Augustinian Studies 25 (1994) 179-199

Augustine and the Spirituality

of Desire
William S. Babcock
Perkins School of Theology
Southern Methodist University

The term spirituality, it need hardly be said, carries a sometimes be-

wildering range of meanings; and a little sorting out might be in order at
the start. On the one hand, the term can refer quite narrowly to the ordered
patterns in which various religious traditions have represented the purg-
ing of the self and the sequential stages of its ascent to contemplation and
ultimately to union with the divine. On the other hand, and far more
broadly, it can also refer to the whole shape and character of the religios-
ity that obtains in a particular culture or during a given era.! In the former
sense, the term has a reasonably determinate meaning; and it gathers un-
der its wing a reasonably discrete set of religious practices and experi-
ences as these are portrayed and interpreted in more or less specific types
of religious writings. Here, for instance, would fit the views, practices,
and literary works of the Sufis in the Islamic tradition or of the early
monastic theologians and the medieval mystics from the Christian tradi-
tion. In the latter sense, in contrast, the term becomes more elusive and
more difficult to pin down. It appears to take in the whole complex of
conceptions through which the interaction between the human and the
divine is understood and represented in any given culture or sub-culture;
and, even more importantly, it includes the full range of practices through
which that interaction, so understood, is actually enacted, the full range
of imageries through which it is portrayed, and the full range of sanctions
through which it is both authorized and enforced, whether officially or
unofficially.2 It is in something like this sense, I think, that we might
speak of medieval spirituality or native American spirituality or any num-
ber of other types and forms of human spirituality or religiosity.3

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Somewhere between these two, I would like to think, there is also

room for a third meaning of spirituality, less definite than the first and
yet more focused than the second. We might use the term, in this third
sense, to refer to the various forms and patterns in which the religious
life is both delineated and lived in one religious setting or another. Spiri-
tuality, in this sense, will obviously include the first meaning of the
term; the asceticism of the monk and the contemplation of the mystic
will clearly count as forms or patterns in which the religious life is de-
lineated and lived. Yet the term will now reach out beyond these rela-
tively restricted cases. It will also take in quite ordinary persons, perhaps
no better than they should be, who are less disciplined in their religious
lives and whose orientation toward the divine has by no means driven
out or quelled their enduring impulses toward other things as well. Even
with this extension of its range, however, the term still will not cover as
much as it does in its broadest meaning. It remains centered specifically
on the religious life itself, rather than widening out to include all the
dimensions of religious culture writ large. Once again, of course, the
distinction cannot be drawn too sharply. The religious life is always de-
lineated and lived within a wider religious culture to which it belongs,
by which it is sustained, and from which it cannot be uprooted. But it
need not be construed as a mere reflection of its culture, simply repeat-
ing the culture's patterns in undifferentiated form; it can also stand out
against its background, in one way or another, through its depth or its
intensity or its specific character. And it is Augustine's view of the spe-
cific character of the religious life as a struggle between competing pat-
terns of desire within a single self that I want to examine in this essay.
For Augustine, as for most of us, the spirituality of desire is not the
spirituality of a fully integrated self caught up in one all-embracing
longing for God; it is rather the spirituality of a self caught in a conflict
of desires in which its yearning for God must compete with other yearn-
ings that retain a tenacious, if diminished, power. 4

I.
I want to begin, however, on rather different, although quite familiar,
ground. In the eighth book of the Confessions, Augustine brings the
story of his conversion to its climax in the famous scene in the garden in
Milan. 5 Here Augustine portrays himself in the midst of a deep inner
turmoil, drawn to a life of continence and yet held back by the inertial
force of his ancient habits of desire, delighting in eternity and yet still
held captive by his continuing - if weakene - delight in things tempo-

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ral, himself willing and yet himself unwilling to give himself over to
God. While embroiled in this inner agony, Augustine reports, he heard a
child's voice, coming from a neighboring house and crying, tolle, lege,
"take, read" (Con! 8.12.29).6 Interpreting the cry as a divine command,
he picked up a copy of Paul's epistles, opened it at random, and read the
first passage to catch his eye: "not in revels and drinking bouts, not in
sexual adventures and acts of shame, not in strife and envy, but put on
the lord Jesus Christ and take no thought for the flesh in its desires"
(Rom 13:13-14).1 With the reading of this passage, the moment ofreso-
lution came. Immediately upon finishing the sentence, Augustine's heart
was suddenly filled with the bright light of surety, and all the dark shad-
ows of his earlier waverings disappeared. No longer seeking a wife or
pursuing any ambition in this world, he found himself standing squarely
on that rule of faith where, years earlier, God had shown Monica in a
dream-vision that he would stand (Con! 8.12.30; see 3.11.19).
For our purposes, however, the resolution of Augustine's turmoil is
less important than his way of describing and interpreting his inner con-
flict itself. It is just here, in his description and interpretation of that
conflict, that he finally and definitively displaces his own earlier
Manichaean anthropology and replaces it with a new, anti-Manichaean
anthropology that is distinctively his own - the anthropology that will
provide the basis for his own view of the religious life. We need, then, to
take account of the process of displacement and replacement.
From the very beginning of Book VIII, Augustine makes it clear that
the story he tells will be the story of his release from the chains that held
him bound. More precisely, in the language of Psalm 115, it will be the
story of how God broke those chains (8.1.1); and, in fact, the imagery of
chains and captivity recurs in dominant patterns throughout the book
(see, e.g., 8.5.10, 8.6.13, 8.8.20, 8.9.25). The point is not unimportant.
Unless we notice it, we might think that Augustine's problem was merely
a problem of indecision, that he simply could not make up his mind. s In
fact, however, Augustine takes great pains to exclude such a diagnosis of
his plight. He insists, from beginning to end, that his intellectual doubts
and hesitations had by this point all been put to rest: it is not greater
certainty of God, but more stability in God that he now desires (8.1.1).
Nor is he speaking of a merely intellectual conviction that had not yet
penetrated to the levels of affection and will. He makes it plain at the
outset that he is no longer inflamed by the desires of this-worldly ambi-
tion and that the appeal of honor or wealth no longer delights him above
the sheer sweetness of God and the sheer beauty of God's house which

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he loves (8.1.2). Despite the common practice, then, we cannot say-

or, at least, we cannot say without qualification - that Book VIII por-
trays the conversion of Augustine's will as Book VII portrays the con-
version of his intellect. At the crucial points, Augustine insists that he
wills both God and the world and that he himself - his "selI'- belongs
on both sides of the equation: he is the one who wills both the one and
the other (8.5.10; and especially 8.10.22). Thus it is too simple to say
that the problem Augustine faces is the problem of getting the will to
embrace what the intellect has already accepted. In fact, Augustine
would not have his problem at all if his will had not already embraced
the God of his intellectual conviction even while it continued, intracta-
bly, to will other things as well. At issue is no mere question of indeci-
sion, but rather the far deeper and more perplexing question of the self's
resistance to itself, of its refusal, so to speak, to love and to will one
thing.
In the culture of late antiquity, it was the Manichees, more than any
others, who had corne to grips with this question and provided an inter-
pretation of the human experience from which it arises. For them, how-
ever, the internal opposition of self to self represented not so much a
conflict within the self as a conflict between two selves struggling for
dominance within a single person. In their view, as Augustine represents
it, there are two souls within human beings, one good and a very particle
of God, the other evil and an alien intrusion from the forces of darkness.
The Manichaean scheme, however, dissolves the very internal conflict
that it seems to portray, transforming the struggle of the self with itself
into a struggle between two selves. Since the one soul is wholly good
and the other wholly evil, neither of the Manichaean souls is internally
divided in any sense at all; and their conflict is thus a conflict between
two psychic forces each of which is understood to be wholly alien to the
other. The two are inevitably at odds with each other, but neither is at
odds with itself.9

It is important to note that Augustine does not seek to deny or to

avoid the human experience that the Manichees purport to portray and to
interpret. He makes no attempt to transmute it into something else - the
struggle of reason, for instance, to gain control over the passions or of
intellect to convince the will to follow where it leads. His aim, then, is
not to displace one experience and to replace it with another, but rather
to construe the same experience in a way that will not draw him back
into the Manichaean camp to which he had once himself belonged. To do
so, he tacitly reverts to arguments and imagery that he had deployed

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against the Manichees several years earlier in his treatise De duabus ani-
mabus and in his debate with Fortunatus the Manichee. There, in order
to work out the sense in which we can be said to be held captive by sin,
but without losing our moral responsibility for the sin that holds us fast,
he had already made use of the image of a person bound in chains. In the
De duabus animabus, in particular, he had suggested that we consider,
first, the case of a person so tightly bound that, when another moves his
hand to do something evil, he is powerless to resist (De duab. an. 10.13).
In such a case, Augustine argued, no one would hold the bound person
responsible for the evil he was forced to do. We would see that he was
wholly in the other's power and, therefore, that he was not in any sense
the agent of the evil he was compelled to enact. But suppose, in contrast,
that the person had himself originally contrived to have himself bound
in chains; suppose that his aim had actually been to make it look as
though he were being compelled against his will and thus to make it look
as though he bore no responsibility for the act. In this instance, Augus-
tine argued, our assessment would be very different. It is still true, of
course, that, at the time of the act itself, the person was wholly unable to
resist. But now we would insist that the person was responsible for that
very fact, that he had himself arranged the circumstances in which he
was no longer at his own disposal and thus could not help but do what he
was "forced" to do. And this, Augustine insisted, is the example that
applies to the human case. Human beings are themselves the contrivers
of their own moral helplessness; they have brought upon themselves the
internal resistance of the self to its own promptings and desires for the
good.
It is in the De duabus animabus, too, that Augustine proposes, appar-
ently for the first time, that the mechanism (so to speak) of the soul's
self-induced captivity is the sheer inertial force of the habitual patterns
of desire and action that we have authored for ourselves. Through our
own action, he suggests, "it has been made difficult for us to abstain
from carnal things .... So it happens, that when we strive after better
things, habit ... and our sins in some way begin to militate against us
and to put obstacles in our way." And he goes on to observe that it is
precisely this resisting force of habit that has led "some foolish persons"
to imagine that there is another, evil soul in human beings which com-
pels us into sin (De duab. an. 13.19),10 As early as 392 then, when
Augustine wrote the De duabus animabus, there are strong intimations
that the notion of habit (consuetudo) will provide the key to his alternate
interpretation of the experience which the Manichees had construed as a

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conflict of two opposing souls. Not an alien power, but self-contracted

consuetudo provides the chains with which we are bound - with which,
in fact, we have bound ourselves. 11
In his debate with Fortunatus, held in the same year, Augustine is led
to reinforce the point and to link it explicitly with the theology of Paul. 12
To support the Manichaean claim that the good soul is compelled to sin
by a contrary nature that holds it captive, Fortunatus cited certain
Pauline verses, especially Galatians 5: 17, where Paul asserts that the de-
sires of the flesh and of the spirit are mutually opposed, with the result
that what we want is not what we do, and Romans 7:23-25 with its well
known picture of "another law in my members, at war with the law of my
mind and taking me captive to the law of sin and death" (C. Fort. 21). In
response, Augustine concedes that we are, in fact, held captive by sin,
but turns the point to his own advantage by arguing that we are ourselves
the ones who have contrived our own bondage (c. Fort. 22). Humanity
as first created could will freely, could observe God's commands without
internal resistance to its own willing. Through the freely willed sin of the
first human being, however, we who descend from Adam's stock have
been plunged into necessity (in necessitatem praecipitati sumus). Even
a cursory consideration of our own experience, Augustine insists, will
confirm the point. Before we are implicated in any habit, we have the
free choice of acting or not acting in any given case. Once we act in that
freedom, however, and once the pernicious sweetness (dulcedo) and
pleasure (voluptas) of the act take their grip on us, the soul is so impli-
cated in its own habit that it cannot afterwards break the hold of what it
has contrived for itselfthrough its own sinning. What does battle against
the soul, then, is not another soul, but the habit which it has itself con-
structed in its own flesh; and so long as we live according to the flesh,
Augustine concludes, we are burdened by the necessity of our own habit
(necessitatem consuetudinis nostrae): what we want is not what we do.
Only when divine grace evokes love for God in us are we again set free
from the law of sin and death and begin, once again, to be just (C. Fort.
22).
In substituting habit for a second soul, however, Augustine is not sim-
ply renaming the alien nature, the intrusion from the race of darkness,
posited by the Manichees. Rather he is in the process of devising a new
psychology of inner conflict, a psychology of competing desires in all of
which the self is genuinely engaged. It is true enough, of course, that for
Augustine habit has a penal character and that he can, on occasion, speak
of poenalis consuetudo, identifying it with the law of sin that we serve

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with the flesh (as, for example, in Exp. ad Gal. 46). But this punishment
is not so much externally as internally related to the act for which it is
the penalty.!3 It is inflicted on us by God, to be sure; it is not, however,
inflicted from without, but from within. It is not, therefore, like a prison
cell that holds us within limits externally and artificially imposed. The
penalty is rather the very psychic disruption and disturbance that follows
from our turn away from God and from the setting of our hearts on lesser
things.I4 Because these things are fleeting and transient, subject to time
and chance, they finally escape our efforts to bring them or to keep them
under our control. To make these things the objects of our desires, there-
fore, is to afflict ourselves with both a fever of longing for what we do
not have and a dread oflosing what we dO;15 and this affective oscillation
between longing and dread has, for Augustine, a penal force. It tinges
our entire emotive life with a deep instability and a gnawing dissatisfac-
tion as we seek to secure our happiness through the realization of a de-
sire for things that, ironically, can never be secure. Thus the very activa-
tion of this desperate pattern of desire, which arises from "the pernicious
sweetness and pleasure" (C. Fort. 22) of the act, is itself the act's pen-
alty. Through the continuing pull of that sweetness and pleasure upon the
self, this pattern of desire hardens into custom and becomes, as Augus-
tine will say in various places, virtually a second nature (see, e.g., De lib.
arb. 3.18.52) or a consuetudo naturalis (see Exp. ad Gal. 48) to the self.
It is, however, and it remains the self's own pattern of desire, forged by
its own act and not imposed on it from the outside, whether by divine
punishment or by the "contrary nature" of the Manichees. In Augustine's
view, then, I have contrived my own captivity; I am imprisoned by my
own desire.
And this is precisely the point that Augustine wants to make in por-
traying his inner turmoil in Book VIII of the Confessions. Despite his
longing for God, he is held fast, as he says, not by an alien chain, but by
the iron fetters of his own will (Conf. 8.5.10). Here, in a single sentence,
he recapitulates the movement from initial incidence of will to bitter in-
ternal necessity that he had first worked out in his earlier anti-
Manichaean writings: from perverse willing arises desire (libido); and
when desire is served, it becomes habit (consuetudo); and when habit is
not resisted, it acquires the force of necessity (8.5.10). Now, Augustine
reports, a new will was beginning to make itself felt within him, a will
to serve God freely and to enjoy God as the one sure source of joy (iu-
cunditas). But this new will is not yet powerful enough to overcome his
prior will or to break down its ancient strength. Thus, he concludes, "my

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two wills, one old, one new, one carnal, one spiritual, waged war upon
each other and, by their discord, scattered my soul" (8.5.10). The dis-
tance Augustine has traveled from his former Manichaeanism is regis-
tered, here, by his use of the apparently innocent personal pronoun,
"my." Both wills are his own, neither is alien to himself; the conflict
between them is a conflict in which he is himself engaged on both sides
of the issue. 16
Once having identified both wills as his own, Augustine can take over
the very Pauline verses that Fortunatus had cited against him and can
deflect their Manichaean force by embedding them in a new rendering of
the human experience of inner conflict and of the irresistable drag of
misdirected desire. By his own experience, he reports, he had come to
understand Paul's statement about the mutually opposed desires of the
flesh and the spirit (Gal 5: 17); and he had clearly come to recognize that
he himself stood on both sides of the opposition, even though, now that
he was breaking with the one pattern of desire and embracing the other,
he found that he was more often suffering the desires of the flesh unwill-
ingly than performing them willingly. Thus the continuing draw of evil
desire arises from no alien or contrary nature, but from the sheer inertial
force of habits of desire with which we no longer wholly identify our-
selves and yet from which we still cannot fully break free. That is how
the (internal) penalty of sin continues to affect us; and it explains our
passive sense that evil desire sometimes grips and overwhelms us in
spite of ourselves. 17 It also explains the workings of the law in my mem-
bers which, according to Romans 7:22-25, fights against the law of my
mind and takes me captive to the law of sin in my members. The law of
sin is no contrary nature intruding upon us from without; it is the sheer
violence of habit (vialentia cansuetudinis), drawing and holding the un-
willing soul, by its own desert (merita), where it was once all too willing
to go (8.5.11).

Thus the story that Augustine tells of the breaking of his chains is not
a Manichaean - or even a crypto-Manichaean - story. And when, later
in Book VIII, he openly rejects the Manichaean account of inner conflict
in terms of two contrary minds arising from two contrary substances or
principles, he is simply making explicit points that he had already de-
vised in earlier works and had already deployed at earlier stages of Book
VIII itself. It was a story, however, that he could not (and would not)
have told as he did without his own lengthy dalliance in the Manichaean
camp and his own penetrating efforts to construe, in alternate fashion,
the very type of human experience that lay at the core ofthe Manichaean

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view. For Augustine, the inner conflict that he portrayed as a conflict of

two wills reached deep into the heart of the self. For him, the will is
always rooted in basic patterns of desire, patterns which engage the self
and thus cannot be treated as if they were independent of the self. Even
when a pattern of desire seems to draw the self - or hold it captive -
against its will, it is still a pattern that the self has forged and, by not
resisting it, has allowed to harden into habit and necessity.

It is this conflict of competing patterns of desire that brings us back

to the question of Augustine's understanding of the religious life. For it
is precisely the displacement and replacement of the Manichaean anthro-
pology which Augustine achieves in the eighth book of the Confessions
that sets the stage and provides the terms for his rendering of a spiritu-
ality of desire.

II.
Culminating as it does in Augustine's conversion, the eighth book of
the Confessions presents the appearance of conflict brought to resolu-
tion. At its end, it would seem that Augustine had not only made the
decisive, anti-Manichaean point that both of his opposing wills, for all
their opposition, were most certainly his own, but had also achieved a
reintegration of the self in the triumph of his new will for God over the
dwindling power of his old will for the attractions and the pleasures of
this world. It would appear that he had not only realized that he must
identify himself with both of his patterns of desire, but had also suc-
ceeded - by God's intervention - in defeating his old pattern of desire
so that it no longer incapacitated the new, no longer held it prisoner in
the chains forged by the enduring habit of his past. The personified fig-
ure of Continence, striking in her chaste beauty, had appeared before
him, urging him to throw himself upon God without fear and assuring
him that God would catch and heal him. She had exhorted him to turn a
deaf ear to the delights (delectationes) recounted by his "unclean mem-
bers on earth," insisting that such delights are as nothing compared to
the delights told by "the law of the Lord" (Con! 8.11.27). And the import
of Book VIII would seem to be that, at the prompting of Continence,
Augustine had done just that: he had thrown himself upon God and had,
in fact, stopped his ears to the delights told by his members. His desire
for God, it would seem, had drowned out the sounds of his older and
habitual desire for other and lesser things, unifying his will and reinte-
grating his scattered soul in a single yearning for and delight in the su-
preme joy of God.l 8

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But the appearance created by Book VIII is deceptive. Well before

Augustine began the Confessions, he had elaborated, in various com-
mentaries on passages from Paul, a scheme of steps or stages that mark
out the temporal sequence of salvation history both in the case of human-
ity writ large and in the more concentrated experience of the single indi-
vidual. The elements in the scheme are well known. Prior to the law
(ante legem), we pursue the desire of the flesh without struggling against
it; we not only desire and sin, but we approve of our sins. Under the law
(sub lege), we are drawn and pulled by sin compulsively. Knowing that
sin is evil, we struggle against it, but are overcome. Under grace (sub
gratia), in contrast, although the desires of the flesh do battle against our
spirits, and continue to do battle against them so long as we are in this
life, our spirits are fixed in the grace and love of God. Consequently,
they do not consent to the desires of the flesh; and in this sense at least,
they cease to sin - for, Augustine says, sin does not consist in depraved
desire itself, but rather in our consent to it (non . .. in ipso desiderio
pravo, sed in nostra consensione). In this third stage, then, we struggle
against sin, but we are not overcome. Thus, it is only in the fourth and
.final stage, in peace (in pace), that all struggle disappears, and full reso-
lution comes: because we no longer resist God, nothing resists us; and
we will have perfect peace. 19
Augustine did not drop this schematization after writing the Confes-
sions, nor did he diminish its force. It provides, therefore, a framework
within which we can locate Book VIII and can estimate its import with
regard to the broader pattern of Augustine's thinking about the religious
life. And in this connection, perhaps the most striking feature of the
Augustinian scheme is also the most obvious: the transition from the
second stage to the third does not put an end to the internal struggles of
the self. It breaks the compulsive hold that sinful desire has taken on the
soul; but it does not eradicate the desire itself or keep its enticements
from being felt or snuff out its allure. If the transition puts the self in a
new position, now capable of denying its consent to the lure of misdi-
rected desire, it does not achieve that further and final point at which the
self no longer experiences any internal resistance at all. Seen in this
light, Book VIII should not be taken to represent an enduring resolution
of the conflict between Augustine's two wills or of the opposition be-
tween his two patterns of desire. Instead - whatever its immediate role
may be within the structure of the Confessions itself - it should be
taken to register a more subtle shift. If, before, the hardened habit of
Augustine's fleshly desire had the effect of incapacitating his longing for

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God, now it is his longing for God that keeps him from yielding consent
to his fleshly desire; and this shift brings us, in effect, into the third stage
in Augustine's scheme, the stage in which we struggle but are not over-
come. For Augustine, then, the religious life is not at all a life free of
struggle, a life in which we are no longer pulled in opposite directions
by conflicting and competing desires. Our former desires are not elimi-
nated; our former service to the law of sin in the flesh is not eradicated.
Galatians 5: 17 and Romans 7:22-25 remain as descriptive of the life that
follows from conversion as they were of the life leading up to conver-
sion. Only the balance of power has shifted. The desire of the spirit now
holds firm against the desire of the flesh; but it does not elevate us into
a realm of untroubled peace. Rather it plunges us into a new version of
the ancient conflict of desires, a new version which is the religious life.
How then are we to understand this new version of the internal con-
flict of desires? Taking a cue from Augustine's early commentary on
Galatians, we can say that in his view what activates the human will is
its delight (deleetatio). "Of necessity," he claims, "we will act in accord
with what gives us the greatest delight" (Exp. ad Gal. 49: quod enim
amplius deleetat, secundum id operemur neeesse est). It is crucial that
we give full weight to this point. When Augustine speaks of denying
consent to the desires of the flesh, his language should not evoke dark
images of the grim heroism of a self refusing all delight or resisting all
desire. Rather Augustine means us to recognize that the religious life,
and the struggle it entails, is rooted in a prior and more dominant desire
for and delight in God. Not the absence of delight but the presence of a
stronger delight is what motivates the will to refuse consent to the de-
sires of the flesh and to hold out against their allure.
Augustine can picture this struggle in the dramatically physical im-
agery of the boxing or the wrestling match. Justice will only be perfected
in us, he states in one of his homilies on 1 John, "when it delights us to
do nothing else, when death is absorbed in victory, when no contrary
desire (eoneupiseentia) titillates us, when we have no struggle with flesh
and blood, when we have the crown of victory" (In 1 10. 4.3). In the
meantime, however, while we do still delight in other things and are still
titillated by contrary desires, we do battle: we are in the arena, we give
blows, we receive blows. And in the midst of this battle, we are sustained
by hope; we await a God whom we do not yet see. In one sense, we are
already children of God; in another we do not yet know what we shall
be; we know only that we shall be like God, for we shall see God as God
is (see 1 Jn 3:2). What we await, therefore, is a vision that will exceed

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"every earthly beauty, of gold, of silver, of woods and fields, the beauty
of sea and air, the beauty of sun and moon, the beauty of the stars, the
beauty of the angels" (In 1 10. 4.5). But this vision surpasses what lan-
guage can say and what the mind can grasp; and because we are not now
capable of saying it or seeing it, our current office, Augustine says, lies
precisely in desire (In 1 10. 4.6: officium vestrum in desiderio sit). We go
quite wrong, then, if we do not see that Augustine's imagery of the arena,
the giving and receiving of blows, arises from his sense that the religious
life is rooted in desire. It does not pit the self against desire, but pits the
self's deep desire for God against its residual, but still titillating, desires
for the pleasures of this world.
It would be equally wrong, however, to imagine that Augustine
treated the desire for God as no more than a counterweight to the desires
of the flesh, a mere scaffolding designed to support the self in its refusal
to consent to their pulls and tugs in the opposite direction. For Augus-
tine, the desire for God is no mere cipher for the self's opposition to the
flesh. In the western culture of the late twentieth century, it has become
increasingly difficult to imagine God as a true object of desire or the
desire for God as a deep yearning of the self. But Augustine did not have
our problem. For him, the sheer beauty of God did attract desire; and the
desire attracted, far from being a languid waiting for the divine, was
rather an active exercise that serves to expand the capacity of the self
and make it capable (capax) of the vision it awaits. In Augustine's own
image, it is as if we had a purse or a bag which we knew to be too small
to hold what we wanted to carry in it. In such a case, Augustine suggests,
we would stretch the bag in order to expand its capacity; and in the same
way, by putting off what we long for, God stretches our desire and, by
means of our desire, stretches the very soul itself so as to make it capable
of the awaited vision. "This is our life," Augustine concludes, "that we
be exercised by desire" (In 1 10. 4.6). It is quite clear, then, that the de-
sire for God has a drive of its own in Augustine's conception of the re-
ligious life, a drive that runs strong enough and deep enough to expand
the self so that its grasp may catch up with its reach as it stretches out to
its God; and it is just this fact that makes "holy desire," as Augustine
says, "the whole life of the true Christian" (In 1 10. 4.6).20

Nowhere, however, does Augustine ever suppose that holy desire is

the only desire active in persons engaged in the religious life; and even
in the immediate context of the discussion of holy desire in the fourth
homily on I John, he still insists that it only exercises us, only trains and
extends us for God, insofar as "we cut off our desires from the love of

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this world" (In 1 10. 4.6). So long as we are sub gratia and not yet in
pace, then, we still have and therefore must still resist the contrary de-
sire, the ongoing tug of concupiscentia, that continues to titillate us with
the pleasures and ambitions of a life that takes its orientation not from
God but from the world. Augustine's treatment ofthis theme, which runs
through his theological career, nowhere appears in more focused or more
concentrated form than in his brief treatise, De continentia. The work is
difficult to date. In some respects, it seems to cohere with Augustine's
early anti-Manichaean polemic and his first commentaries on Paul. In
other respects, however, it sounds notes that appear to belong to the later
stages of the Pelagian controversy and, in particular, to the milieu of
Augustine's writings against Julian of Eclanum. For our purposes, how-
ever, the difficulty in dating De continentia is less a disadvantage than
an advantage. It suggests that we are dealing with deep continuities in
Augustine's thought rather than with a momentary episode in the devel-
opment of his thinking about the religious life. 21
And the treatise is the more useful for our purposes because Augus-
tine makes it clear at the outset that he is not thinking here primarily of
continence in relation to the exercise of human sexuality, but rather of
that deeper continence of the heart which keeps it from giving its con-
sent to any inclination to evil or to any impulse of misdirected desire (De
cont. 1.2-5). In fact, for Augustine, it is precisely the gift of continence
in this deeper sense that marks the transition from life sub lege to life sub
gratia, from a life in which sin does reign to a life in which sin no longer
reigns in our mortal bodies (De cont. 3.7-9; see Rom 6:12-13). When
Paul speaks in this way, Augustine explains, he uses the word "sin" to
refer to sinful desire (concupiscentia peccati); and thus he means that sin
reigns in us when we obey its desires and allow it, so to speak, to usurp
our members as the instruments of its own action (De cont. 3.8). Conti-
nence is the gift, then, that breaks sin's reign; and, characteristically,
Augustine represents it as the gift of a countervailing desire and a more
powerful delight: against the pernicious sweetness (suavitas) by which
concupiscence defeats us, God gives the beneficent sweetness by which
continence delights us the more (De cont. 3.7). Here again, as in the
commentary on Galatians, it is the stronger delight that activates the self
and sets its course. Continence, then, provides the delight on the basis of
which the self denies its consent to sin, i.e., to sinful desire, and thus
breaks the reign of sin in our mortal bodies. "For when, through conti-
nence, consent is withheld, the evil of fleshly desire - against which
spiritual desire does battle [see Gal 5: 17] - is not permitted to do any

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harm" (De cant. 3.5). Without the consent of the self, the lure of concu-
piscence does not captivate the heart and so does not command our in-
tentions or our actions. 22
The denial of consent, however, does not eliminate the desires of the
flesh. They continue to do battle against the desires of the spirit (see Gal
5: 17); and their enduring opposition continues to prevent us from doing
what we want (for now what we want is precisely to be free of the op-
posing desires of the flesh; see De cant. 9.25). The sheer recalcitrance of
these desires, their sheer persistence despite our refusal to consent to
them, might suggest, once again, that Augustine has veered dangerously
in the Manichaean direction. Their intractable and unyielding character
might be taken as an intimation that Augustine has tacitly embedded
them in the flesh or in the body as in an alien nature inflicted on the self,
an alien nature from which the soul must be set free if it is to escape their
disruptive power.
Once again, however, it is clear that Augustine makes the decisive
anti-Manichaean move. He does not deny the enduring power of fleshly
desire or mitigate its force; but he does insist that the desire is ours. It
does not come from an alien source. It is not rooted in an opposing na-
ture or principle. It is our own. The flesh, he stipulates, "desires nothing
except through the soul" (De cant. 8.19).23 Thus, the desire of the flesh
is said to oppose the spirit only because the soul itself strives against the
spirit through its own fleshly desire; and we ourselves, Augustine as-
serts, are this whole: tatum hoc nos sumus (De cant. 8.19). We cannot
pretend that the opposing desires of the flesh belong to someone or
something else; they belong inescapably to the whole that is ourselves.
That is why the apostle James wrote that each is tempted not simply "by
concupiscence," but "by his own concupiscence" (De cant. 7.18; see Jas
1:14). Equally, that is why the psalmist cried, "heal my soul, for I have
sinned against you" (Ps 50.5). The soul would need no healing if it had
not infected itself by its own sinning with the result that its own flesh's
desire turned against it - or, better, with the result that it turned against
itself from the side of its own diseased and weakened flesh (De cont.
7.18). Thus the pull of fleshly desire is the soul's own pull against itself,
a disease from which it needs to be healed, not a foreign power from
which it needs to be set free.
The operative idiom for Augustine, then, is the idiom of healing; and
he places it in deliberate opposition to the Manichaean idiom of separa-
tion from an alien nature: the healing of our diseased and fractured self

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will take place non a nobis alienae separatione, sed in nostrae repara-
tione naturae (De cont. 7.18). Thus we are not to think of the body as the
enemy of the soul or of the self.24 It is true enough, of course, that the
body is distinct in nature from the soul; but it is not alien to human na-
ture. For, if the soul is not itself a body, it is still true all the same that
the human being is constituted of soul and body (De cont. 12.26). Nei-
ther are we to think of the flesh as the enemy of the spirit in any sense
that would make it and its desires independent of ourselves. In relation
to Paul's statement that he knows that "no good dwells in me, that is, in
my flesh" (Rom 7:25), Augustine states flatly that Paul says "that he is
his flesh" (Se itaque dicit esse carnem suam); and similarly, in relation
to Paul's statement that with the mind he serves the law of God while
with the flesh he serves the law of sin (Rom 7:25), Augustine stresses the
point that the personal pronoun appears in both clauses: ego mente, ego
carne, "I myseli' serve the one with the mind and the other with the
flesh (De cont. 8.19). It is not the flesh in any independent or alien sense,
therefore, that opposes the self, but rather the flesh as the enduring and
penal (see De cont. 8.21) form of the self's own prior pattern of desire.

For Augustine, then, the self sub gratia, the self leading the religious
life, is caught up in a true internal conflict of desire. He does not assign
the desires of the flesh to an alien nature, to the body, or even to any
lesser part of the soul that cannot be fully identified with the self. The
desires of the flesh are as much mine as the desires of the spirit; and thus
I must be placed on both sides of the line of battle between them. Con-
sequently healing cannot be construed as separation from something
alien to myself, but must rather be conceived as a reparation of my very
self. And continence is the means whereby reparation begins to take
place in this life, the means whereby the deep rift in my desire begins to
be healed. Augustine does not treat continence, then, as a merely nega-
tive factor in the religious life. It is not, in his view, a mere constraint
that opposes but does not alter the resisting force of our own misdirected
desires. Rather it is ordered to the positive purpose of healing; and it
plays itself out, in the continuing struggle of the spirit against the flesh
that characterizes life sub gratia, in a gradual diminution not only of our
sins but also of the very desires that we oppose by denying them our
consent (De cont. 8.20).

By denying consent, by not obeying the desires of the flesh, or yield-

ing our members to them as weapons of iniquity, we keep our own evil
inclinations from carrying over into intention and action. Thus, we do
not bring the evil to realization. But neither, so long as we have these

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desires at all, do we fully realize the good (De cont. 8.20). Our delight
in the good overcomes our pleasure in the evil; but our pleasure in the
evil continues to excite our desire and to put us at odds with ourselves.
The role of continence, in this opposition of self to self, is, then, not
simply to check the opposing desire but to reduce it and, in this sense, to
work toward a reparation of our nature, a reparation of our self. Perfect
peace, the fourth and last of the four stages in Augustine's schematiza-
tion of salvation history, is only realized when continence has no further
work to do (De cont. 8.20), when there remains no further internal resis-
tance of the self to God. In the meantime, in the religious life itself, there
remains the patient labor of continence in undoing our prior pattern of
desire with its enduring habitual and penal force. In Book VIII of the
Confessions, Augustine had said that, when desire is served, it hardens
into habit and, when habit is not resisted, it acquires the force of neces-
sity (Con! 8.5.10). Now we can see that, in effect, Augustine has made
continence the instrument through which the links of this chain are fi-
nally broken in the religious life. It is no mere holding operation, await-
ing some moment of future and final release. Rooted in and sustained by
a prior and stronger delight in God, it is itself the psychic mechanism
through which we resist habit, thus eroding its necessity - and through
which, too, we uproot our misdirected desire, thus overcoming the
deadly sweetness and pleasure of the act that forged our habit in the first
place. It is, then, through continence and in the religious life itself that
the reparation of our nature begins, and we move toward the resolution
that comes not at the moment of conversion, but in the full reintegration
of the self in a single pattern of desire and love for God in pace.

III.
I have tried, in this essay, to sketch out what seem to me the most
important factors in Augustine's understanding of the religious life and
to intimate why, in my view, his delineation of the religious life might be
called a spirituality of desire. Basic to all the rest is the critical anti-
Manichaean move that he makes in Book VIII of the Confessions and
reiterates in the De continentia. Against the Manichees, he identifies
both his will for God and his will for the world, both his "desires of the
spirit" and his "desires of the flesh," as inalienably and inescapably his
own. Thus he equips himself to understand and to portray a true internal
struggle of the self against itself - a struggle that he will not allow us
to reduce to a struggle of the self against its body, against its flesh, or
against any Manichaean power of darkness. And he puts himself in posi-

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tion, too, to represent the self's internal struggle as a conflict of oppos-

ing desires, each of which engages the self and neither of which belongs
to someone else. Thus Augustine will not construe the religious life as a
tranquil and uninterrupted triumph of the desire for God. Rather he will
acknowledge - and will insist upon - the ways in which our ancient
patterns of desire continue to make themselves felt and continue to exer-
cise an allure that we must continue to resist just because we have not
yet attained a fully integrated selfbood fully ordered to the divine. In
short, he will construe the religious life in ways that are not wholly dis-
tant from the ordinary experience of more or less unintegrated selves
like our own.
Thus if we are to understand Augustine properly, we must give due
weight to at least two aspects of his rendering of the religious life. On
the one hand, it is a form of life in which, while we desire what we do
not see, our desire stretches out the limits of the self and expands the
capacity of the soul so as to make us capable of God. On the other, it is
a form of life marked by a struggle still awaiting resolution, a struggle
between two patterns of desire and a struggle for the reintegration of the
self in a single pattern of desire and love for God. In both of these as-
pects, although in different senses, Augustine's can be called a spiritual-
ity of desire and can be construed, I hope, in ways that will have some
bite even in our present world and culture. Over the last two centuries or
so, it seems to me, Protestant Christianity - and perhaps increasingly
Catholic Christianity as well- has largely lost its bearings so far as the
religious life is concerned. It no longer seems to have any very sophisti-
cated conceptuality or vocabulary to deploy in this regard; and such no-
tions of the religious life as have survived seem terribly thin, no longer
making contact with the human self at any depth. In this situation,
Augustine is by no means the only resource that the tradition makes
available to contemporary Christianity. But he is one such resource; and
he has the added advantage that much of his thinking about the religious
life is directed precisely to the case of more or less ordinary Christians,
yearning for a God who is not seen and caught up in competing desires
which are undeniably their own. 25 A recovery of these elements in
Augustinian spirituality might give us something to say, at the deepest
and most entrenched levels of human desire, for just such people as
these. That is why, at the outset of this essay, I tried to distinguish, if
only roughly, a sense of spirituality that has to do with the religious life
in its more or less ordinary forms and thus applies to persons who are
neither monks nor mystics - but who also are no mere pale reflections

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of the attenuated religious cultures in which most of us happen, at the

moment, to live.

Notes
1. The distinction between these two meanings of the term spirituality is succinctly
stated in Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of
the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1982), 3.
2. In this sense, spirituality is more or less congruent with "religiosity" as Ramsey
MacMullen employs the term in Paganism in the Roman Empire (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1981), 64: it takes in "the whole nexus of thoughts
and feelings about the divine," and "their intensity or vitality as well"; and, as
Bynum observes, it veers in the direction of what the French annalistes have la-
belled mentalite, so that "the 'history of spirituality' becomes almost a branch of
social history" (Bynum, 3).
3. There is good reason, however, for the historian to be on guard against the be-
witching singular of the term. It is unlikely that any era, culture, or population
group ever exhibits a single, uniform spirituality.
4. The magisterial work on Augustine and desire is Isabelle Bochet, Saint Augustin
et Ie desir de Dieu (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1982). Bochet paints on a far
broader canvas than I do, however; and the particular questions at issue in this
study are not central to her inquiry. Despite its enticing title, Margaret Miles' De-
sire and Delight: A New Reading of Augustine s Confessions (New York: Cross-
road, 1992) also takes a rather different tack and, in any case, offers an
interpretation of the Confessions, not a study in Augustine's spirituality. For a se-
lection of recent essays on this topic, see, e.g. Vernon J. Bourke, "Augustine of
Hippo: The Approach of the Soul to God," in The Spirituality of Western Chris-
tendom, ed. E. Rozanne Elder (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1976);
Gerald Bonner, "The Spirituality of St. Augustine and its Influence on Western
Mysticism," Sobornost, N.S., 4 (1982): 143-162, reprinted, with a new appendix,
in Bonner, God's Decree and Man's Destiny: Studies in the Thought of Augus-
tine of Hippo (London: Variorum Reprints, 1987); Mary Clark's introduction to
Mary T. Clark, ed. Augustine of Hippo: Selected Writings (New York, Ramsey,
NY, and Toronto: Paulist Press, 1984); and J. Patout Burns, "Grace: The Augus-
tinian Foundation," in Christian Spirituality: Origins to the Twelfth Century, ed.
Bernard McGinn and John Meyendorff (New York: Crossroad, 1985). None of
these, however, focuses on the questions most central to my concern here.
5. The literature on the Confessions is vast, of course; and studies of Book VIII
abound. Here it will serve to mention only two works: James Wetzel, Augustine
and the Limits of Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 126-
138, offers a penetrating analysis of issues central to my concern; and Judith
Chelius Stark, " The Dynamics of the Will in Augustine's Conversion," in Collec-

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tanea Augustineana, ed. Joseph C. Schnaubelt and Frederick Van Fleteren (New
York: Peter Lang, 1990), seems to me to have captured the key points in her study.
6. Augustine was not the only one in antiquity to invest the voices of children at
play with oracular significance; see Plutarch, Moralia 356E (=De Iside et Osiride
14) and Aelius Aristides Orationes 50.10 (=Sacred Discourses 4.10).
7. I have translated the Romans passage directly from Augustine's Latin. Unless
otherwise noted, all translations in this essay are my own.
8. See Wetzel, 130-34.
9. As Wetzel, 128-29, observes, on the Manichaean view, the "good soul may be
prevented from expressing its knowledge of the good as will, but it remains undi-
vided in its approbation of the good. Its power to will the good has, however, been
overwhelmed by an alien power. Once internal obstacles to willing have been ren-
dered into external impediments, the soul has a metaphysical guarantee of integ-
rity." Obviously there can be no internal conflict in the self, when all internal
resistance is dissociated from the self and assigned to an external source.
10. I have cited the translation of the De duabus animabus in Philip Schaff, ed.,
Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 4: St. Augustin: The Writings
against the Manichaeans and against the Donatists, trans. Richard Strothert and
Albert H. Newman (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974).
11. For Augustine's understanding of habit, see especially John G. Prendiville,
"The Development of the Idea of Habit in the Thought of Saint Augustine," Tradi-
tio 28 (1972) 29-99.
12. For brief accounts of the debate with Fortunatus, see Peter Brown, Augustine
of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1967), 141, 149 and Malcolm Alflatt, "The Development of the Idea of Voluntary
Sin in St. Augustine," Revue des etudes augustiniennes 20 (1974) 118-132. I have
discussed the issues involved in the debate (and in the De duabus animabus) more
extensively in "Augustine on Sin and Moral Agency," Journal of Religious Ethics
16 (1988) 30-41 (reprinted in The Ethics of St. Augustine, ed. William S. Babcock
[Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991],89-100).
13. For a broader treatment of Augustine on sin and punishment, see my "Sin and
Punishment: The Early Augustine on Evil," in Augustine: Presbyter Factus Sum,
ed. Joseph T. Lienhard, Earl C. Muller, and Roland J. Teske (New York: Peter Lang,
1993),235-248.
14. See, in particular, De lib. arb. 1.11.22: "Is it to be regarded as in itself a small
penalty that the soul is dominated by lust, spoiled of its resources of virtue, drawn
hither and thither in abject proverty ... here anxiety, there vain and false rejoicing;
here torture because something loved has been lost, there eagerness to obtain what
it does not possess ... suffering all the other countless emotions which inhabit and
trouble the realm of lust. Can we think that a condition like that is not penal ... ?"
(trans. John H. S. Burleigh, Augustine: Earlier Writings [Philadelphia: Westmin-
ster Press, n.d.], 125-26).

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15. For a more detailed discussion of this point, see my "Cupiditas and Caritas:
The Early Augustine on Love and Human Fulfilment," in The Ethics of St. Augus-
tine, 39-66.
16. Both Wetzel and Stark make the same point, although less strongly then I would
like to do. Augustine "cannot avoid identifying himself at least partialIy with what-
ever binds him from within" (Wetzel, 130); "Augustine drives the analysis further
back to examine the relationship between the self and these two wills, another fea-
ture of his description of the will. The first aspect of this relationship is that of
identity, that is, the self is initially identified with both wills. Then Augustine modi-
fies this by introducing the qualifications of more and less, and approval and disap-
proval ... In a certain sense then the self can stand over against these two wills to
render them subject to approval or disapproval" (Stark, 50). The qualifications,
however, do not attenuate Augustine's insistence that he is the one who wills both
wills, that neither can rightly be alienated from himself: ego eram, qui volebam,
ego, qui nolebam; ego eram (Con! 8.10.22).
17. Thus, as both Wetzel and Stark suggest (see n. 16 above), there is a sense in
which Augustine does not wholly identify himself with both of his conflicting
wills, a sense in which he can even suggest that he is the passive victim of one of
those wills. But the key point remains: even if he does not fully identify himself
with both wills, he nevertheless insists that both wills are entirely his own and that,
insofar as he is the passive victim of one of these, he is the victim of his own prior
pattern of will and desire, not of another's will or desire imposed upon him from
without.
18. Only in the tenth book of the Confessions, where Augustine reviews his present
life under the headings that he draws from 1 In 2: 16 (the desire of the flesh, the
desire of the eyes, and the ambition of this world) do we again catch hints that his
former pattern of desire may not be quite dead after all, but may still keep some
hold on his will and may still have some scattering effect on his soul; see Con!
10.30.41.
19. I present the scheme as Augustine sets it out in Propp. ad Rom. 13-18; see also
De div. quaest. 8366 and Exp. ad Gal. 46-47. For brief discussions of the scheme
as it appears and functions in the early commentaries on Paul, see my "Augustine's
Interpretation of Romans (A.D. 394-396)," Augustinian Studies 10 (1979) 58-61,
and Paula Fredriksen, "Beyond the Body/Soul Dichotomy: Augustine on Paul
against the Manichees and the Pelagians," Recherches augustiniennes 23 (1988)
89-92. Auguste Luneau, L 'histoire du salut chez les Peres de I'Eglise: La doc-
trine des ages du monde (Paris: Beauchesne, 1964), 357-383, traces Augustine's
use of the scheme through the full range of his theological career.
20. For a more fully elaborated discussion of this theme with attention to its possi-
ble Plotinian affiliations, see Bochet, 131-142.
21. The De continentia has traditionally been ascribed to 395 or 396. Arguing on
the basis of its pattern of scriptural citations, A.-M. La Bonnardiere, "La date du De
continentia de saint Augustin," Revue des etudes augustiniennes 5 (1959) 121-
127, reaches the conclusion that the work must be later than 412 and may belong to
the years 416-418. D. O'B. Faul, "The Date of the De Continentia of St. Augus-

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tine," Studia Patristica 6 (1962) 374-382, suggests a date around 426 on the
grounds that it offers an interpretation of Eph 5:27 that fits late in the sequence of
Augustine's interpretations of that passage.
22. Since the continence that Augustine has in mind in De continentia is that of the
heart rather than that of the genitals, there is good reason to presume that, corre-
spondingly, concupiscence here refers to all misdirected desire and not merely or
primarily to sexual desire. Perhaps the classic studies of Augustine on concupis-
cence are Gerald Bonner, "Libido and Concupiscentia in St. Augustine," Studia
Patristica 6 (1962) 303-314 (reprinted in Bonner, God's Decree and Man's Des-
tiny) and Franfi:ois-Joseph Thonnard, "La notion de concupiscence en philosophie
augustinienne," Recherches augustiniennes 3 (1965) 59-105.
23. Augustine makes the same point in the City of God and in virtually the same
words: Quid enim caro per se ipsam sine anima vel dolet vel concupiscit? Sed
quod concupiscere caro dicitur vel dolere, aut ipse homo est, sicut disseruimus,
aut aliquid animae quod carnis afficit passio ... (DCD 14.15) ; and again the
point is the same: the desire of the flesh cannot be ascribed to any subject other than
the self.
24. See the judicious comments on the view of the body in De continentia in Mar-
garet R. Miles, Augustine on the Body (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1979), 60-
62. Miles' entire study is, of course, relevant on this point. See also Fredriksen,
"Beyond the Body/Soul Dichotomy," and especially her conclusion that among
other factors in relation to which Augustine can be reckoned "the first modem man"
(114) is his affirmation of embodied existence.
25. Thus Augustine's spirituality of desire belongs, in its own way, to the Augus-
tinian "vindication of Christian mediocrity" that R. A. Markus has recently charted
in the chapter entitled, "Augustine: A Defence of Christian Mediocrity," in his The
End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 45-
62 (the quoted phrase appears on p. 53).

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