St. Augustine Confessions Analysis
This excerpt from St. Augustine’s Confessions, illustrates two points. Firstly, it illustrates a divergence from ancient western understandings of desire/sex as they relate to the body. The paper will show this divergence by comparing the work of Augustine (and his understanding of desire as it relates to the body) with the work of Galen. Secondly, this excerpt centralizes the act of confessing one’s bodily desires as a process by which the soul is purified. The paper will show the significance of confession by contextaulizing this excerpt within Augustine’s larger text and within the larger paradigm of early Christianity. This excerpt highlights the divergence between ancient understandings of desire/sex and how they relate to the body and early Christian understandings of desire/sex and how they relate to the body. For example, within Galen’s writing, the readers are witness to an …show more content…
For example, Augustine writes “In my tender youth they [lust and love] swept me away over the precipice of my body’s appetites and plunged me in the whirlpool of sin” (43). This quote illustrates the aforementioned divergence between the early Christian understandings of sex/desire and the ancient western understandings of sex/desire.Firstly, sex is seen as a negative act in and of itself. Moreover, and more importantly, desire/lust is seen as the genesis of sex and thus it is desire that must now be subdued so as to subdue the sinful body. Finally, we witness here a de-physiologization of desire: desire is no longer something that is understood as part of bodily technologies, but rather it is understood as something evil that somehow lies outside the needs of the body and its mechanisms. Desire, therefore, automatically becomes a form of indulging in
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