Augustine’s Oceanic: The Wellspring of Christianity vs. the Disease of Desire

Abstract:Challenging Freud’s contention that the origin of religion is the need for a protective Father (rather than an oceanic feeling of eternity), Augustine’s Confessions (as I read it) indicates that such an oceanic experience generated the concept of original sin, to justify a theological procedure for wending one’s way back to that ecstatic experience, and thereby laid the foundation for Christianity. Lacanian and Kristevan theory in turn facilitates our realization that Christianity springs from a wish for maternal fulfillment, a propensity to cling to the plenitude that occupies the void of das Ding. By illustrating the strong line of Christian thinkers Augustine was up against, Agamben puts into relief the subjectivity operating in Augustine’s formation of Christianity, furthering our ability to grasp the psychosexual underpinnings of the concept of original sin, with its ironic capacity to compel belief in a purity of spiritual oneness. Foucault, in Confessions of the Flesh, also weighs in, through his analysis of City of God and Against Julian that not only underscores Augustine’s obsession with sex but suggests that the consumption of the forbidden fruit might “be understood in a sexual way.” The Christian son/daughter therefore, ideally, fuses with the mother-Church to experience an oceanic state of completeness prior to sexual differentiation, an all-embracing fullness that enables a (Monica-inspired) victory—through evasion—over the Law of the Father, the disease of desire, and its concomitant lack. However, although Augustine held Lacanian theory within his perceptual and conceptual grasp, he veers off personally in a direction Lacan would consider a detour, insofar as Augustine “drown[s] the symptom in meaning,” in mother’s mystical milk, leaving it “repressed.” Yet in doing so, he instigated two-thousand years of Christianity: thanks to Augustine Imaginary maternal protection can be enjoyed through the jouissance of an oceanic feeling, celebrated by dozens of Madonna del Latte paintings.