherited Sin’, in Augustine on Heart and Life: Essays in Memory o f William Harmless, S.J., ed. by J. J. O'Keefe and M. Cameron, Journal of Religion and Society Supplement Series, 15 (Omaha: Kripke Center, 2018), 104-27.

53 Han-Luen Komline, Augustine on the Will: A Theological Account, Oxford Studies in Historical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 162.

54 Augustine, On Romans, trans. by Paula F. Landes (Chico: Scholars Press, 1982), 7. 55 Augustine, Sermons, ed. by John E. Rostelle, trans. by Edmund Hill, 11 vols (New Rochelle:

New City Press, 1990-1997), V (1992), 75. 56 Komline, Augustine on the Will, 163. 57 Augustine, 'Confessions’, 204-05; cf. Phil. 1:6. 58 Wetzel, Augustine, 82.

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How worthless, how foul, how execrable, how horrible, seemed to you the embrace of a woman, as we were inquiring between ourselves concerning the desire for a wife! And yet, th at veiy night, being wakeful, when we again discussed this matter, how far other you felt than you would have supposed, when thrilled with these imagined blandishments and th at amorous soft­ ness! [...] May th at most confidential physician of yours therefore demon­ strate to you both w hat you have escaped by his care, and what y e t remains to be cured.59

Augustine replies in despair, ‘Silence, I beseech you, silence! Why do you so to r­ ment me? Why do you probe so deep? Now I weep beyond endurance! Henceforth I promise nothing, I presume nothing, lest you ask again concerning these things’ (Sol. 1.14.26).60 Of course, for the purposes of this article, it is interesting to note th at Reason appeals only to that with which the post-conversion Augustine had pre-conversion experience. It is to this particular relation between the sins of youth and present temptation th at we now turn our attention.

For the most part, the content of the Confessions is produced solely by Augus­ tine’s memory. Indeed, the entire book can be described as his 'memoirs’, so to speak—a historical account of his life up to the very moment of writing. One of the most pressing of all of his memories, however, was th at of an ex-lover. Indeed, he speaks much of her, but never so much as to speak her name—referring to her only as una, 'the only one’ (Conf. 4.2.2); or as ‘the one with whom I was used to sleeping’ (iConf. 6.15.25).61 Most Augustine scholars consider her to have either been a slave or a lower-class freed woman, and since Roman law forbade marriage between cer­ tain classes, it is suggested th at ‘concubinage’ was the only option.62 Some, howev­ er, prefer to maintain the ‘teasing elusiveness of Augustine's Latin’, which gives the reader no labels with which to assign their mysterious relationship—'He does not call her m istress or concubine any more than he calls her wife; rather, he manages not to call her anything.’63 Either way, it is certain that, once his m other had chosen out a bride for her son, Augustine’s una—having been with him thirteen years, and even having had a child with him—was only an ‘impediment’ th at required prom pt removal (Conf. 6.15.25):

Meanwhile, my sins were being multiplied. The one with whom I was used

59 Augustine, ‘The Soliloquies’, in Augustine: Earlier Writings, ed. and trans. by John H. S. Burleigh, The Library of Christian Classics, 6 (London: SCM Press, 1953), 43-44 (emphasis added).

60 Ibid., 44. 61 Augustine, 'Confessions’, 77,132; cf. E. Ann Matter, ‘Women’, in Fitzgerald (ed.), Augustine

through the Ages, 887-92 (889). 62 Kim Power, 'Concubine, Concubinage’, in ibid., 222-23 (222). 63 Burrus, Jordan, and Mackendrick, Seducing Augustine, 19. It has been argued that

Augustine's avoidance in using the word concubina was an attempt to maintain the ambiguity of the relationship, blurring the distinction between marriage and concubinage. For more on this, see Danuta Shanzer, ‘Avulsa a Latere Meo: Augustine’s Spare Rib— Augustine's Confessions 6.15.25 'Journal o f Roman Studies 92 (2002), 157-76.

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to sleeping was torn from my latere (side) as an impediment to my marriage, and my heart which ad h a ereb a t (cleaved) to her was torn and wounded until it bled. She w ent back to Africa, vowing to thee never to know another man, and leaving with me my natural son by her.64

Augustine's choice of language here reveals that he viewed his separation as a ‘re­ versal’, so to speak, of Gen. 2:21-24, wherein God, having created Eve from Adam’s latere, defines marriage: ‘A man shall leave his father and mother, and he shall ad- herebit to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.'65 By using this terminology, he invites the reader to consider his grief at the loss of his una in absolute contrast to Adam’s joy and pleasure at the creation of Eve, as if to say, 'God has cut away from me the flesh of my flesh' (contra Gen. 2:23).

Now, this section of the Confessions is relevant to the present study for two rea­ sons, with the first being Augustine's immediate response to being torn away from his una. The girl whom his mother chose for him was two years too young for m ar­ riage, and Augustine ‘could not bear the delay of the two years’.66 As such, he would prove himself to be ‘more faithful to the bed than to the woman’, finding himself another m istress to fill this void in his life.67 His own explanation was th at he was in ‘bondage’ to a perd u ra n tis consuetudinis, a 'lasting habit’, th at only became increas­ ingly dangerous over time. It is the fourth of w hat Augustine spoke of as four stages of sexual sin—(1) concupiscence, (2) consent, (3) action, and (4) habit.68 Once this fourth stage is reached, that which is now a sexual habit becomes a ‘necessity’ (cf. Conf. 8.5.10, cited above), for as soon as 'the deadly sweetness and pleasure of the action has taken hold of the soul, the soul becomes so entangled in th at habit of its own making that it cannot conquer what it fashioned for itself by sinning’.69

A second reason, however, is th at Augustine’s submitting of himself to a p er­ d u ra n tis consuetudinis—indeed, anyone's submitting of themselves to a perdurantis consuetudinis—is predicated upon the ‘memory’ of the first three stages. It is at this point, then, th at we must begin to traverse into the segments of Book Ten in which Augustine explores the mystery of m em oria. Introducing this mystery, he writes (Conf. 10.8.12; 10.8.14-15),

1 will soar, then, beyond this power of my nature also, still rising by degrees toward him who made me. And I enter the fields and into the spacious halls of memory, where are stored as treasures the countless images that have been brought into them from every m anner of things by the senses. There, in the

64 Augustine, ‘Confessions’, 132. 65 As noted by Virginia Burrus, The Sex Lives o f the Saints: An Erotics o f Ancient Hagiography

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 84. 66 Augustine, 'Confessions’, 132. 67 Burrus, Jordan, and Mackendrick, Seducing Augustine, 22. 68 Allan D. Fitzgerald, ‘Habit (Consuetudo)’, in Fitzgerald (ed.), Augustine through the Ages,

409-11 (409). 69 Augustine, quoted in Bart Van Egmond, Augustine's Early Thought on the Redemptive

Function o f Divine Judgment, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 120; cf. Komline, Augustine on the Will, 85.

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memory, is ... [all] that has been entrusted to it and stored in it, which oblivi­ on has not yet swallowed up and buried ... All this, I do within myself, in that huge hall of my memory ... Great is the power of memory, exceedingly great, 0 my God; a large and boundless inner hall! Who has plumbed the depths of it?70

For Augustine, memoria is clearly much more than the simple recollection of in­ formation. Memoria, rather, contains with it, and preserves within it, ‘the histori­ cal experience of the soul's single historical existence’.71 Included, therefore, is the imago Dei, the image of God, and thus, it is reasonable for Augustine to search for God in memoria, for memoria retains the imago Dei—albeit hidden deep within.72 As he searched therein for God, he discovered the 'unlimited capacity’ of memory (Conf. 10.9.16], able to store one’s sensory experience of the created order (Conf. 10.8.15]; abstract concepts learned in the sciences (Conf. 10.9.16]; and even the marks of emotion—‘For without being joyous now, I can rem em ber that 1 was once joyous, and without being sad, I can recall my past sadness' [Conf. 10.14.21].73 Au­ gustine also recognises, however, that God himself dwells in memory, but exactly where in memory? Hence, his questions, ‘What sort of lodging hast thou made for thyself there? What kind of sanctuary hast thou built for thyself?’74 But then, once his wall of corporeality has collapsed to the ground, he finds an answer [Conf. 10.26.37-10.27.38].

Where, then, did I find you so as to be able to learn of you—save in yourself beyond me. Place, there is none. We go backward and forward, and there is no place. Everywhere and at once ... Belatedly I have loved you, 0 Beauty so ancient and so new, belatedly I have loved you. See, you were within and I was without, and I sought you out there. Unlovely, I rushed wildly among the lovely things you have made. You were with me, but I was not with you.75

These sentim ents would be a fitting conclusion to the Confessions—but then, seem­ ingly out of the blue, he laments: ‘Woe is me! Lord, have pity on me; my evil sor­ rows contend with my good joys, and on which side the victory lies I do not know ... You are the Physician, I am the sick man; you are merciful, I need mercy’ [Conf. 10.28.39].76 As O'Donnell puts it, if the Confessions ‘were merely the story of Augus­ tine’s ascent to God, the work could well end with 10.27.38’.77 That it does not, how­ ever, is indicative of the fact that, despite clear progress being made, there remains something that still needed to be addressed—and th at something was none other

70 Augustine, 'Confessions’, 208-10. 71 Wayne Hankey, ‘Mind’, in Fitzgerald (ed.), Augustine through the Ages, 563-67 (566]. 72 Rigby, The Theology of Augustine's Confessions, 116. 73 Augustine, 'Confessions’, 213. 74 Ibid., 223. 75 Ibid., 224. 76 Ibid., 225. 77 James O’Donnell, Augustine: Confessions, 3 vols (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992],

III, 150.

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than the ‘wounds of concupiscence'.78 The next major division of Book Ten [Conf. 10.30.41-10.39.64j explores these

‘wounds’ in accordance with the structure of 1 John 2:16, ‘For all th at is in the world—concupiscentia carnis (the lusts of the flesh), and concupiscentia oculorum (the lusts of the eyes), and a m bitione saeculi (the pride of life)—is not from the Fa­ ther, but is from the world.’79 With his ensuing discussion on these three concupis­ cences, Augustine 'catalogues with unsettling precision all the ways th at the world [still] seduces him’, effectively providing a detailed summary of his post-conversion struggle with sin, still very much in need of divine aid.80 He begins by expressing his success in hitherto observing the divine imperative unto complete abstinence from fornication, and yet, this is partially undone almost immediately, for he confesses, ‘There still exist in my memory ... the images of such things as my [sexual] habits had fixed there' (C onf 10.30.41).81 Not only would the lustful memories of these im­ ages cause him trouble during his waking hours, but even during his sleep, invading his mind without consent 'not only so as to give pleasure, but even to obtain consent and w hat very closely resembles the deed itself. Indeed, the illusion of the image prevails to such an extent [that it] persuades [him] when sleeping to what the real­ ity cannot do when awake.’82 Thus, Augustine, in a mom ent of despair, prays that his soul would be ‘wrenched free from concupiscentiae visco expedita (the sticky glue of lust)’, in order that, even in dreams, he might 'neither commit nor consentto debasing corruptions which come through sensual images, and which result in the pollution of the flesh’ (C onf 10.30.42).83

We may conclude here that, according to Augustine, memories of past sins may trigger present and future sins. That is, the historical ‘carrying out’ or ‘performing’ of the sin—from the consent given to concupiscence, to the wilfully repeated action th at then becomes ‘habit’—is stored in m em oria, and at any given moment or situ­ ation (especially those th at are similar to the one in which the sin was initially car­ ried out), th at memory presents itself, functioning as the m o tiva tin g fo r c e behind the temptation to repeat the act.84 To once again yield to this temptation, then, is to further strengthen the ‘fixation’ of the lustful images in the mind. Or, in Augus­ tine’s own words, ‘Such [carnal] delight strongly "fixes" in memory what it brings from the slippery senses.’85 Therefore, the one with their 'spacious halls of memory’

78 Pamela Bright, ‘Book Ten: The Self Seeking God Who Creates and Heals’, in A Reader's Companion to Augustine’s Confessions, ed. by Kim Paffenroth and Robert P. Kennedy (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 155-66 (162).

79 The Latin here is the text of the Latin Vulgate. 80 Burrus, Jordan, and Mackendrick, Seducing Augustine, 92; cf. Schlabach, ‘Continence’,

236. See also John M. Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 102,140,188.

81 Augustine, 'Confessions’, 226. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid. 84 Egmond, Augustine's Early Thought on the Redemptive Function o f Divine judgment, 82. 85 Augustine, ‘De Musica VI (391)', in Musical Aesthetics: A Historical Reader, ed. by Edward

A. Lippman, Aesthetics in Music, 4, 2 vols (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986-1988), 1

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filled with images formed by past sexual habits is constantly going to be at w ar with dispositions th at they once willingly formed in themselves.

IV. My weight is my love What, then, is a believer to do—or, rather, w hat can a believer do—in light of this re­ sidual concupiscence? As seen above, the guilt of concupiscence is cleansed through regeneration. Therefore, those Christians who have filled their memory with im­ ages of a pre-conversion sexual life can rest assured in God’s forgiveness of their sins. Regeneration, however, does not (typically] wash away those memories. That is, the images cannot be erased—hence the continual experience of erotic dreams, lustful impulses, and the like in Augustine’s post-conversion life (Conf. 10.30.41], even as the consecrated bishop of Hippo Regius in Northern Africa.86 As Carl Vaught put it, 'Intellectual and volitional transform ations do n o t cancel suppressed physi­ ological needs, and the images of past sexual acts persist in [the] memory with lasting consequences.’87 In sleep, these consequences are experienced seemingly w ithout restraint, for his capacity to reason appears to fall asleep along with him. When awake, on the other hand, they are not made manifest alone, but along with another complexity—namely, the curiositas (‘curiosity’] for the novel, or the unu­ sual; what Augustine would call the ‘striving for new experiences through the flesh’, and a ‘passion for experimenting and knowledge’ (C onf 10.35.54-55].88 Of course, by this definition, ‘curiosity’ would not qualify as a ‘vice’, but since it constitutes ‘an excessive [and] unregulated’ appetite for things th at derive from the ‘allurements of the eyes’, Augustine considered curiositas to be one of the chief vices.89

Curiositas operates, however, through the ‘mediation’ of memory—th at is, through the images that the memory presents and reflects upon—and in this man­ ner, the memory, which is ‘the site within the soul marked by the "habits” of the heart’, functions as a kind of ‘portal’ between the past and the present, where one’s past habits are able to come to life in the present.90 In the words of Pamela Bright, the memory functions as the ‘continuation of the earlier trap th at continues long after the original act (of falling into the trap] is over’.91 It is the ‘re-presentation,’

(1986), 53. 86 John M. Rist, ‘Awe-ful Augustine: Sin, Freedom, and Inscrutability’, in Augustine Deformed:

Love, Sin, and Freedom in the Western Moral Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 28-61 (59); see also P. Remes, 'Inwardness and Infinity of Selfhood: From Plotinus to Augustine’, in Ancient Philosophy o f the Self, ed. by P. Remes and J. Sihvola (New York: Springer, 2008), 155-76 (174).

87 C. Vaught, Access to God in Augustine’s Confessions: Books X-XII1 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 81.

88 Augustine, ‘Confessions’, 233-34. 89 Natale Joseph Torchia, ‘Curiosity’, in Fitzgerald (ed.), Augustine through the Ages, 259-61. 90 P. Fredriksen, ‘The Confessions as Autobiography’, in A Companion to Augustine, ed. by

Mark Vessey, Blackwell Companion to the Ancient World (Malden: Blackwell, 2012), 87- 98 (96-97).

91 Bright, ‘Book Ten: The Self Seeking God Who Creates and Heals’, 163.

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so to speak, of that same trap over and over again, and each time it succeeds in its ensnaring of one’s soul, it tastes better. Hence, ‘But now the necessity of habit is sweet to me, and it is against this sweetness that I must fight, lest I be enthralled by it' (Conf. 10.31.43).92 And, of course, by ‘fight’, Augustine recognises that, in and of himself, he does not stand a chance—divine grace, rather, is always necessary: 'My life is full of such lapses, and my one hope is your great mercy’ [Conf. 10.35.57).93

It is important to note, however, that Augustine views the ‘portal’ of memory as a kind of double-edged sword, for also within the memory is his God: ‘Thou hast done this honour to my memory to take up thy abode in if [Conf 10.25.36).94 Having the capacity for two very different outcomes, Augustine thus calls this ‘portal’ his pondus (commonly translated in English versions of the Confessions as ‘weight’).95 The concept has its roots in the classical Greek philosophers, who spoke of the four 'classical elements' (fire, air, water, and earth) as continually seeking their pondus (i.e. their ‘proper places’).96 Pondus, therefore, includes both gravitas (‘heaviness’) and levitas (Tightness’)—and this 'neutrality of weight' became for Augustine a model for a twofold, bidirectional love.97 He writes [Conf 13.7.8; 13.9.10),

How can I speak of this pondere (weight) of concupiscence, which drags us downward into the deep abyss, and [the weight] of love (that is, a love for God) which lifts us up by thy Spirit who hovered over the waters ... For concupiscence and love are not certain places into which we are plunged, and out of which we are lifted again ... They are both feelings; they are both amores (loves) ... A pondus does not tend downward only, but moves to its own place. Fire tends upward; a stone tends downward. They are propelled by their own weight, seeking their own places. Oil poured under the water rises above the water; and water poured on oil sinks under the o i l ... Pondus meum amor meus, eoferor quocumque feror (my weight is my love; by it, I am carried wherever I am carried).98

The directions of the twofold love here, then, are the two things, or the two con­ cepts, that Augustine has used so far as predicates for pondus —'[M]y own weight ... was carnal habit' [Conf. 10.7.23), referring to his concupiscence, i.e. his love of the lustful things of the flesh; 'My weight is my love’ [Conf. 13.9.8), referring to his reli­ gious affections, i.e. his love for his God. Both of these amores, although necessarily antithetical, are housed together in the memory, operating as a kind of 'cognitive

92 Augustine, 'Confessions’, 227. 93 Ibid., 235. See also Conf 10.30.42, ibid., 226. 94 Ibid., 223. 95 Fredriksen, ‘The Confessions as Autobiography’, 97. 96 Frederick Van Fleteren, ‘Natural Place' in Fitzgerald (ed.), Augustine through the Ages,

584-85. 97 As noted by Susan Schreiner, 'Introduction: Augustine Our Contemporary', in Augustine

Our Contemporary: Examining the Self in Past and Present, ed. by Willemien Otten and Susan Schreiner (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018), loc. 15 of 620, Scribd.

98 Augustine, ‘Confessions’, 303-04.

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gravitational force’ that drags the subject in two completely opposite directions." As such, an anthropological self-division in the Christian is once again the conclu­ sion of Augustine's thought.

Thus, if the reader approaches the Confessions with a hope of finding a quick solution to their struggles with their own concupiscence, they may find themselves putting the book down in disappointment. While Augustine does see a certain val­ ue in having his Confessions read by fellow concupiscent believers—that they may 'stop dozing along in despair ... but will instead awake in the love of [God’s] mercy and the sweetness of [his] grace, by which he that is weak is strong’ (Conf. 10.3.4)— he ultimately gives no solution to the problem of post-conversion concupiscence.100

Indeed, throughout the book, Augustine articulates a deep-seated regret toward his pre-conversion sexual life, even going as far as regretting his unwilful dreams; while at the same time acknowledging that, by his own resolve, he cannot do any­ thing to erase those images that are now 'fixed' in his memory.101 Christians who experience this surely know the guilt that such rumination can produce, for they know, as Augustine w rites elsewhere, th at 'God commands some things which we cannot do, in order that we might know w hat we ought to ask of him’ (contra the Pelagian ‘ought implies can' doctrine); and therefore, one’s inability by no means reduces their culpability.102 Due to his reflections on statem ents like these, Robert J. O’Connell suggests th at Augustine’s thought here has produced 'some of the most depressing reading in all of Christian literature’, chronicling no less than 'the exces­ sive wariness of a man who has been burned by sense-delights’, only then to face the ever-present burning of the m em o ry of these delights.103

Others, however, recognise great value in Augustine’s conclusions, for if the reader discovers anything, it will surely be a refreshing dose of honesty. As one author has put it,

If you feel that your w orst enemies are still inside you—e.g. guilt, or lust, or a constantly defeated Christian life—then Augustine’s Confessions may just be the book for you ... Augustine’s honesty and openness before God are so re­ freshing and relieving to a lifetime of bottling things up and postponing that catharsis of soul which many of us need so badly.104

99 Vault, 201; cf. Rethinking Trinitarian Theology: Disputed Questions and Contemporary Issues in Trinitarian Theology, ed. by Giulio Maspero and Robert J. Wozniak (New York: Continuum, 2012), 394-95. Here, it is said that, by chasing the love of concupiscence, 'we stumble with our restless, disoriented, confused desires’ perpetually 'dragging us’ downward.

100 Augustine, 'Confessions’, 203. 101 Rist, Augustine Deformed, 58. 102 Augustine, 'A Treatise on Grace and Free-Will’, in Dods (ed.), The Anti-Pelagian Works, III,

46. 103 Robert J. O’Connell, St. Augustine's Confessions: The Odyssey o f the Soul (New York:

Fordham University Press, 1989), 133. 104 James M. Houston, Because o f Christ: Living Out the Gift o f God through Faith (Colorado

Springs: Cook, 2005), 208.

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With this in mind, the present work will conclude with a consideration of Augus­ tine's final section of Book Ten, along with a last pursuit for a potential exhortation that can be drawn from its contents for those enduring the residual pondus of post­ conversion concupiscence.

V. Conclusions It has been argued above that those with memories of a pre-conversion sexual life will have no means of erasing such memories, and no guarantees at all of a place in the fallen world in which the memories will not present themselves. While it is true that, upon conversion, none of their pre-conversion sexual sins (or any of their sins at all, for that matter) will be held against them in the divine court of law, it is also true that the numerous effects of those sins, to which they once gave consent, might remain with them for the rest of their mortal existence. Having formed the habits, and having the images fixed in their minds, rest from concupiscence, wherein their amores will be directed appropriately toward God, will seem to them like a distant reality. As Bernard McGinn puts it, for all those who are 'still caught in the toils of fallen flesh, any interior vision of God’s nature (i.e. any beatific vision), and any oth­ er experience of God in the spiritual senses, [is] always partial and fleeting’.105 The inner vision of concupiscence, conversely, is constant (Conf 10.37.60; 10.40.65; 10.41.66):

By these temptations, we are daily tried, O Lord; we are tried unceasingly ... in this matter, you know the groans of my heart, and the rivers of my eyes, for I am not able to know for certain how far I am clean of this plague; and 1 stand in great fear of all my secret faults, which your eyes perceive, though mine do n o t... But still, by these aerumnosis ponderibus (wretched weights) of mine, I reccido (relapse) into these common things, and am sucked in by my old customs, and am held. 1 sorrow much, yet 1 am still closely held. To this extent, then, the burden of habit presses us down. I can exist in this fashion, but I do not wish to do so. In that other way I wish I were, but I am not able to be; miser utrubique (in both ways I am miserable) ... With a wounded heart, I have seen thy brightness, and having been beaten back, I cried, ‘Who can attain to it? I am cut off from before your eyes.’ You are the Truth, presiding over all things; but I, because of my covetousness, did not wish to lose you. But still, along with you, 1 wished also to possess a lie ... By this I lost you, for you will not condescend to be enjoyed along with a lie.106

As discussed above, the content of Augustine's Confessions offers no method to re­ move the 'wretched weights’ of the memory that cause a person to relapse into ‘carnal habit’. Hence the observation of Jean-Franfois Lyotard, who notes that, after thirteen books of arduous confession, 'the penitent finds himself on the threshold

105 B. McGinn, ‘Visions and Visualisations in the Here and Hereafter’, Harvard Theological Review, 98/3 (2005), 227-46 (230).

106 Augustine, ‘Confessions’, 237, 240-41.

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of [God’s] door, still being stuck in the pall of affairs, pulling in every direction on the harness of the before, or the after’.107 In this way, Augustine—never ceasing to offer his confession—dem onstrated th at the very act of confession itself Is imma- nently repetitive (i.e., as Lyotard puts it, 'the soul can think of nothing but returning to its crimes’].108 W hether it was his first year since conversion or his thirteenth, his prayer remained the same—eripe me ab omni temptatione, 'Deliver me from all temptation!’ (Con/ 10.31.46 cf. Matt. 6:13].109

Perhaps rather than searching for a method of addressing the ‘weight’ of mem­ ory in the content of the Confessions, then, somewhat of a method might be the act of confession itself. We might say that, for those Christians with a pre-conversion sexual life, the memory is twice scarred—firstly, by the 'images’ of past sexual sins; and secondly, by God himself, or more specifically, by God’s ‘entry’ into memo­ ry.110 The former have been ‘fixed’ there—placed in one of the 'cells’ of a 'w onder­ ful filing system’ (Conf. 10.9.16]—by sexual habit, but the latter cannot be ‘fixed’ anywhere, for 'place, there is none’ wherein God might be 'filed away’, so to speak (iConf. 10.26.37].* * 111 And yet, Augustine makes clear several times in his work that his search for God in memory is ultimately dependent upon the ‘spokeness’, or the ‘communicability’, of his confessions (e.g. Conf. 10.1.1; 10.2.2; 10.3.3].112 Therefore, we may say that God is not 'in place’ within the memory, b ut God may indeed be known through confession, which does not proceed from a 'place', but rather, ‘dis­ places memory (that is, it surpasses the "spacious halls of memory," along with its "wonderful filing system’’] and refigures it within the "confessive expression" itself’.113 In short, through the rhetorical act of confession, God is remembered, and he is remembered without being 'placed'.

How might this confessive remembrance assist the Christian resist images or habits from a pre-conversion sexual life? As noted at the beginning of this paper, it is improbable (perhaps impossible in some contexts] for contemporary Chris­ tians to navigate through the hypersexualised twenty-first century West without unwillingly being exposed to, and even drawn toward, the allurements of fallen sexuality—and those with memories of consenting to such allurements (and thus, of having formed sexual ‘habits’, giving rise to a 'necessity'] will have little hope of resistance apart from divine aid. Of course, as the people whom the New Testament describes as ‘sojourners and exiles' in the present world (1 Pet. 2:11], the appropri­ ate Christian response may not be to engage in any kind of iconoclastic destruction of advertisements featuring underw ear models, for, while it may sound fatalistic,

107 Jean-Franfois Lyotard, The Confession o f Augustine, trans. by Richard Beardsworth (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000], 14.

108 Ibid. See also Dave Tell, 'Beyond Mnemotechnics: Confession and Memory in Augustine’, Philosophy and Rhetoric 39/3 (2006], 233-53 (248].

109 Augustine, 'Confessions’, 229. 110 Tell, ‘Beyond Mnemotechnics’, 248. 111 Augustine, 'Confessions’, 211, 224. 112 For more on this, see Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and

the Ethics o f Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996], 213. 113 Tell, ‘Beyond Mnemotechnics’, 249.

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the world is by no means going to change for the sake of Christian sexual purity. Perhaps by means of Augustinian confessive expression, through the displace­

ment of memory, the concupiscent Christian might remember God—and in this way, rather than giving consent to sexual habit, they might turn and do as Joseph once did (Gen. 39:11-12):

But one day, when [Joseph] went into the house to do his work, and none of the men of the house were there in the house, [Potiphar's wife] caught him by his garment, saying, 'Lay with me.’ But he left his garment in her hand, and he fled and got out of the house.

Abstract It is increasingly difficult for Christians in the twenty-first century West to avoid the influence of a hypersexualised culture, particularly for Christians with memories of a sexual life (outside of marriage) prior to conversion. The classic case of this category is that of Augustine, who spoke of‘the images of such things as [his] sexual habits had fixed’ in his memory, a symptom of what called ‘the lust disease'. In his Confessions, he engages in a philosophical enquiry into the mysteries of the memo­ ry, searching for God in the ‘place’ of memory, but concluding that the incorporeal God cannot be found in a ‘place’. While it is impossible to erase memories of one’s pre-conversion sexual life through one's volition, Augustine found that it is possible to ‘displace’ memory so as to find the unplaceable God. In this way, one might see greater success in the struggle against residual, post-conversion concupiscence.

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