Paul Camacho

Book 8 of Augustine’s Confessions has most often been read as a narrative of liberation from the flesh: God grants Augustine the grace to overcome the drag of fleshly habit (consuetudo carnalis) and embrace a life of sexual continence (continentia). This article proposes a more nuanced reading of the well-known garden scene by attending to three rhetorical moments Augustine deploys in Book 8. First, he frames his struggle in the garden within a network of caring relationships—Simplicianus, Victorinus, Ponticianus, Alypius, Monica—whose counsel, companionship, and examples help prepare him for conversion. Second, at the climax of the garden scene, he deploys the figurative trope of Continentia, not as an abstract virtue of self-denial, but rather as a “fruitful mother of children.” This figuration recalls the mother of Adeodatus, and presents Augustine with the possibility of a more profound meaning of incarnate desire: a love that issues beyond self-gratification and into new life. Third, the command to “take and read” comes through the voice of a child, a detail that puts us in mind not only of Augustine’s own son, but also of the God who willed to entrust himself, with all the vulnerability of a child, to a bodily community of love. In light of these three moments, Book 8 is better read as Augustine’s coming to a different wisdom about how to care for the flesh—not how to escape it.

This paper aims at analyzing the main findings of a research on sex-affective experiences of cis heterosexual adult men from the cities of Montevideo and Maldonado in Uruguay. In the approach of their discourses from an ethnographic perspective, we see that their experiences and subjectivities are traversed by the mandate of compulsive heterosexuality that, even if it is not actively subscribed, it appears as a permanent background that configures their masculine identities. Furthermore, it acquires different discursive characteristics according to the social sector to which the individuals belong to. It is observed that in men’s sex-affective trajectories, they assign different meanings to their ties with women, moving between the affective, sexual and rational dimensions. This "three-dimensionality" is configured according to their vital projects and the place men assign to certain female identities.

Augustine developed one of the most profound and influential accounts of love ever offered. Led this way and that by the desires of his famously restless heart, Augustine came to view the experience of desiring as indicating a profound excess to the self. His theory of love has enduring philosophical relevance, not least because it disrupts our prevalent notion of freedom as self-determination. In contrast to our own dominant ethics of autonomy, Augustine argues that true freedom depends upon what exceeds self- willing: we only become free when we are able to acknowledge our finitude, and thereby learn to love others rightly. This dissertation traces the development in Augustine’s thinking concerning the relationship between love and freedom across two pivotal texts: the De libero arbitrio and the Confessiones. I argue that what emerges in Augustine’s thought is the startling realization that genuine freedom is constituted by submission to a good beyond our anticipation, i.e., a good encountered in the experience of love. As Augustine came to see, the human person is ecstatically self-surpassing, drawn dynamically to the good through affect and rationality. Given this philosophical anthropology, the primary concern of the ethical life has less to do with autonomous willing, and more to do with properly nurturing and attuning our desire through a purifying attention. In other words, as Augustine shows us, the aim of the moral life is to allow our self-exceeding loves— viii and the good at which they aim—to form and reform the self. The following project aims to rehabilitate an Augustinian account of freedom by arguing for a renewed appreciation of the goodness of being, and for a recovery of the notion of loving-desire that constitutes our fundamental way of relating to this good. Given the fundamentally ecstatic nature of the human person revealed in love, freedom cannot be conceived purely as self-determination; as Augustine argues, we are made free by a transcendent source of our being. There is, ultimately, a deeper source of freedom than autonomous choosing: we are given our freedom in the gift of our being, and we discover this freedom by learning to love rightly.