Augustine is read in several ways by feminist philosophers, psychologists, and theologians. Often the modes of reading Augustine are divided into two categories: one that is unforgiving, which places great blame for patriarchal oppression of women on his shoulders, and one that seeks to explore what Augustine might have to offer feminist readers. This article finds itself in the latter category. However, let us begin with the former. In the introduction to their The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy's Future, Carol Gilligan and David A. J. Richards write, “Augustine played a pivotal role in the radical darkening of the view of human sexuality (beyond anything in Greco‐Roman culture) that Christianity was to impart to the modern world, marking a major break by demonizing pleasure per se” (Reference Gilligan and RichardsGilligan and Richards 2009, 16). They see this role as the folding of Roman patriarchy into Christian theology, and thus into the fabric of the history of the West. Their argument concerning patriarchy's effect on individuals is intriguing: patriarchy prevents “love between equals” (19); it “calls for and legitimates the traumatic disruption of intimate relationships and that the effect of such trauma on the human psyche is precisely to suppress personal voice and relationships in an identification with the patriarchal voice that imposed the disruption” (21). That is, we are taught in patriarchy to suppress our hearts and believe that the patriarchal voice was correct all along. Although their reading of the folding of Roman patriarchal practices into the Christian faith in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages is compelling, their primary means of doing so (that is, their critique of Augustine) leaves much to be desired. By looking to Augustine's autobiography, the Confessions, and seeing a template for Roman manliness placing itself in Christian thought, they not only do a disservice to Augustine but also to their own theory.

Gilligan and Richards critique Augustine for supporting the suppression of intimate, personal love, as it is a move that reinforces patriarchal society. I agree that the suppression of love is a result of life under patriarchy and that a study of the possibilities for opening up the gates of love is itself a political stance against patriarchal domination of hearts and minds. However, I disagree that Augustine's philosophical and theological writings on love support the assertions of Gilligan and Richards. Rather, in my reading, Augustine's account of love provides a way of understanding the transformative and transformable nature of love, specifically love for worldly things. In this article, I will focus on Augustine's account of his relationships with women as given in his Confessions in order to demonstrate the gendered, bodily side of love that is often glossed over in readings of Augustine on love. I begin by discussing what I mean generally by love and desire in terms of Augustine's Confessions. Then, I move to a discussion of two ecstatic visions Augustine recounts as well as Augustine's relationship with sex and continence. Finally, I discuss what I take to be the crux of understanding Augustine on love: the loving body. Augustine's view of the body as beautiful, God‐made, and as naturally lovable as it is loving provides interesting answers to feminist questions concerning bodily love as well as a ground for contemplating the unnecessary philosophical and theological division between intellectual love (which is divine and perfect) and bodily desire (which is worldly and depraved).

Love (that is) Desire

Statue of Cupid and Psyche; Temple of Love, Ostia Antica, Italy. Photograph by author.

There is a statue in Ostia that dates from 325–350 CE located in the Temple of Love, not too far from the first Christian Church built in Rome. The wings of the gods are now severed, their noses fallen away, but Cupid and Psyche once stood resplendent in their embrace in the same city at the same time that Augustine, before he was a bishop, even before he was a priest, had an ecstatic experience of divine grace together with his motherFootnote ¹ as they leaned out of a window overlooking a garden. The proximity of their vision to this statue hints at the connection between the evolution of the relationship between Augustine and his mother and that between the two gods.Footnote ² In the myth of Cupid and Psyche, which is recounted for the first time by the Late Antique writer Apuleius and which Carol Gilligan writes of in her book The Birth of Pleasure (Reference ApuleiusApuleius 1999; Reference GilliganGilligan 2002), we hear of the many trials of Cinderella‐like Psyche and the great feats of love she had to perform to win back her hidden lover, Cupid. The myth ends with her clothed in immortality, their marriage, and the birth of their daughter Vuluptas, Pleasure. Thus Neoplatonist Apuleius places the emergence of pleasure in the human world with the successful recoupling of love and soul.

As Cupid and Psyche begin their relationship in blind physical love, so too does Augustine with his mother. His love for her begins as one of bodied grasping as an infant. As an adult he flees her cloying, desperate love, but he finally comes around. Both love stories involve the transcendence of physical ties through the tears and desperation of the female of the pair. Both stories involve the ascension of one of the pair to immortality: Psyche becomes a goddess and Augustine becomes a member of the Christian community. The completion of both of their tales shows a love that must be both bodily and spiritual, earthly and heavenly. These two loves, in Augustine's view, are the loves of concupiscentia and of caritas.Footnote ³

Augustine's Confessions, written sometime between 397 and 400 CE shortly after he became Bishop of Hippo in North Africa, is dripping with the language of love. Augustine confesses his current love for God as well as the wild love of his youth. In her book Desire and Delight: A New Reading of Augustine's Confessions, feminist theologian Margaret Miles discusses the motive for such a rhetorical strategy: “the Confessions constructs its reader as voyeur in relation to an erotic text, a text full of partial disclosures, vivid sensual metaphors, tantalizing gaps, and earnest appeals for the reader's understanding and indulgence” (Reference MilesMiles 2006, 68). Love and desire are intertwined in the language of the text, and the reader is invited to participate in its affective nature—the text seeks both to inform the reader of the spiritual journey but also drag the reader into the experience of desire as grasping love. Augustine's use of sexual language is revealing of his conception of what the soul “at peace” in the body looks like: roiling, affective, and pouring outwards. For example, in Book X, after going back and forth seeking where God abides in his memory, Augustine evokes bodily imagery to demonstrate the conclusion of his search for God:

An alternative translation to the last clause, “tetigisti me, et exarsi in pacem tuam,” is “you touched me, and I burned into your peace.” God was always there in his memory, but Augustine was not sensually engaging with the divine. God flashes and Augustine sees; God calls out and destroys Augustine's deafness. Augustine uses the language of hearing, sight, smell, taste (both of food and drink), and, finally, touch to denote the final burning into peace Augustine achieves. The fruition of Augustine's “coming to God” is not peaceful in the normal connotation of the word. Whereas Dido is on fire when she is abandoned by Aeneas, Augustine is on fire when he finally turns to God. Augustine's conversion in his Confessions is apparently spiritual, but it is in no way peaceful in the sense of limpid pools—it is violent and loud and fragrant and intimately bodied.

Augustine's overwhelmingly bodied experience of the presence of God in his memory is indicative of what he conceives of as love. Why, if Augustine's conversion to Christianity (that is, to love as caritas) is a conversion to continence and celibacy, is there so much sexualized language in his Confessions? And what purpose does Augustine's sexual language serve him philosophically? Miles claims that the sexualized language of the Confessions leads to a heavily gendered notion of spirituality. She writes in Desire and Delight:

Some scholars (feminist and otherwise) disagree with Miles's account of the importance of sex in Augustine's Confessions. In their introduction to Seducing Augustine: Bodies, Desires, Confessions, Virginia Burrus, Mark D. Jordan, and Karmen MacKendrick write:

They read Miles as closing off the possibility of love Augustine offers. Indeed, Augustine's use of the language of desire does not end with his supposedly chaste embrace of Lady Continence (more on his last wife below) at the time of his conversion. His Confessions is full of his struggles with passionate, libidinal love. Although Book VIII's final conversion scene seems to be the conversion of a wild, concupiscent love of the world and worldly things to the calmer, soothing love of God with a calming caritas, Augustine's prayers to God and his accounts of his relationship with the Divine—the prayers that he makes not only post‐conversion but decades later—are rife with sexualized language. For example, in Book IX, having recounted his conversion experience and discussed his retirement from being a professor of rhetoric in Milan, he writes, “You pierced my heart with the arrow of your love (caritate)” (Reference AugustineAugustine 1998, IX.ii.3, 156).

In the note that follows, Henry Chadwick points out that the symbol of Christ as Cupid was already common by the time Augustine wrote his proto‐autobiography (Reference AugustineAugustine 1998, 156, n. 3). It is historically satisfying that Augustine sees the activity of God's love in relation to Cupid's arrow, as the Cupid and Psyche myth is alleged to have originated in North Africa, but it is also philosophically satisfying—the god Eros becomes Cupid and, finally, is then transformed into Christ. As the root of concupiscentia is Cupid, it is not difficult to imagine the possibility of a positive, concupiscent love that is distinct yet in relationship with love as caritas.

Miles is correct in her description of the presence of sexual love language in the Confessions, but her notion of what counts as love ought to be fuller. Burrus, Jordan, and MacKendrick push toward a notion of relationality in the way in which Augustine writes of lust: “He prefers to convert lust into love, to promise fornications while in fact delivering friendships. Yet the translation of lust into love—the effective switching of the bait—only serves to erode the distinction between lust and love—to remind us of the lust secreted within love” (Reference Burrus, Jordan and MacKendrickBurrus, Jordan, and MacKendrick 2010, 18). For Augustine, concupiscent desire is the expression of love for the beautiful things of the world (the things that God made, according to the “Late have I loved you” passage cited above), for bodily things, yes, but really for all the physical, external things. It shows up everywhere, even when the ascetic breaks her fast.Footnote ⁵ Love is depicted in the Confessions as a spilling forth; concupiscent love is more like Onanism—a spilling forth of love onto things that cannot hold it, and caritas love is a spilling that leads to being filled in return. If the overwhelming love of God is a gendered sexuality, then it must be a gender that includes male, female, and in between; it fills, causes to overflow, and returns backwards. To take the metaphor home, wouldn't then the individual once filled with love of God and God's love filled in turn go and spill her love on the ground in a more profound way? This second spilling is not caritas but concupiscentia perfected.

Mothers and Wives: Love, Grief, and Continence

In the previous section I discussed the interplay between love and desire in Augustine's Confessions. In this section I will explore the different interplay between these connected emotions and affects in his Confessions. Augustine is a possible source for the infusing of Christianity with Neoplatonic notions of God as affectless, rational mind (or nous). Books VII and IX of the Confessions seem to offer some traction for these claims, as in these books Augustine offers descriptions of two out‐of‐body ecstatic experiences that led him to two different kinds of knowledge. Indeed, his experience in Book VII is predicated on his having read some books of the Platonists. Which books we do not know, but likely some selection from Plotinus's Enneads; what is significant is that he learned from these texts to conceive of God as nonmaterial and the relationship of humans to that nonmateriality. This vision, preceded chronologically by the excising of his wifeFootnote ⁶ of thirteen years from his side, is violently cut short by what he considers the crushing weight of his sexual habit. This is an important vision philosophically and religiously speaking: it leads him to a nonmaterial understanding of divinity and thus seemingly closer to his ultimate conversion to Christianity in Book VIII.

Gilligan and Richards take up this development as a further way to critique Augustine's anti‐sexuality: “Why, once he arrives at a conception of an immaterial lover/God, does that lead to him associatively (certainly not logically or philosophically) to celibacy?” (Reference Gilligan and RichardsGilligan and Richards 2009, 110). They accept that Augustine conceives of the relationship with God as a lover–beloved relationship, but they find in Augustine's ultimate celibacy a neutering of the possibility of love and desire.

Augustine's second ecstatic experience occurs in Ostia and ends more gently than his first: he and his mother gradually come to their senses and back to the place where sentences have beginnings and endings (Reference AugustineAugustine 1998, IX.x.24, 171). At the conclusion of this vision his mother declares,

Thus Monnica expresses her acceptance of death, saying also that she no longer wished to have her body buried next to her husband.

Both of these visions seem to align with readings of Augustine as one who sees soul and mind as separate from flesh, and yearning for the divine. Augustine's account of love as double, as bifurcated into quiet caritas and wild concupiscentia seems to support this claim as well. After all, wouldn't a proper transformation of “fallen” flesh to “resurrected” flesh lend itself to a world without concupiscentia? But Augustine is no immaterialist denouncer of the flesh: the perfection of human love at the time of resurrection (or through the grace of God in this world) does not involve the destruction of concupiscentia, but its transformation. A robust understanding of concupiscentia lends itself to an understanding of human interaction and desire as one that is always stretching outward from itself.

A believer in Porphyry's biographical exposure of Plotinus's shame for his bodied existence may look to Augustine's ecstatic flight in Book IX of the Confessions as one of Neoplatonic triumph over flesh.Footnote ⁷ However, Augustine and his mother were intimately connected, both spiritually through their faith and bodily through their mother/child relationship as well as through cohabitation. As Catherine Conybeare points out in The Irrational Augustine, Monnica is presented in The Happy Life (De beata vita) and other early dialogues as not just a mother or a philosophical conduit for the words of God. When Augustine (both as interlocutor within the texts and as writer of the texts) ascribes the category of “Mother” and “Church” to Monnica, Monnica herself reminds her son that she is a “little woman” (Reference ConybeareConybeare 2006, 74). By reminding Augustine and his crowd of friends and students of her gender, Monnica deepens the connection between reason and embodiment. She is not a special spiritual conduit of God's words; she is an embodied creature who reasons. The flight Augustine takes with his mother in Book IX of the Confessions is intimately bodied—both must remain tied to their flesh as their flesh.

Augustine does examine his relationships with women in his Confessions, but his discussion of his friendships focuses only on his friendships with men. Yet “Friendship can be a dangerous enemy, a seduction of the mind lying beyond the reach of investigation” (Reference AugustineAugustine 1998, II.ix.17, 34); “Tongues that appear to be offering helpful advice can actually be hostile opponents and, in offering love, may devour us in the way people consume food” (Reference AugustineAugustine 1998, IX.ii.2, 156). Augustine uses the language of seduction and love to discuss friendships—loving others is a dangerous activity when one's affections of soul are relegated to base concupiscentia. This danger is because those other humans are not like the other “beautiful things” of nature, which are good insofar as they are creations of God. Other humans are goods in themselves, to be sure, but they also have their own desires and motivations, and can be a cause for corruption in others: Augustine wrote the first quotation above in connection with the famous pear tree incident, in which he and his friends stole inedible pears that they had no intention of eating, sinning for the sake of sinning.

By his own account, Augustine himself is a far worse friend than any of those he allowed to corrupt him in his youth. In Book IV of his Confessions Augustine speaks of an unnamed friend whom he convinced to join him in the Manichean cult. This friend then fell into a fever and converted to Christianity on his deathbed, casting Augustine from his presence. When the friend died shortly thereafter, Augustine was inconsolable. Augustine's language of this time of his life is florid and heart‐wrenching: “I was in misery, and misery is the state of every soul overcome by friendship with mortal things and lacerated when they are lost” (Reference AugustineAugustine 1998, IV.vi.11, 58). Augustine himself asks, “Why do I speak of these matters?” (58). Because this wrapping of himself in misery is the consequence of his concupiscent communion with worldly things, Augustine is “lacerated” by the death of this friend, and wraps himself up in this wound as if he could never be healed.

Excessive grief, for Augustine, comes from the connection of oneself with concupiscentia, from loving the world with eyes of lust. As a youth he wept for Dido and learned the joy of weeping (Reference AugustineAugustine 1998, I.xiii.20, 15). With the death of his unnamed friend he was finally able to enact on a closer object that bitter grief he felt for Dido, weeping desperate tears and being so miserable that he had to leave town. Excessive grieving, too, is a kind of concupiscentia, for it comes from perverted love:

Augustine's weeping for Dido was unreal: his pain was based upon something ephemeral. However, that is what it is to base one's love on something that is mortal. He writes of his grief at the death of his friend, “The reason why that grief had penetrated me so easily and deeply was that I had poured out my soul on to the sand by loving (diligendo) a person sure to die as if he would never die” (Reference AugustineAugustine 1998, IV.viii.13, 60). Augustine here likens concupiscently loving a mortal other to Onanism, spilling one's seed onto the ground. The mortal other is not the proper receptacle of love. Instead, the only way to love properly is to love the fitting object. Like Diotima's ladder suggests, the ultimate object of desire, for Augustine, is to be filled with love and to spill forth with love. Truly, proper love of an object is to be pregnant with love and to spill forth that love without being depleted.

It is no wonder Miles and others criticize Augustine for a conception of love and soul that is overly rife with masculine sexual imagery—even excessive grief is the result of a wasted orgasm. The lesson to be learned from Augustine's excessive grieving is: “If physical objects give you pleasure, praise God for them and return love to their Maker lest, in the things that please you, you displease him. If souls please you, they are being loved in God; for they also are mutable and acquire stability by being established in him” (Reference AugustineAugustine 1998, IV.xii.18, 63). Plato's Diotima ascends the ladder and gives birth in Beauty, but Augustine ascends it and is able to spill out his “love” continuously without being depleted, and instead is in turn filled with the love of God.

The death of Augustine's mother, which occurred in Ostia not many days after their shared vision, warrants many pages of the Confessions, even though he wept for her for only fifteen minutes. The loss of his wife of thirteen years, with whom he produced his only child, Adeodatus, who stayed in Milan while his mother went back to Africa alone, covers fewer pages in the text but left a wound that took some time to heal:

Readers of Augustine (especially feminist readers of Augustine) are often caught in a particular kind of reading of his personal sexual relationships with women. It is difficult to pass some passages without thinking of Augustine's problematic position as patriarch:

There is much in this passage that is open for feminist critique. Perhaps Augustine lingers on the sexual possibilities of the original human pair in Eden in so many of his works because he himself had a personal problem with sex, though there is some back and forth in Augustine scholarship whether modern psychological terms like “sex‐addict” ought to be applied to him.Footnote ⁸ This anachronism seems to explain much of Augustine's pathology concerning women: he cannot have sexual relationships in which he considers the woman to be on his level or at least on the level of his male companions, of whom he says: “without friends I could not be happy even when my mind was at the time a flood of indulgence in physical pleasures (carnalium voluptatum). My friends I loved (diligebam) indeed for their own sake; and I felt that in return they loved (diligi) me for my sake” (Reference AugustineAugustine 1998, VI.xvi.26, 110).

As Miles points out, Augustine has no problem with having intimate life‐long friendships with men, but balks at the possibility of having such companionship with a woman (Reference MilesMiles 2006, 89). That is, Augustine, who lived with his wife for thirteen years and with his mother until her death when he was thirty‐three, could not conceive of a good friendship relationship between men and women that would not be hampered by sexual desire. Miles claims that Augustine's representation of women in his Confessions omits their feelings and points of view—“What did she feel, returning to Africa, swearing permanent celibacy, while Augustine chooses a more advantageous marriage? What did she feel, leaving her son—perhaps forever, as she sailed off to her new solitary existence?” (Reference MilesMiles 2006, 78). He represents the two women in his Confessions, his common‐law wife and his mother, in a certain light, but really obsesses over only his feelings about them.Footnote ⁹ He was wounded at the loss of his life‐companion due to his mother's and his own political aspirations, deeply wounded, but this did not stop him from taking another lover.Footnote ¹⁰ It is possible to end one's reading of Augustine on love with this fact, but Augustine is writing of his spiritual journey and includes these women as representative of the interplay between caritas and concupiscentia in his loving life.

There is a way in which Augustine's wife is herself resurrected in his Confessions: during the famous conversion narrative of Book VIII, Augustine's lover is transformed. Lady ContinenceFootnote ¹¹ arrives, surrounded by her progeny, swollen with her fecundity:

On the surface, her arrival is a call to chastity and a turn to God (and certainly readers of Augustine such as Gerald Schlabach take this chastity at face value [Reference SchlabachSchlabach 1998]): “Why do you try and stand by yourself, and so not stand at all? Let him support you. Do not be afraid. He will not draw away and let you fall. Put yourself fearlessly in his hands. He will receive you and will make you well” (Reference AugustineAugustine 1998, VIII.xi.27, 151). However, her words require a deeper understanding of what Augustine is playing with in his conception of love.

There is very interesting research pertaining to the specific nature of Augustine's conception of continence (Reference SchlabachSchlabach 1998), but what is significant for my argument is the parallel between the unnamed woman who was once his wife and Lady Continence: both figures are the lone representatives of Augustine's relationships with women other than his mother. It is fruitful to ponder the significance of a gendered Continence who comes to Augustine at a crucial time personified as a pregnant woman surrounded by her children (nequaquam sterilis, sed fecunda mater filiorum gaudiorum de marito te). I read Lady Continence as pregnant not because her hands are full (plenas) with her existing children: she is pregnant with Augustine himself, for it is through her figurative body that Augustine himself must emerge in order to be born into Christianity. Contra Miles, Gilligan, and Richards, Augustine's conversion to Christianity and to celibacy is not a denial of feminine bodies, sexuality, or gender. Rather, it is an embracing of them. When Augustine is able to clasp Lady Continence while seeing her not just as a bodied site at which to have his needs met (sexually or filially), he is able to move past his patriarchal conception of loving relationships with women and into a new way of thinking about love.

Love and Augustine

There are not many women in the Confessions, but those who are present are powerful and are represented not just as watery figures but as adult, fertile women who have given birth. It is necessary to read Augustine on love in terms of these relationships, as the desire that Augustine “suffers” from in his early life is related to these women. Concupiscentia is a kind of love (amor) that does not offer what one really wants; rather, it is a kind of love that desires things of the world. It is a love that is bodied and seeks bodies. In her dissertation, Love and Saint Augustine, Hannah Arendt contrasts the love of caritas with the love of cupiditas Footnote ¹² in a manner that is representative of what I read as the common negative philosophical and theological reading of Augustine on love. The dissertation is composed of three parts (none of which discuss the women in Augustine's life). The first part lays out Arendt's reading of Augustine on love as craving for fulfillment and stability; in this section she claims that, for Augustine, there is a stark divide between caritas and cupiditas, which she correctly reads as forms of love that have different foci and only one of which is stable. She reads cupiditas as causing a constant estrangement from the individual from herself and claims that Augustine calls for its dissolution in favor of stable caritas (Reference Arendt, Scott and StarkArendt 1996, 23).

In the second part, Arendt lays out Augustine's reading of caritas as the loneliest form of human love and the seeming impossibility of neighborly love. The final part is concerned with making space for neighborly love and distancing caritas to co‐habit. She writes in the final section,

In this final part Arendt must make room for social life in a perfected form of human existence sans cupiditas. In a footnote to her discussion of Augustine's account of the human temporization of the world as separate from the godly creation of the world, she quotes Augustine's Sermon 76, 9: “The world only knows how to devour its lovers, not to carry them” (Reference Arendt, Scott and StarkArendt 1996, 69, n. 93). On Arendt's reading of Augustine, this world (“constituted by men,” not “the world as heaven and earth” [Reference Arendt, Scott and StarkArendt 1996, 69]) cannot but destroy those who love it, a confirmation of caritas as sterile, isolated love between spirit and divine and cupiditas as wild, all‐consuming desire for the world. This is a fundamental misreading of Augustine's thinking on the relationship between the human and her world.

In his later masterwork The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Augustine writes that the nature of “carnal concupiscence” is not “in the soul alone, much less in the flesh alone. It comes from both sources” (Augustine 1982, X.xii.20, 110). Although Arendt does indicate that pleasure is felt by the soul, she neglects to fully comprehend the significance of the fact that, for Augustine, pleasure is natural, felt by the soul, and desired by the soul in all forms of human existence (before the Fall of the first pair, in the world that is to come, and now) and that “carnal pleasure,” though felt by means of the body, does not arise from the body (Augustine 1982, X.xii.20, 111). Readers of Augustine who repudiate concupiscentia and worldly love in general tend to gloss over the famous “Late have I loved you” passage quoted above: “The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all.” The world itself is not the source of the problem of human disorderliness, and a disavowal of the world and other humans is not the way to transcend disorder or to get away from disorder and closer to God. It is not merely the choice of objects that causes the lover to be destroyed, for those objects are lovely; it is how the lover loves. If the lover loves the things in the world as if she could consume them and be made whole by them, the lover can only be devoured in turn. The world degrades, and in the death of the object of one's love one's own world unravels as well and must be reknit.

In some respects my reading of Augustine on love is an attempt to rescue concupiscentia from its negative connotations. Concupiscentia is how we love the things of the world; however, for Augustine, concupiscentia also exists in a space between soul and body, human and human. In some ways love is considered as an abstract (and therefore impossible) idea or as an affect: the result of a great burden of cerebral chemicals. By bifurcating amor into caritas and concupiscentia, Augustine makes way for discussions of love that are polyvalent and burgeoning with potentiality. In her dissertation, Arendt focuses on the dual nature of love in Augustine's thought, and her conclusions involve a falling away of concupiscentia in favor of caritas, the proper love of God. She strips from this new love anything resembling passion (bodily or psychological) and makes it intellectual, cutting off the possibility of neighborly love in the process. Even though she ends her dissertation on social life after caritas, there is no clear room for interconnectedness in Arendt's reading of Augustine's caritas. Hers is a provocative misreading of Augustine on love; for Arendt, the turn from cupiditas to caritas is a turn to otherworldliness. This turn is impossible—Augustine requires more of love than just being awash in the presence of God.

On my reading, in contrast to Arendt's, “The world only knows how to devour its lovers, not to carry them” should be read as claiming that the object of concupiscentia is not something that can be reciprocal, because the desire of concupiscentia is to consume and make one, while not being consumed in turn. In contrast, the transformation of love that comes from a gift from the heavens is not a doing away with bodied desire, a cancelling of concupiscentia in favor of stable caritas, it is the stabilization of all forms of love.

The central question of Gilligan and Richard's text is also their last one: “Why is the love of equals unmanly?” (Reference Gilligan and RichardsGilligan and Richards 2009, 267). In her inspiring work The Birth of Pleasure, Gilligan defines patriarchy as

It is surprising, given this reading of patriarchy, that Gilligan and Richards find the origins of patriarchal oppression of the individual expression of love as between equals in the work of Augustine. In contrast, I have maintained that the Gilligan and Richards reading of Augustine as “father” of the problem of patriarchy in the West is much too simplistic. This kind of misreading presents Augustine as a “punching bag” for readings of the negative effect of patriarchal norms on the capacity for love in the human psyche, while ignoring the opportunity his readings of sexuality give us to explore the gendered, fluid nature of love and desire.

What should be of most interest to feminists in my reading of Augustine on love is the way I have complicated the image of Augustine as a patriarch. St. Augustine of Hippo is, after all, considered a Father of the Catholic Church and was in his lifetime a male leader of his city; it is in this very capacity as patriarch that Augustine's analysis of love so powerfully unravels patriarchal constraints on love. A reading of Augustine that leaves him as a patriarch hell‐bent on folding patriarchy into Christianity and nothing more is problematic and not as plausible as my own reading, which focuses on what Augustine's reading of the fate of love has to say about what it is to be human. The biggest crime against love in Western thought, I think, has been the misreading of Augustine on love, which makes caritas sexless and concupiscentia Godless: caritas, for Augustine, is not passionless and bodiless, and concupiscentia, though wild, is not unnatural. What transformations might be possible in folding together these two concepts, bringing love back to love? Augustine does discuss the prospect of the healing transformation of immoderate concupiscentia into moderate concupiscentia. However, the fact that this transformation can happen only after death and outside of time indicates not the evil and unnaturalness of human bodily love, but its naturalness. For Augustine, bodily love is transformed not into dispassionate, divine love but into a more stable form of itself. The object of concupiscentia remains bodily things. Ultimately, a careful reading of Augustine's understanding of concupiscentia and caritas as well as his personal relationships with women offers feminists not an understanding of the necessary transformation of earthly love into divine love, but a way of viewing love in its many forms as natural, though not perfect, in its present state: it is in the nature of humans to love not just God, but each other.