Erotic Absence and Sacramental Hope: Rowan Williams on Augustinian Desire

Abstract

Both church and culture seem perplexed by desire and what it says about us as human beings. Amid the increasing freedom to identify with our desires, there remains the perpetual problem of insatiety, coupled with the increasing isolation of a digitalized age. Our cultural and religious impulses become blurred as we seek always a little more, in our hopes that we might finally quiet our ontological restlessness. Rowan Williams, drawing from Augustine, identifies this restlessness as central to understanding ourselves and our relation to God and others. This erotic absence that disallows any premature closure offers not satiety but sacrament, and a place in a body larger than our own.