Confessions

Perhaps more than any other part of Confessions, the pear episode captivates readers, a fact Modern Library exploited it they put a pear on the cover of its 2018 edition. It certainly captivates Augustine himself, who spends more than half of Book II relating and reflecting on it. Some readers find it tragic that Augustine dwells so long on a relatively trivial transgression, even if he did commit it “simply because it was forbidden” (37). However, it is this aspect of the pear theft that results in such extensive meditation. While Augustine certainly feels shame for the wantonness of his act, he does not dwell on this scene out of guilt. Rather he recognizes in it a unique opportunity to study the true motivation for sin. Augustine’s other transgressions generally fulfilled and so could be explained by some other purpose. He lusted, for instance, because he desired love and sex, while he fabricated exploits to inflate his vanity. With regard to the pears, though, Augustine confesses, “there was no motive for my malice except malice” (37). Closer examination led Augustine to a theory of why we sin, a theory that owes much to the Neoplatonists (see Book VII Analysis).

Augustine presents good and evil on a spectrum rather than as opposing forces. Thus, there is no inherently sinful act, nor is any act inherently virtuous. To navigate the path away from sin and toward virtue is to appreciate the beauty of God’s creation and God himself in appropriate proportion, which will vary depending on context, for:

Sin gains entrance through these and similar good things when we turn to them with immoderate desire, since they are the lowest kind of goods and we thereby turn away from the better and higher: from you yourself, O Lord our God, and your truth and your law (38).

Even in confessing the sin of his lust, Augustine condemns not sexuality itself as some stricter Christians have over the years, but just his inability to be temperate: “What was it that delighted me? Only loving and being loved. But there was no proper restraint […]. I could not distinguish the calm light of love from the fog of lust” (33).

Augustine's reflections on the pear episode again convey the many senses in which he is confessing. Most obviously, he confesses to the theft, asking forgiveness for his misdeed, but as usual he also prominently confesses God’s greatness in celebrating not just his forgiveness of wrongdoings like these but especially the grace that has allowed Augustine and others to avoid countless other sins. He suggests that the awesomeness of God in this latter circumstance is often overlooked, and so he is particularly emphatic in confessing it: “Let such a person [who has avoided sin] therefore love you just as much, or even more, on seeing that the same physician who rescued me from sinful diseases of such gravity has kept him immune” (41).

This discourse also reinforces Augustine’s doctrine of original sin. In asking God, “Is there anyone who can take stock of his own weaknesses and still dare to credit his chastity and innocence to his own efforts?” (41), Augustine asserts that we all have sin within us, so it is simply a matter of whether God will exercise his forgiveness to help us overcome it or his grace to help us avoid it from the start.

The befuddlement Augustine experiences as he tries to account for the impact of peer pressure is stunning for its honesty. Up until this point, although Augustine has been vulnerable in discussing his shortcomings and explored his uncertainties about God, he has always expressed his moral convictions and conclusions with confidence. Here, however, recognizing that the feeling of fellowship was a significant motivator, he seems truly perplexed: “What kind of attitude was that? An extremely dishonorable one, certainly; […] Yet what exactly was it? Who understands his faults?” (42). Perhaps what he is struggling with is the fact that an element otherwise virtuous, namely friendship, which he earlier characterizes as “sweet to us because out of many minds it forges a unity” (38), can bring about such a wholly sinful act. His humility allows him to move beyond this, though, and trust his recognition that the act was unquestionably sinful, even if he struggles to understand the mysterious ways in which God’s creation allowed for it.

Continuing a trend from Book I, Augustine expresses frequent regret at those circumstances of his life that facilitated sin. He blames his promiscuity on his parents’ failure to arrange a marriage for him (33), his vanity on the premium his family and his society placed on eloquence and rhetoric (34), and his theft of pears on peer pressure (42). As with his delayed baptism, he wonders wistfully how much more meaningful his life might have been if circumstances had been different, and yet he praises God’s greatness and wisdom as manifest in the specific lessons he learned from these mistakes. This contradiction does not seem to trouble Augustine, which makes sense given his belief in original sin and his embrace of the myriad paradoxes inherent in God’s nature. Furthermore, it again reveals parallels between Augustine and the world he inhabited—a civilization with values that frequently transgressed the doctrines of Christianity and yet without which Christianity would never have spread with such rapidity and success.

One such battle between regret and gratitude emerges from his failure to heed his mother’s warnings against giving into his lust. His decision is clearly rooted in sexism, for he viewed Monica’s advice as “mere women’s talk” (36), and yet he fails to identify sexism as an obstacle to his communion with God. Considering the misogyny of the era, this view is not so surprising, but his diminishment of Monica’s importance for his life and especially his spirituality even while authoring his narrative is more conspicuous.

On one hand, he spares her the vitriol he hurls at his father and praises her devotion to Christianity, but only to a point. “My mother had by this time fled from the center of Babylon,” Augustine writes, invoking Israel’s ancient enemy as a stand-in for sin, “though she still lingered in its suburbs” (36). Even though Augustine acknowledges that his mother "regarded the customary course of studies as no hindrance, and even a considerable help, toward my gaining you eventually” (37), he faults her for prioritizing her son’s career prospects over more serious efforts to preserve his chastity. It is unclear, however, how much power Monica would have had to redirect her son’s future over Christian concerns, especially up against her domineering pagan husband and likely Augustine himself, who appears to have been quite content with his lot at the time. Without hearing her voice, we cannot know to what degree Augustine’s accusations against Monica are fair. In Book IX, Augustine accords Monica more reverence, though somewhat problematically, and the Church would eventually see past her shortcomings sufficiently to canonize her.

Despite their enormous importance and readers’ likely curiosity about them, Augustine generally does not give his parents much attention at this point in his narrative, a logical choice considering how much credit for his parenting he awards to God. This perspective plays into the Prodigal Son parallels, to which he returns to conclude Book II, ending with a phrase lifted directly from the parable: “I slid away from you and wandered away, my God; far from your steadfastness I strayed in adolescence, and I became to myself a land of famine” (42).