"Carthage Didn't Burn Hot Enough"

I've been following the career of Karmen MacKendrick for a while, mostly because she and I both hold the unpopular opinion that, in the words of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, "life would be quite unbearable without suffering." It turns out that those of us who walked away from Counterpleasures wanting more will not have to wait for the November release of Fragmentation and Memory: Meditations on Christian Doctrine to get our next dose, because MacKendrick's essay "Carthage Didn't Burn Hot Enough: Saint Augustine's Divine Seduction" is available online:

I want to suggest that Augustine stays in love with love—more exactly, that he seeks a constant and potent seduction of and by his God, and that the Confessions is mutually illuminating when read with contemporary theory on seduction. Only seduction will allow Augustine to retain his love of the created world as good while refusing to immerse and gratify himself in its beauty. Augustine's relation to God exemplifies at least three characteristics of seduction: the manipulation of the will beyond a simple opposition of consent and coercion; the persistence of the elusively promising within the representational and discursive; and relatedly, the necessary incompletion of both meaning and desire. The fires of worldly lust are too easily quenched for one who wants to be seduced...