So, if concupiscence is so alluring, leading us to become addicted to finite ends and to act as if they are transcendent, how do we get out of this state of being with Cupid?   This “state of being with Cupid” often feels like a prison, with demonic guards who “force” us to say “yes” when we should say “no”.  This “state of being with Cupid” makes one feel that she is a puppet and that someone from hell is pulling the strings.

Peters mentions “grace”.  God overcomes our addictions.  But usually that comes after the person has “hit bottom” and has no choice but to ask God for help.

Here Peters skirts one of the profound insights of Lacan (a French Psychoanalyst who wrote in the 1930s to 1970s): Some knowledge cannot be obtained unless one has committed an error.  The grace sought to recover from addiction may lead to a providential moment where “the one who committed an error” gains an insight that could not have been obtained directly.   The experience of the error itself plus the humiliation of asking for God’s help sets the stage for discovery.

Even though Augustine seems old hat to us today, what he discovered was nothing short of revolutionary.  His theory of Original Sin became the “go to” explanation for over a thousand years.

Today, his formulation acts as a gargoyle keeping cerebral celebrities at bay.  Like Pelagius, they are affronted by it and scandalized by it.  They ridicule it.   They want to put a bag over its head and pretend its not there.  They refuse to enter any Church ornamented with the abysmal gargoyle of “Augustine’s definition of Original Sin”.

What they cannot do is explain it.  They have no method of explanation capable of showing how Augustine made sense.