Abstract

This chapter presents Augustine’s psychologically acute meditation in Confessions 2 on his youthful theft of his neighbor’s pears. After rejecting a series of possible explanations for why he did what he did, he concludes that he must have stolen the pears simply for the sake of knowingly doing something wrong. This conclusion troubles him. The desire to steal must have a cause, but since he believes that everything that exists is good—a belief that is at the core of his rejection of Manichaean dualism—he cannot find any good that he regards as sufficient to have prompted him to act. The theft is not merely a case of knowing the good but failing to do it: its point is to rejoice in what one knows to be wrong. But that “point” seems pointless to him.