On my first day of divinity school, the girl who sat beside me (who would, incidentally, become a very close friend of mine) took a look at the Murillo painting on the cover of my copy of Augustine's Confessions and said: “What's happened to his clothes? He looks like he's been ravished!”
She wasn't wrong, though I had never noticed. An odd thing, I know, with Augustine being one of history's most famously lustful rakes. His is the paradigmatic story of a young man exhausting himself on every worldly pleasure only to find his interior life abysmally barren. His story has also become another kind of model: That of the once-liberated pagan, happy and free in sexual innocence, now dour and beset by torturous guilt on account of his Christian morals, the consummate pessimist.
Read Full Article »