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In The Myth of the Eternal Return Mircea Eliade argued that premodern man understood 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 applicability, 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 demonstrated 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 dramatises 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 extension 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 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,...