Joelle Chenoweth, School of English, University of Sydney
The carnage of the fall of Rome and the rape of the church's consecrated virgins presented Augustine with the opportunity of advising desperate women. His advice, as well as his own experience of the flesh and carnal desire -strange and ambivalent as they are to post-modern ears - present the reader with a distant but compelling configuration of pain, pleasure, desire, blame and loathing of which the faint and seemingly intractable outlines endure in twentieth-century legal discourse on rape.
Augustine believed that a will sanctified by God could transcend the body, and that in the event that the body was forced to participate in a sinful act, a non-consenting will absolved the believer of blame. In theory, at least, the will could remain inviolable and impregnable. This paper will investigate how and why religious women who had become victims of rape were denied such a non-consenting will.
My paper will argue that Augustine's representation of the profanity of rape is strongly reminiscent of his depiction of the sinner's fall from grace into the morass of the lusts of the flesh. The sinner's fall is always an internal drama played out between the body's true sovereign - the will - and the post-lapsarian usurper of the will's privileges - lust. This side of heaven, men and women are irrevocably alienated from their sexuality, their relation to it can never again be mediated by the will, for in the post-lapsarian world, the sexual parts of men and women are heedless of the will's directions. But this paper will investigate Augustine's persistent assertion that men and women are unequally equipped for spiritual battle with and within the body.