Abstract

Augustine’s Confessions 2 is revisited, this time in response to Scott MacDonald’s “Petit Larceny, the Beginning of All Sin: Augustine’s Theft of the Pears.” Central to MacDonald’s interpretation are the theses that all sins are cases of preferring lesser goods over greater goods and that all sins are motivated ultimately by pride. The argument of this chapter is that Augustine does not maintain that preferring a lesser good over a greater good is a sufficient condition for sinfulness: the condition must be supplemented with a proviso that the preference is contrary to God’s commands. MacDonald takes the ultimacy of pride thesis to entail that sinners desire to be “transvaluators,” pretending to be God. This is implausible—most sinners are scofflaws, not moral revolutionaries—and there is no evidence for the thesis in Augustine.