The veil signifies the exclusion of eros from the inner life of the Christian community, in which man and woman belong together in agape. Does this mean that it also signifies the ‘negative attitude towards sexuality and the body’ for which Christian faith is so often held to be responsible? This thesis presupposes a contrast between an earlier era of sexual repression (variously associated with ‘Victorian hypocrisy’ or with Paul and Augustine) and the present era of sexual enlightenment. Freud is conventionally seen as the turning-point from one era to the other, since it was he who first gave voice to sex, enabling sex to speak for itself and without shame. Paul and Augustine on the one hand, Freud on the other, mark the opposite poles of contemporary telling and retelling of the story of our sexual enlightenment.

Augustine's view of sexuality is based on the Pauline analysis of desire (epithumia, concupiscentia) and of the ego caught within the opposition between ‘the law of God’ and ‘the law of sin that is in my members’ (Rom. 7). In his later theory of the ego as exposed to the contradictory demands of super-ego and id, Freud shows himself to belong to the Pauline-Augustinian tradition. Far from underwriting the modern assumption that we (unlike our predecessors) have now discovered sexuality to be unproblematic, Freud recovers the Pauline-Augustinian sense of the intractability of this sphere of human experience.