The beloved icon: an Augustinian solution to the problem of sex | Scottish Journal of Theology | Cambridge Core

Published by ☕, March 15th, 2023

RESEARCH ARTICLE

The beloved icon: an Augustinian solution to the

problem of sex

Onsi A. Kamel*

The Davenant Institute, Leesburg, VA, USA

*Corresponding author. E-mail: onsiakamel@outlook.com

Abstract

Augustine famously believed fallen human sex to be inescapably bound up with sinful lust.

In every sexual act, lust embodies both the sin of the fall (prideful idolatry) and that sin’s

consequences. John C. Cavadini has extended Augustine’s conception of lust to include

domination, and even violence. This leaves us with a disturbing question: is sex without

violence possible? Building upon Jean-Luc Marion’s distinction between idol and icon,

this paper locates a solution to the problem of lust in Augustine’s conception of friend-

ship. Identifying the beloved as an icon of God entails relating to the beloved without lust-

ful domination.

Keywords: Augustine; friendship; icon; idolatry; libido dominandi;sex

In The Myth of the Eternal Return Mircea Eliade argued that premodern man under-

stood the meaning of acts to lie in the ‘ property of reproducing a primordial act, of

repeating a mythical example’.

1

Actions participated in and exemplified mythical

events; their significance was never primarily physical. Whatever its general applicabil-

ity, this claim about the mythic import of premodern acts captures a crucial element of

Augustine’s vision of human sexuality: there is no ‘mere sex’. That is, sex’s significance

cannot be reduced to the physical interactions of bodies. Its primary meaning,

Augustine believed, is derived not from biological facts, nor even from the emotional

or psychological states which attend the sexual act, but from the fall. As shall be demon-

strated below, Augustine saw the postlapsarian sexual act as inextricably bound up with

sinful lust, and such lust as a punishment inherited from the fall. In every sexual act, lust

embodies both the sin of the fall and that sin’s consequences. Fallen sex sinfully drama-

tises fallenness.

In this paper, I propose that resources for mitigating the problem of lust in sex may be

found in Augustine’s iconographic account of Christian friendship, defined as the love of

God in the friend. To demonstrate this, it will be necessary to first explicate both

Augustine’s conception of human sexual lust and John C. Cavadini’s Augustinian exten-

sion of that concept to include domination. Second, utilising the analytical tool of

Jean-Luc Marion’s distinction between idol and icon, I will examine Augustine’s account

© Cambridge University Press 2021

1

Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R. Trask, 2nd edn

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 4.

Scottish Journal of Theology (2020), 73, 318–329

doi:10.1017/S0036930620000642

of worldly and heavenly friendship and find therein a solution to the problem of lust.

Following this, I will investigate Augustinian habit, and especially the role of habit in

enslaving humans to dominating lust. Finally, I will suggest that eucharistic participation,

which is Augustine’s solution to habituated enslavement, may be the Augustinian means

by which Christians can be freed from enslavement to habituated lust.

Augustine, Cavadini and the problem of sex

Augustine believed sexual lust to be the paradigmatic example of God’s punishment of

pride, the original sin. God had ‘commanded obedience’ from his rational creature of

such a sort that ‘submission [was] advantageous’ to it; ‘the fulfillment of its own will

in preference to the creator’s’ was, by contrast, ‘destruction’.

2

Adam and Eve, rational

creatures both, recognised their good to consist in obeying God, ‘the unchangeable

good which ought to satisfy’.

3

Yet, mysteriously, even inexplicably, while recognising

their good to be communion with God, and while knowing that disobedience entailed

forfeiture of this communion, Adam and Eve sinned. The culprit was pride.

Pride, writes Augustine, is the ‘ craving for undue exaltation’ when ‘the soul aban-

dons Him to whom it ought to cleave as its end, and becomes a kind of end unto itself’.

4

Pride is the wish of man and woman to ‘be as gods’ which drives them to reject the true

God (cf. Gen 3:5). Adam and Eve saw the good and, recognising it as the good, rejected

it. The fall was thus an inexplicable violation of the rational order. In so acting, Adam

and Eve ceased to be rightly constituted, fully rational beings: pride entailed man’s

‘turning toward himself’ and becoming ‘contracted’, or, in Cavadini’s parlance, ‘dis-

integrated’.

5

This dis-integration had a peculiar, if poetically just, effect: just as man

introduced an irrational lawlessness into the created order, so God introduced ‘another

law in [man’s] members’, namely, ‘the disobedience of his flesh’.

6

In other words, the

fact that the sexual organs do not follow the dictates of the will, but respond only to lust,

justly results from human disobedience to God.

7

In the fall, the prideful will militated

against reason; in the fallen man, the lustful flesh militates against the will. This is man’s

just punishment.

8

As defined aptly by Cavadini, lust ‘is the expectation of and desire for pleasure’

which takes on a life of its own, independent of the will.

9

It is bound up in the disin-

tegration of the person from himself, ‘ alienated’ from the person ‘by pride’.

10

East of

Eden, Augustine recognises lust as to some degree necessary for the sexual act to

occur, but this necessity does not render lust morally neutral. On the contrary, because

2

Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2009), 14.12,

14.13.

3

Ibid., 14.13.

4

Ibid.

5

Ibid.; John C. Cavadini, ‘Feeling Right: Augustine on the Passions and Sexual Desire’, Augustinian

Studies 36/1 (2005), p. 201.

6

Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 1.8.

7

Importantly, while Augustine’s account of concupiscence can apply to both men and women, his

account of the sexual act as independent of the will and dependent upon sexual lust is informed by dis-

tinctly male physiology (especially the erection) and does not apply in the same way to women (who

can conceive without lust). Thus the use of the word ‘man’ in the argument is significant.

8

Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 1.7.

9

Cavadini, ‘Feeling Right’, p. 204.

10

Ibid.

Scottish Journal of Theology 319

it is a deliverance of pride, lust is wicked, incomprehensible, irrational and enfeebling.

For Augustine, not even marital intercourse can occur without lust, so the permissibility

of marital intercourse lies solely in its capacity t o bring good (i.e. ‘the procreation of

children’) from evil (i.e. lust).

11

Thus, regardless of the context in which it is engaged,

the sexual act is, as such, compromised by lust.

Furthermore, since lust is inescapably bound up with pride, which, again, is the

soul’s abandonme nt of God for the self, it entails self-worship. Consequently, the sexual

partner becomes a means for said worship: ‘Pride cannot grant that one will be moved

in one’s deepest self, AS [sic] one’s deepest self, by the beauty of someone else qua

someone else, but rather by one’s capacity for sovereignty on its own terms.’

12

Thus,

as John Burnaby wrote so eloquently, ‘The desire of private possession is just what

Augustine regards as the perversion of self-love and the destruction of all love to

God.’

13

Inherent in such desire for private possession – what might be described

more baldly as the ‘use’– of the beloved is a kind of assault on the human person.

To treat ‘ a person as the means to an end does violence to the very essence of the

other’.

14

Precisely because a person’s true end is God, to use another for the purpose

of prideful self-worship violates the integrity of the other. It should come as little sur-

prise, then, that for Augustine’s pagan contemporaries, lust was ‘in effect a cultural pro-

ject’ of domination and, as illuminated by the harrowing account of the bride’s rape in

City of God, often literally, not merely metaphorically, violent.

15

This is, no doubt, a startling and even worrying account of sex. Yet its force, as cer-

tain strains of feminist thought and recent developments in western public life attest,

cannot simply be waved away. If Augustine’s account is correct, prideful lust is inherent

in the sexual act. If Cavadini’s Augustinian extension of the concept of lust is correct,

lust includes domination. This leaves us with a disturbing question: is sex without vio-

lence possible? Is it possible to be healed of lust such that, ‘even if we can never engage

sex without it, it does not fully define the experience any longer?’

16

Cavadini gestures

toward a solution based in Christ’s transformation of his members, that is, the people

of the church.

17

This paper proposes a different, although not contradictory, solution:

Augustinian friendship models the love of God in the other, and this love may be rea-

lised in the faithful by their believing participation in the church’s sacraments. To

Augustinian friendship we now turn.

The friend: icon or idol? A solution to the problem of sex

Proposing Augustinian friendship as the solution to Augustinian sex may seem akin to

suggesting technological development as the solution to malfunctioning technology – it

11

Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence 1.9.

12

Cavadini, ‘Feeling Right’, p. 209.

13

John Burnaby, Amor Dei: A Study of the Religion of St Augustine (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2007),

p. 117.

14

Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, revised edn (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1993), p. 27.

Wojtyla’s broader argument is, of course, based on a quasi-Kantian scheme of means and ends. It is, there-

fore, rather different from Augustine’s argument and the argument advanced here. This particular state-

ment, though, helpfully illuminates Cavadini’s Augustinian wrestling with lust and domination.

15

Cavadini, ‘Feeling Right’, pp. 198, 209. Strikingly, as Cavadini has demonstrated, Augustine’s critique

of sex is similar to certain feminist critiques, especially that of Andrea Dworkin.

16

Ibid., p. 211.

17

Ibid., p. 215.

320 Onsi A. Kamel

might solve the immediate problem, but it will merely generate more problems of the

same sort. Many worry that Augustinian friendship is use-oriented and, given that the

problem in Augustinian sex is its prideful use of the other, concern about proposing

Augustinian friendship as the solution to Augustinian sex is understandable.

18

Will

Augustine’s vision of friendship merely solve one kind of use with another kind?

Properly understanding Augustine’s claims about friendship will, I hope, assuage the

fears of those concerned. It will be helpful, first, to examine the classical, non-Christian

accounts of friendship Augustine references and eventually critiques on Christian

grounds. Prior to his conversion in the Confessions, Augustine uses classical philosoph-

ical language to describe his friends hip with an unnamed man. In sharp contrast to the

bad friendships with which Augustine filled his boyhood, this was based in shared

interests and ardent mutual affection.

19

In describing it, Augustine references

Cicero’s On Friendship and quotes Horace (‘He was half my soul’), Ovid (they

were ‘one soul in two bodies’) and perhaps Aristotle, who made the same claim as

Ovid.

20

If, as Valk writes concerning Aristotelean friendship, ‘The highest form of

friendship … becomes a kind of exchange of selfhood, a series of self-disclosures that

continues over a long period of time’, pre-conversion Augustine seems to have agreed:

‘He was my "other self".’

21

Following his conversion, however, Augustine’s attitudes shifted. No longer did

friendship consist only or primarily in an exchange of selfhood. Instead, true friendship

was constituted by loving ‘God in your friend’.

22

Love of God in the friend is the same

love by which we love ourselves. Thus, ‘If we love ourselves’–or, by extension, our

friends –‘for any other reason, we are in fact hating rather than loving’.

23

To love

the friend is to love God in and for the friend, just as proper self-love is loving God

in and for oneself. This may seem like a convoluted paradox: how can one love another

by loving someone besides that other for the sake of that other? Should we not love our

friends for their own sakes? These are two separate questions, and both will be answered

in the process of by investigating what, exactly, Augustine means by ‘loving God in the

friend’.

Friendship explained: the icon of God

Augustine claims friendship is loving God in another – but what can this mean? As

shall be shown below, it means loving someone while recognising he points beyond

himself to God: ‘Earthly neighbors are loved well according to love’s heavenly referent

in God.’

24

This is, in one sense, straightforward Augustinian anthropology: because

each person’s final good is God, to ‘love’ anyone without wishing this good for him

18

Kyle Hubbard, ‘Idolatrous Friendship in Augustine’s Confessions’, Philosophy and Theology 28/1

(2016), pp. 44–5. He cites Hannah Arendt and C. S. Lewis as critics of Augustinian friendship on the

grounds that it is use-oriented.

19

Marie Aquinas McNamara, Friends and Friendship for Saint Augustine (Staten Island, NY: Alba

House, 1964), p. 64.

20

Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: OUP, 2009), 4.6.11.

21

Frank Vander Valk, ‘Friendship, Politics, and Augustine’s Consolidation of the Self’, Religious Studies

45/2 (June 2009), p. 126; cf. Augustine, Confessions 4.6.11.

22

Augustine, Sermons 336.2.

23

Ibid.

24

Sarah Stewart-Kroeker, Pilgrimage as Moral and Aesthetic Formation in Augustine’s Thought (Oxford:

OUP, 2017), p. 214.

Scottish Journal of Theology 321

is not love, but a form of hatred. Augustinian (Christian) friendship is based, therefore,

on the recognition that the friend is, as Jean-Luc Marion defines the term, an icon.

25

An

icon ‘summons sight in letting the visible … be saturated little by little with the invis-

ible’.

26

The beholder’s gaze does not remain fixed upon the icon, but, in gazing upon

the icon, he gazes also upon that to which the icon points.

Recognising that the friend is an icon dissolves the perceived dichotomy between

loving God in the friend and loving the friend. One need not choose. In loving the

friend as an icon (i.e. in loving God in the friend), one loves God and friend together.

The friend does not simply absorb his friend’s love; as an icon, he refers it beyond him-

self, so that, as he is loved, so is God loved: ‘The true icon never encourages the observer

to focus on the visible itself but allows the invisible to be revealed in the visible’.

27

It is

precisely this feature of the icon, that as it is loved God is loved in one and the same

love, that permits Augustine to reverse the directionality of friend-love in

Confessions. There, to love a friend is to love him ‘in God’, whereas in Sermon 336 it

was to love God ‘ in the friend’.

28

Loving a friend ‘in God’ recognises that the soul of

the friend is ‘established in’ God, that without God friends ‘go their way and perish’.

29

Thus, the problem with loving the friend only for the friend’s sake is that it amounts to

hatred, for it wills the friend’s ultimate disso lution. Friendship recognizes the friend’s

‘good consists in [his] relation to God’.

30

In sum, for Augustine, true Christian friend-

ship means loving God in the friend, or loving the friend in God, so that the friend

functions as an icon. Only thus is it possible to love God and friend together.

How might Augustinian friendship solve the problem of sex? Again, t he problem

with sex is lust: the desire for pleasure manifested in the use of the beloved for the pride-

ful, selfish ends of the lover. The lusting eye perceives the other as an object whose pur-

pose is one’s own gratification rather than as a subject whose good is God. As shown

above, for Augustine, friendship is possible only insofar as the friend is an icon of

God, referring one’s gaze beyond himself to God. Augustinian friendship, therefore,

provides the conceptual tools to fix Augustinian sex, for it recognises that to love

another in and for God is to stop loving that other in and for oneself. Friendship pre-

cludes domination. My proposal, then, is this: insofar as the beloved is loved as an icon

of God, as one in whom God is loved and for whom God is willed as the only good, lust

ceases to characterise the sexual act. To will God for another is to cease willing that

other for oneself.

Friendship exposed: The problem of idolatry

If the solution to the problem of sex is to love God in the beloved, the question is how

one can be transformed from an idolater to one who sees others as icons. To answer this

question, it is necessary to examine idolatry in friendship more fully. The account of

iconographic friendship given above is distinctly Christian; non-Christian friendships,

25

For other fruitful investigations of Augustinian friendship in relation to Marion’s concept of icon, see

Richard B. Miller, ‘Evil, Friendship, and Iconic Realism in Augustine’s Confessions’, Harvard Theological

Review 104/4 (Oct. 2011), pp. 387–409; and Hubbard, ‘Idolatrous Friendship’.

26

Jean-Luc Marion, Thomas A. Carlson and David Tracy, God without Being: Hors-Texte, 2nd edn

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), p. 17.

27

Hubbard, ‘Idolatrous Friendship’, p. 52.

28

Augustine, Confessions 4.12.18.

29

Ibid.

30

Hubbard, ‘Idolatrous Friendship’, p. 52.

322 Onsi A. Kamel

for Augustine, cannot follow the pattern of the icon. As with fallen human sex, so, too,

with fallen human friends hip: it is characterised by pride, domination and, therefore,

idolatry. Examining fallen human friendship and the problem of idolatry in it will

set us on the path which leads to loving the beloved as an icon.

As discussed above, in book 4 of the Confessions, Augustine provides a moving

account of the death of an unnamed friend. As we saw, Augustine uses the language

of classical authors to describe their love. Theirs was a deep union. At his friend’ s pas-

sing, Augustine was devastated; he became restless and agitated, and he could find no

diversion or escape from his misery.

31

Crucially, because Augustine had not yet con-

verted, their friendship was not yet redeemed by grace. It was a fallen friendship,

beset with the problems attending such friendships. These problems are strikingly simi-

lar to the problems of fallen sex, and an anecdote Augustine tells about his friend’s bap-

tism before his death is instructive.

Prior to his friend’s illness, Augustine convinced his friend to become a Manichaean.

When Augustine’s friend temporarily lost consciousness, he was baptised without his

knowledge.

32

When he awakened, Augustine attempted to get his friend to mock his

baptism, but ‘he was horrified at me as if I were an enemy’.

33

Augustine was ‘dumb-

founded and perturbed’.

34

He planned to wait for his friend’s recovery, the better to

‘do what [he] wished with him’.

35

This sentence reveals all: despite Augustine’s eloquent

classical citations about the nature of their friendship, he did not love his friend truly.

He wished to possess his friend, to use him for his own ends.

Hence, perhaps counterintuitively, Augustine’s deep despair at his friend’s death. His

friend’s life was so bound up with his own that his friend ’s death was akin to his death.

It left him ‘tired of living and scared of dying’.

36

Augustine was ‘more surprised that

when he was dead I was still alive’.

37

Because Augustine wished to use his friend, his

friend had become an extension of his own being – a tool. To lose his friend was to

lose a means of accomplishing his will. But for what did Augustine wish to use him?

What function was his friend fulfilling? Prior to his conversion, Augustine writes, he

loved friends ‘as a substitute for [God]’.

38

Augustine’s friend became to him an idol

and a false god which Augustine wrongly imbued with the qualities of the one true

God. As a result, Augustine lost sight of his friend’s corruptibility, of his mere human-

ity.

39

The death of Augustine’s friend was the death of god.

One migh t, of course, be tempted to find an inconsistency in the above account. Did

Augustine wish to use his friend for his own purposes or to worship him as an idol?

People serve idols; they do not use idols. In this case, however, there is no need to

choose between serving and using, for, as Hubbard argues, ‘The idol is the invisible

mirror of the human gaze.’

40

Indeed, the idol actually ‘depends on the gaze that it sat-

isfies’.

41

The idol is a construct of the human by which the human worships himself. To

31

Augustine, Confessions 4.8.12.

32

Ibid., 4.4.8.

33

Ibid.

34

Ibid.

35

Ibid.

36

Ibid., 4.6.11.

37

Ibid.

38

Ibid., 4.8.13.

39

Ibid., 4.6.11.

40

Hubbard, ‘Idolatrous Friendship’, p. 50.

41

Marion, God Without Being, p. 10.

Scottish Journal of Theology 323

serve the idol is to serve the self. It is precisely because Augustine has substituted his

friend for God that he wishes to use him for himself. If the friend’s final good is not

recognised to be God, one will satisfy oneself in the friend by using him to advance

one’s own ends. ‘For Augustine, narcissism and idolatry are two sides of the same

coin.’

42

The possibility of idolatrous friendship is important for two reasons. First, it demon-

strates that the issue at stake in friendship is analogous to the issue of sex, namely, sim-

ultaneously idolising and using the other. Second, it further demonstrates that the key

problem in both sex and friendship is the will. The gaze creates the idol and wills the

idol’s existence for itself. Speaking of his state after the death of his friend, Augustine

writes, ‘I should have lifted myself to you, Lord, to find a cure. I knew that, but did

not wish it or have the strength for it.’

43

Although it was a problem with his will,

Augustine was unable to abandon his idolatry. He needed medicine. In examining

how he found it, we will find the solution to our own problem.

Reforming habits by finding grace

As Marion has argued, and as Augustine claimed above, the problem of idolatry is a

problem of the will. ‘The gaze makes the idol’, and ‘the manner of seeing decides

what can be seen ’.

44

This claim leads to an intriguing possibility: if the human gaze,

by the human will, makes an idol, it can unmake it. So why does the willing subject

not simply decide to love the beloved in God? Augustine’s answer is alarming: he can-

not. The willing subject is bound by habit. In finding Augustine’s solution to the prob-

lem of sinful habit we will also find the possibility of redeemed sex characterised by the

love of God in the beloved.

In book 10 of the Confessions, Augustine analyses various kinds of lust and the role

of habit in enslaving humans to these lusts. Reflecting on ‘the lust of the flesh’,

Augustine makes two striking assertions in three consecutive sentences. First, ‘anyone

who could change from worse to better’ can ‘change from better to worse’, and divine

mercy alone guarantees there will be no backsliding.

45

Second, prior to Augustine’s con-

version, ‘the pleasures of the ear had a … tenacious hold on [him], and subjugated

[him]’.

46

Lustful pleasures, sexual or not, take captive those who indulge them such

that the indulgent eventually become slaves who can only succumb. Even after one’s

conversion, when one wills to do the right, sinful habits are so ingrained that one is

incapable of doing what one wills.

Augustine’s case study is musical delight, which functions similarly to sexual delight,

not least because both are lusts of the flesh. Augustine can be tempted to give ‘well-

trained voices more honor than is fitting’.

47

At times ‘physical delight … deceives me

when the perception of the senses is unaccompanied by reason, and is not content

to be in a subordinate place’.

48

This is precisely the problem of sexual lust: it takes

upon itself a life of its own, unaccompanied by reason, and subjugates the willing

42

Miller, ‘Evil, Friendship, and Iconic Realism’, p. 391.

43

Augustine, Confessions 4.7.12.

44

Marion, God without Being,p.9.

45

Augustine, Confessions 10.32.48.

46

Ibid., 10.33.49.

47

Ibid.

48

Ibid.

324 Onsi A. Kamel

subject. The pleasure of aural bliss, and the lust for it, often takes pride of place over the

delight of rationally contemplating the scriptures, which the music ought to serve.

The mode of Augustine’s enslavement brings into sharp relief the crux of the prob-

lem for sexual lust. Augustine’s slavery is to ‘habitual practices’.

49

These constantly

‘reabsorb’ him such that he is ‘held in their grip’.

50

Crucially, Augustine does not

wish to be so held, but he is utterly unable to break free. Echoing Romans 7,

Augustine claims, ‘Here I have the power to be, but do not wish it. There I wish to

be, but lack the power.’

51

Augustine, and indeed all sinners, have been so habituated

into relating to worldly goods out of lustful desire that, even once they recognise

their errors, they cannot change. Before, Augustine willed to fulfil lust; now he fulfils

it against his will. This is the summit of human dis-integration.

The example of aural lust instructs doubly: Augustine was enslaved to it, but surpris-

ingly, following his conversion, Augustine achieved some modicum of ‘restful content-

ment’ from temptation of the ears.

52

‘Now’, he wrote, ‘I am moved not by the chant but

by the words being sung.’

53

The relevant question is how such a thing was possible.

What moved Augustine from being an unwilling slave to his passions to a rational, will-

ing master of them? This question is important because Augustine expresses a confi-

dence about healing from aural lust which he does not extend to sexual lust. In

virtue of their shared genus (i.e. fleshly lust), however, the possibility of such healing

could be extended faithfully to sexual lust in accord with Augustine’s premises.

The eucharist as the principal iconic reality

Before proceeding to Augustine’s solution to the problem of slavery to lust, let us briefly

sum up the investigation thus far. Owing to the fall, in which Adam and Eve incompre-

hensibly rebelled against God by seeking to become their own Gods, God punished

man’s prideful, willing rebellion against the good. He rendered human bodies disobedi-

ent to human reason and will. Cavadini aptly calls this ‘dis-integration’. Dis-integration

is paradigmatically evidenced in the sexual act, the accomplishment of which necessi-

tates prideful, ultimately dominating lust. Lust uses its object to fulfil the lusting

subject’s desires rather than allowing the lover to love the beloved in God. Lust is ultim-

ately idolatrous because it fails to point the beloved to the true good (i.e. God) and treats

the beloved as the lover’s true good. I proposed a solution: Augustinian friendship, in

which the friend becomes an icon of the divine, such that God is loved in the friend,

undermines the dynamics of idolatry. Loving God in another means willing God for

him; and willing God for another precludes willing that other for oneself. The problem

of habit, addressed in the prior section, is the impediment to realising this transform-

ation from idolatry to iconography. Fallen man is habituated to idolatrous lust and

cannot escape it of himself. Below, then, it is necessary to chart out Augustine’s solution

to the problem of lust: grace working through faith to rehabituate the faithful by their

participation in the eucharist.

Augustine begins and ends book 10 of the Confessions, in which he details his post-

conversion enslavement to habituated lust, with extended meditations upon grace and

49

Ibid., 10.11.65.

50

Ibid.

51

Ibid.; cf. Rom 7:15.

52

Ibid., 10.33.49.

53

Ibid.

Scottish Journal of Theology 325

the incarnation, priestly mediation and the ongoing salvific activity of Christ.

Augustine’s initial reflection foregrounds the inability of his ‘human readers’ to ‘heal

[his] diseases’, that is, those lusts to which he had become habituated and therefore

by which he was enslaved.

54

By contrast, God has ‘forgiven and covered up’

Augustine’s ‘past wickednesses’, and his grace alone ‘transform[s] [Augustine’s]

soul’.

55

Lest anyone descend ‘into the sleep of despair’, concluding that his wounds can-

not be healed, Augustine emphasises that grace gives the ‘weak person … power’, trans-

forming the soul ‘by faith and [God’s] sacrament’.

56

God’s grace, working through faith

and the church’s sacraments, transforms the soul and strengthens the Christian to over-

come sin.

In the concluding meditation of book 10, Augustine again remembers the promise of

God to ‘heal all [his] diseases’.

57

Without God’s promise, Augustine would be ‘in des-

pair’; but he knows God’s ‘medicine is still more potent’ than his diseases.

58

This medi-

cine, Augustine proclaims, is nothing else than Christ, God’ s Word who ‘had become

flesh and dwelt among us’.

59

Crucially, as medicine, Christ is distributed, eaten and

drunk in the eucharist.

60

Augustine finds healing at the Lord’s Table.

Augustine’s claims about the eucharist as a locus of healing points to its unique

nature. The eucharist elevates the faithful above what is seen to the unseen and spiritual

reality beyond. In the eucharist, what can be seen is ‘bread and a cup’, but faith teaches

that ‘the bread is the body of Christ, the cup the blood of Christ’.

61

Or again, ‘What can

be seen has a bodily appearance, what is understood has a spiritual fruit.’

62

In short, in

the sacraments, ‘one thing is seen, another is to be understood’.

63

In the eucharist, bread

and wine point beyond themselves to the invisible reality present in them: Christ him-

self. Faith teaches that, even though bread and wine are received (or appear to be

received, depending upon one’s interpretation of Augustine) physically, Christ’s body

and blood are received sacramentally.

Because the eucharist moves the faithful beyond the sensible to the insensible,

because it ‘makes use of the material to lead us to the immaterial’,itis‘effective …

for reforming minds obsessed with the material’.

64

The eucharist is a rehabituation,

an unlearnin g of carnal modes of thought. By it, participants are healed of their habi-

tuated infirmities, learning to see Christ beyond the elements by faith, to love the thing

signified in and through the sign. The eucharist teaches Christians iconographic

relations.

If the problem of sex is habituated lust, which selfishly dominates another, the solu-

tion is being taught to see and receive Christ in the eucharistic bread and wine. In so

doing, one becomes newly habituated to loving God in created realities, that is, in icons;

in our case, this means loving God in and through the beloved. The eucharist makes

54

Ibid., 10.3.3.

55

Ibid., 10.3.4.

56

Ibid.

57

Ibid., 10.43.69.

58

Ibid.

59

Ibid.

60

Ibid., 10.43.70.

61

Augustine, Sermons 272.

62

Ibid.

63

Ibid.

64

Hans Boersma and Matthew Levering (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology (Oxford:

OUP, 2015), p. 158.

326 Onsi A. Kamel

possible the loving of God in the beloved and the beloved in God. Gradual rehabituation

is a condition for true friendship and therefore for a sexuality characterised not by dom-

inating lust but by a love of God in, with, through and for the beloved. Ultimately, the

end of the eucharist is ‘harmonious unity’, because it is the ‘ultimate shape of the

restored human community’.

65

Presumably, such harmonious unity would extend to

the hidden recesses of human life, not demurring to take up its place in the marriage

bed.

As an aside, lest this solution seem appropriate only for Catholics or the Orthodox, it

is important to recognise this solution is also perfectly in keeping with the sacramen-

tology of the magisterial Protestant traditions. Whatever Augustine’s position on the

presence of Christ’s human body in the elements – and there is a great deal of debate

on this point – the cru cial aspect of his account of the eucharist as medicinal rehabitua-

tion is a point upon which magisterial Protestants, Catholics and Eastern Orthodox

agree. Namely, our senses tell the faithful they receive mere bread and wine, but faith

teaches them that they receive Christ himself – spiritual healing under the sign of phys-

ical sustenance.

Engaging Cavadini’s solution

Near the beginning of this paper, I stated that my solution does not compete with

Cavadini’s, but that I imagine my solution as a complement to his. Whereas his project

was laying out the problem of lust as Augustine saw it, connecting lust to Augustine’s

thought on domination and briefly providing a solution, my task has been to lay out the

problem Cavadini raises, introduce to it the further problem of the will’s enslavement to

habit and provide a solution at greater length. There is much to glean from Cavadini’s

proposal, and some also to critique.

Pointing to the incarnation, Cavadini argues that Christians may possess an ‘imagin-

ation’ in which ‘Christ offers to us the reality of an emotional life which is fully free …

and so calls to us beyond dissembling to deeper feeling, to self-possession’.

66

Commenting on Augustine’s sermon on Psalm 30, Cavadini writes that incarnate

Christ truly fears, but his ‘fear is a function of the Incarnation, of his having declared

his solidarity with our life. He feels our fear.’

67

By the same token, because Christians

are members of Christ, we ‘are being transfigured into Christ’s way of feeling’.

68

For

Cavadini, as, of course, for Augustine, the divine medicine is Christ the incarnate

one, in whom Christians are transformed by participation. Specifically, Christ trans-

forms the human imagination, such that it is capable of putting on Christ, gradually,

by speaking his words and doing his deeds after him.

69

My proposal is not an attempt to contradict Cavadini but to fill out his account.

What might ‘being transfigured into Christ’s way of feeling’ mean as we relate to our

beloveds? I suggested it means adopting an iconographic frame, such that the beloved

becomes truly loved as God is loved in her. It is in recognising that humans are signs,

icons, whose function is to point to God, that the redeemed human being puts on the

imagination of Christ. How might this transformation occur concretely? Cavadini did

65

Ibid., p. 160.

66

Cavadini, ‘Feeling Right’, p. 211.

67

Ibid., p. 213.

68

Ibid.

69

Ibid., pp. 213–14.

Scottish Journal of Theology 327

not address – did not intend to address – the problem of habit or, by extension, the

‘bondage of the will’; such bondage prevents the Christian from acting in accord

with his new imagination, his new will. If the Christian is enslaved by habit – even

after having been incorporated into Christ’s body, death and resurrection in baptism

– a new ritual habituation is needed precisely to make the transformed imagination effi-

cacious over against habit. ‘The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak’ (Matt

26:41, RSV). The eucharist, by which the faithful, week in and week out, actively receive

the sign as the thing signified, makes possible the extension of iconographic vision to

other realms, including the sexual. New behaviour becomes, for the first time, a true

possibility.

Conclusion

This paper has taken up the problem of Augustinian sexual lust. As a result of the fall,

which was wilful human disobedience against the rationally comprehended Good, man

was punished with a will impotent in relation to the flesh. This is exemplified in the

sexual act, for which lust, operating almost entirely independently of the will, is neces-

sary. This lust, as Cavadini demonstrates, is not mere sexual desire. It is, instead, a

prideful desire to possess another for one’s own gratification. It is a form of idolatry

in which one both sees the other as one’s own ultimate good and possesses the o ther

to attain said good. In other words, lust constitutes a kind of violence against the

beloved, a domination.

The solution taken up above is that of friendship, which Augustine defines as the

love of God in the friend; friendship nullifies this kind of possessive desire. In recognis-

ing God as the friend’s final good, one no longer desires to possess the friend as a means

of obtaining one’s own (albeit wrongly understood) final good. Friendship thus con-

ceived is an instance of what Jean-Luc Mario n characterises as the icon: the earthly

and visible reality by which the heavenly reality is received. Iconography precludes

the possibility of idolatry.

Just when we had identified this solution, however, we were met with a further prob-

lem: the impotence of the will. The will cannot change its behaviour – or, perhaps

incomprehensibly, is incapable of changing human behaviour – no matter how much

the individual wishes to do so, because it is enslaved to habit. As Augustine contends,

however, grace alone can heal and strengthen the will, and the eucharist, as a crucial

means of receiving grace, effects a rehabituation which enables the Christian to put

on iconographic spectacles and act accordingly. In brief, this paper proposed the follow-

ing: lust is the problem; iconographic friendship is the solution; habit is the obstacle; the

eucharist is the means of overcoming the obstacle.

There is much that remains to be investigated, especially the contents of the

redeemed Christian’s imagination and how this imagination might transform other

aspects of relating to the world. As Cavadini proposed, the Christian’s participation

in Christ ultimately transforms the imagination. Insofar as it proclaims Christ’s

death, the eucharist proclaims also the death of the Christian, who was baptised into

this death.

70

The imagination of one dead and resurrected is the imagination of one

who possesses all things precisely because he possesses nothing in himself. He possesses

all things only as they exist and subsist in God, to whom they ceaselessly point. He pos-

sesses all things as icons.

70

See e.g. 1 Cor 11:26 and Rom 6:3.

328 Onsi A. Kamel

Eliade, in sum, got the story half-right. In Augustine’s view, only fallen human action

points backward, mythically embodying the fall. Christian behaviour, by contrast,

points forward. The meaning of the Christian’s acts is not mythical – it is eschatological.

Christian action may, falteringly and ever imperfectly, escape fallen modes of being and

embody the iconographic truth of the new creation. Christian action points to the day

when everyone will see that God is all in all (Eph 1:15–23).

Cite this article: Kamel OA (2020). The beloved icon: an Augustinian solution to the problem of sex.

Scottish Journal of Theology 73, 318–329. https://doi-org.uplib.idm.oclc.org/10.1017/S0036930620000642