St. Augustine was known as a theologian of feeling for many centuries. Renaissance painters pictured him holding his passionately blazing heart in his hand. In Augustine's society and education, feeling was considered an intimate and integral aspect of thinking, so intimately interwoven that philosophers struggled to distinguish these activities. Thus, Augustine was also committed to learning throughout his passionate and thoughtful life, from his early conviction that "God and the soul" can be known through the meticulous use of reason, to mature sermons in which he quoted "God is love," and commented, in effect, that is all you need to know about God. The role of feeling in his understanding of the effect of Christian doctrines on present life has been less noticed. This book proposes that changes in his perception of the value and significance of human bodies--from objects of rapacious lust to rapturous admiration of their beauty--form the nexus within which Augustine's thought and feeling cohere. The old Augustine's understanding of the theological significance of present bodies informed his acknowledged speculations on the qualities and capacities of beautiful bodies, nunc et tunc.
Margaret R. Miles is emerita professor of historical theology at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California. Her books include Reading Augustine on Memory, Marriage, Tears, and Meditation (2021), The Long Goodbye (2017), Augustine and the Fundamentalist’s Daughter (2011), A Complex Delight: The Secularization of the Breast, 1350–1750 (2008), and The Word Made Flesh: A History of Christian Thought (2005).
“In Beautiful Bodies, lifelong Augustine scholar Margaret Miles examines the evolution of the North African bishop’s understanding of divine justice, love, and human being in body and in community—particularly the community of the church. For any readers troubled by seeing Augustine as body-hating or curmudgeonly, Miles evokes, interrogates, renovates, and restores for us that generous-minded ancient intelligence that has had such an abiding influence on Christians in a deeply appreciative and invigorating way.”
—Jennifer M. Phillips, former rector, St. John’s Episcopal Church Westwood
“Margaret Miles, who has had a long career bringing readers to new and deeper understanding of Augustine, offers in this book an opportunity to think and feel with Augustine as he grew and changed from his youth to old age. Dealing with a number of tensions in his thought, Miles persuades the reader to tangle with the issues not to get a systematic answer but to live into the way Augustine grappled with them as an embodied and thoughtful theologian and philosopher.”
—Jennifer Hockenbery, dean of humanities, St. Norbert College
“In this nuanced and deeply felt meditation on the aging Augustine, Margaret Miles lifts up an Augustine attuned from his own life experience to the miraculous wonder of the everyday: from sky, earth, air, and waters, to human being itself. Beautiful Bodies draws on a half century of Miles’s passionate reading, struggling, thinking, and feeling with Augustine to offer her own readers an aching model for living fully in the beauty of the now and opening oneself to future transformations.”
—Ann Pellegrini, professor of performance studies & social and cultural analysis, New York University
“Scholars often draw contrasts between Augustine’s early and later thought, but no one does so with such insight and sensitivity as Margaret Miles in this book. Miles tracks gentle shifts of attitude, conviction, and emotion in the acutely self-aware North African bishop, who, during the late autumn of his life, amended and sometimes revised his beliefs, attitudes, and perspectives on questions enthralling him since his youth. This is a gorgeous study of, arguably, the most impactful personality of late antiquity.”
—Christopher Ocker, professor of the history of Christianity, San Francisco Theological Seminary
“It is difficult to think of any theologian who has devoted such engaged reflection and pellucid insight into ‘body’ across the centuries. Margaret Miles’s most recent book on Augustine reveals how she has developed a new sort of hermeneutic: her own embodiment as insight into historical bodies.”
—Martin Laird, OSA, professor of early Christian studies, Villanova University
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