Veiled Desire: Augustine on Women

Augustine remains one of the most influential theologians in Western Christianity, but his attitudes to women and sex are said to lie at the heart of the modern Church's confusion on these issues.

Kim Power sets out what Augustine actually wrote about women, and what the consequences of his attitudes have been. She looks at the religious, philosophical and biological assumptions Augustine shared with all his contemporaries, then at the influence of the women close to him, in particular his mother, Monica, and the woman with whom he lived for many years and who was the mother of his child. Power illustrates how, once Augustine became a Christian bishop, he never again had a close relationship with a woman, although many women came under his pastoral care.

As Augustine debated whether or not women are made in the image of God, and as he developed an increasingly idealized picture of the place of the Virgin Mary, Augustine's own cultural and psychological circumstances must have helped shape his conclusions. Power employs insights drawn from psychology, anthropology and feminist theory, as well as theology, to put Augustine in a new and revealing setting.