beautiful bodies: augustine, nunc et tunc

St. Augustine was known as a theologian of feeling for many centuries. Renaissance painters pictured him holding his passionately blazing heart in his hand. In Augustine’s society and education, feeling was considered an intimate and integral aspect of thinking, so intimately interwoven that philosophers struggled to distinguish these activities. Thus, Augustine was also committed to learning throughout his passionate and thoughtful life, from his early conviction that ＂God and the soul＂ can be known through the meticulous use of reason, to mature sermons in which he quoted ＂God is love,＂ and commented, in effect, that is all you need to know about God. The role of feeling in his understanding of the effect of Christian doctrines on present life has been less noticed. This book proposes that changes in his perception of the value and significance of human bodies--from objects of rapacious lust to rapturous admiration of their beauty--form the nexus within which Augustine’s thought and feeling cohere. The old Augustine’s understanding of the theological significance of present bodies informed his acknowledged speculations on the qualities and capacities of beautiful bodies, nunc et tunc.

Margaret R. Miles is emerita professor of historical theology at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California. Her books include Reading Augustine on Memory, Marriage, Tears, and Meditation (2021), The Long Goodbye (2017), Augustine and the Fundamentalist’s Daughter (2011), A Complex Delight: The Secularization of the Breast, 1350-1750 (2008), and The Word Made Flesh: A History of Christian Thought (2005).