"Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness."

-David Foster Wallace

via gibbs

So under the three forms of lust I have considered the sicknesses of my sins, and I have invoked your right hand to save me (Ps. 102:3). ... This is why I lost you: you do not condescend to be possessed together with falsehood.

augustine, confessions, x.66

structural hypothesis: three forms of lust, he discusses all three in books 5 and 6 (right?) and there are three "grant what you command and command what you will" statements in book 10, all paired with "and you command continence." focus of the work is augustine's search for sexual purity. he finds that he can be a stand-in husband or warden of Christ's bride. and with such a wave of my hand i dismiss all "sexual tension and frustration" and "psycho-sexual disorder" theories of augustine. by the end of the work, any of this so-called sexual tension is resolved because augustine has found the bride he is responsible for.

Indeed the social bond which should exist between God and us is violated when the nature of which he is the author is polluted by a perversion of sexual desire.

confessions, iii.15

interesting that st augustine seems to be the first (other than st paul, of course) to boil the root problem of sexual sin down to a crime against community. sexual sin is, then, a more grievous sin because it's more innately destructive to community. right?