stealing the pears

The most fascinating part of Confessions for me is when St. Augustine talks about the incident where he steals the pears with his friends. He goes into this whole thing about how people do things for the sake of the sinful act itself. He admits that he wasn’t stealing because he was lacking in some way but because of a “greedy love of doing wrong”. Augustine goes on to say, “For no sooner had I picked them than I drew them away, and tasted nothing in them but my own sin, which I relished and enjoyed. If any part of one of those pears passed my lips, it was the sin that gave it flavor. I really liked the way he wrote this and it almost sums up why he committed this crime. He’s giving this completely raw insight into his life and really into human nature because this love of sin is universal. Another interesting point to this is when he talks about how he would never had done this if he were alone. This communal act of sinning I found very intriguing, earlier in Book II he says “…I used to pretend that I had done things I had not done at all, because I was afraid that innocence would be taken for cowardice and chastity for weakness.” Here you can see where the act of sinning is intertwined with some sort of companionship. I won’t pretend like I know exactly why this occurs but I have to say I’ve seen it enough to know it’s true. In 5^th grade me and my friend took a sharpie and drew inside of the school slide at recess, I know this is really stupid but why did we do it? Because we weren’t supposed to and I guarantee neither of us would have done it if we weren’t together enjoying the pure act of doing something wrong.