Heartbreak and Wholeness

Augustine can appear to be a rigidly dogmatic writer and thinker—he is responsible for defining much of what becomes orthodox dogma against positions he vigorously labels heretical. But he is too honest and too poetic a thinker to be so simple. His reading of original sin, a concept whose importance is largely his doing, is often understood as not only unambiguous but strongly misogynistic. This paper suggests that it is neither. It draws especially on two sources. The first is a letter to a young monk, in which Augustine urges that the monk—and perhaps implicitly all devout men—should avoid Eve in all women, but specifically in the figures of mother and wife. The second is the Confessions. Here three feminine figures—Augustine’s mother, Monica; his unnamed partner/wife; and the enticing Lady Continence—all complicate any negative imagery. A series of heartbreaks emerges. It begins, in a way, with Eve’s creation out of Adam’s side; it extends to the exile consequent upon original sin; it goes on to Monica’s death and the unnamed woman’s banishment. But Continence, who turns Augustine to God, strongly echoes both these women, and arguably is not possible without them—not just as women, but specifically as mother and wife. Heartbreak and heart-mending, absence and God, turn out to be inextricably interwoven.