This is a seductive book. While it may not fulfill some expectations, it provides unlooked for pleasures. If readers are looking for either an explication of Augustine's Confessions along traditional historical or theological lines, or a deconstruction of Augustine in the manner popular in the last few decades, they will be disappointed. However, they will be delighted by fresh insights, unexpected appreciations, and intriguing intertextualities. This is intentional on the authors' part—drawing on Baudrillard's understanding of seduction, they intend to evoke both what Augustine hides as well what he reveals, what he obscures as much as what he confesses. Seduction, in this sense, occurs in the seam between temptation and resistance, confession and silence, resistance and willful submission, and is a reciprocal relationship between subject and object. For the authors, then, the Confessions both seduces and is seduced by the reader.

The book itself consists primarily of a reading of the Confessions, although intertextual connections are drawn with On Christian Doctrine and the City of God. While the text has three coauthors, with each taking primary responsibility for individual chapters and bringing different disciplinary expertise to bear, the authors decline to identify the chapters as separately authored; rather they profess a shared seduction by and of the Confessions.

The authors note their debt to Margaret Miles's Desire and Delight: A New Reading of Augustine's Confessions (New York: Crossroad, 1992). They see their own contribution within this schema of seduction. While often agreeing with Miles's analyses and sharing her delight at the Confessions, they suggest, at those objectionable places in the Confessions, that she refuses to be seduced—seduction enmeshes both parties in a reciprocal and reversing relationship. Precisely at the places where the Confessions are most problematic is where the text is seductive to and seduced by the contemporary reader. In this view, seduction is both destabilizing—to various readings of the text and to assumptions of the reader— and pleasurable.

The chapters of the book reflect on seductive tensions in the Confessions and its intertextuality, especially with scripture. These readings are informed by poststructuralist method—chapter 1, on seduction, draws from Jean Baudrillard's Seduction (trans. Brian Singer [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990]); chapter 2, on textuality and pleasure, from Roland Barthes; and chapter 3, on freedom and submission, from Foucault. Chapter 1 explores the nature of the Confessions as seduction. In confessing, the authors argue, Augustine obscures more than he reveals—he does not reveal the details of his sexual sins, the name of his lover or the friend for whom he grieves, and the sin he describes in most detail is disappointingly the boyhood theft of the pears. While he is continuously tempted by the female body, his final submission is to a female figure, Continence, who evokes Wisdom, Scripture, and, ultimately, the divine. Rather than revealing or confessing, the authors argue, Augustine's text seduces, bringing readers to God, where desire is never satisfied and always destabilized.

Chapter 2 provides an intertextual reading of Augustine's interpretative journey from “things” to “signs” to God. The authors see the Confessions as a performance of the pilgrimage outlined in On Christian Doctrine—a redirection of desire by things which, as figures, draw the reader further in the journey of desire. They note, however, that Augustine cuts this seduction short—desire moves from things and bodies to words, the commands of Scripture, which could be embodied again Jesus and the Eucharist, but neither the flesh of Jesus nor the Eucharist are present in the Confessions. Chapter 3, drawing on Foucault, notes the eroticism of obedience. Augustine seeks the freedom to master himself, but the freedom his conversion provides is freedom to be mastered, to submit to Continence. Resistance and submission always remain entwined—the will must be both shattered and sustained. Obedience is active as well as passive, so the seduction of submission is to be always drawn farther into the divine will.

Chapter 4 focuses on the later books of the Confessions, on time and memory, and includes intertextual connections to the City of God. The seduction here is the tension between time and eternity. Augustine sees sexuality as irresistibly temporal, drawn to the moment, but his reflections on memory and eternity extend desire into eternity. There is a fundamental relationship between time and desire, and Augustine considers sexuality both in Eden before time, and Paradise after time. Pleasure causes desire to grow, so eternity, then, depends on pleasure. Erotic desire seeks to stop time, but eternity is growth rather than grasping, an opening rather than a completion.

This book succeeds in what it sets out to do. Qualifications may be raised—when everything is seductive, one questions the nature of seduction. The pleasures of postmodern paradoxical prose will fail to seduce some, as will the occasional over reliance on rhetorical question. Yet, if seduction is the redirection of desire, the text succeeds. Readers wanting an historical or literary explication of the Confessions will be disappointed; those hoping for a thorough deconstruction of the objectionable elements of Augustine's thought will be as well. Both will be seduced, however—the poststructualist approach to the text provides insights, intertextuality, and evocative treatment of the Augustinian themes of word, body, incarnation, and desire. While the Confessions may have been seduced by a contemporary reading, the reader may be seduced anew to Augustine's text.