Agostino d'Ippona e la liberazione del desiderio

Augustine of Hippo as an essential dimension of human existence. Traversing the different meanings and different contexts in which this phenomenon is taken into consideration – appetitus, desiderium, cupiditas,concupiscentia, libido, voluntas, amor – and constituting a true semantic constellation, the phenomenon of desire emerges as a decisive trace to reconstruct the entire Augustinian thought. From the appetitus corporis to the desire for God as a permanent invocation, desire holds together human nature (and thus the impulses that drive it in its various needs) and the history of the self as the insuppressible and irreducible direction of the will to the enjoyment of the true, that is, to happiness. In this perspective Augustine can well be read as the one who “discovered” the full extent of human desire, challenging the ‘repressive’ or ‘moralistic’ interpretation to which his doctrine has often been reduced. For Augustine, desire must be ‘liberated’ and ‘healed’ not because it is a sign of our fall, but on the contrary because it calls for a satisfaction not limited to the satisfaction of needs, but open to recognizing and indulging the call and attraction that God operates with respect to the self. Desire can then be defined, following a textual indication from Augustine himself as extensio animi.