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Book II

For whom does Augustine write these Confessions? He is surely not informing God of anything God does not already know. Therefore he can only be writing for us: “that I and any of my readers may reflect on the great depth from which we have to cry to you” (26). These “depths” are summed up for Augustine in a key scriptural verse, 1 John 2:16, where lust, ambition, and curiositas1—a distracting interest in created things without reference to their Creator—are diagnosed as a kind of malevolent trinity of sin. Much of Confessions can be read as a commentary upon the intertwining of these three in a web that catches the young Augustine until God unravels it, and re-strings it, so that Augustine’s desire would be turned into a harp on which to play music pleasing to God.

We have already noted Augustine’s wrestling with his ambition in the previous book. This also explains a curious episode here in Book II—his father Patrick’s pride at seeing Augustine’s sexual maturity in the bathhouse, a moment that tempts us moderns to armchair Freudian analysis (26–27). In point of fact, the issue at hand here is the worldly desire to see a family grow in size, wealth, and power, all of which would redound to the glory of the head of the household (and all of which is rejected by Christian asceticism, discussed below).2 The second strand of the malevolent trinity is seen here for the first time: Augustine’s struggle with lust, which he now wishes his pious mother had curbed by arranging a marriage for him (24–26). The third strand is here shown in greater detail than before: curiositas, a misdirected attention to trivial things for their own sake. We see it in the strange episode of the theft of the pears (28–29). He and his friends had no need of the fruit. They had far better pears available at home. They did not even put them to any use. They simply stole them because stealing is forbidden, and because they could not withstand the egging on of one another. Not only do we hear an echo of scripture’s original and fruit-related sin (Genesis 3), but also Augustine’s first exploration in this work of the theme of evil as a mere counterfeit good. His young “unfriendly friends” formed a society that encouraged one another in evil, in a sort of demonic parody of the church, which is meant to be a holy society of friends, encouraging each other to virtue (47).

This book is often pointed to as an example of Augustine’s neuroticism, and proneness to exaggeration, over his past sin. James O’Donnell says in his recent popular biography of Augustine that if there are any titillating parts of Confessions, he has yet to find them!3 And sure enough, Augustine’s inner tumult over his past sin seems remarkably disproportionate to the gravity of the deeds actually committed. He says of his confusion between lust and love that the “two things boiled within me. [Confusion] seized hold of my youthful weakness sweeping me through the precipitous rocks of desire to submerge me in a whirlpool of vice” (24)—would that we wrote like that!). Of his theft of the pears he remembers his exultation then with pity: “I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it” (29). Historian John Cavadini calls our attention to the relentless rhetorical excesses in this chapter, often involving swirling, violent motion, as in the first quote above.4 He suggests this book is marked by an almost palpable sense of sadness, epitomized in its final sentence: “I became to myself a region of destitution” (34). Cavadini offers his own, more piquant translation: “I had made of myself a land of empty lack,” a desolate landscape. As Augustine explores the depths of his sin, his rhetoric is appropriate, even in its very excess. For sin with no purpose, no function, no explanation, is a perfect analogy to the theft of the forbidden fruit in the garden, by which Adam and Eve gained nothing, except the very wasteland of independence from God Augustine describes here: “It was foul, and I loved it.” The point is best made with a pedantic example, for sin is itself an abyss, a puzzle, an act without motive, a senseless rebellion against a God who cannot finally be escaped, a wandering into a trackless waste, farther and farther from one’s genuine self as one in communion with God. All the pears gained Augustine was “a few more satisfied pigs,” says Cavadini—it gains us nothing more glamorous or explicable either.5

For Reflection

. Are you surprised at Augustine’s level of horror at his past sin of stealing pears?

. Does his memory of his own pre-conversion behavior help you to reframe memory of past behavior you once thought trivial, but now may be seen with similar horror? Or is Augustine simply neurotic?!

. What do you suppose Augustine means by “curiosity”? Why would he consider this something to be avoided?

. What do you think of the description of sin and evil as a sort of lack or waste? Does it do justice to the palpable presence of evil we see in the world and in our own lives?

. Augustine looked to 1 John 2:16 as an especially important verse to reflect on his life. Is there a particular biblical passage that expresses how you have reflected on your own life?

1 I use the Latin here because the English cognate, “curiosity,” is a false one and would be somewhat misleading to use. Paul Griffiths, a great Augustinian theologian of our day, is presently at work on a book about curiositas in Augustine.

2 For more on this see the masterful work by Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). This book helps explain what early Christians thought they were trying to accomplish through ascetic practice. The book’s value is not only in Brown’s sympathetic ear to ancient voices, and his unmatched prose style, but also in his ability to help us see past the polemical attack on ancient Christian sexual renunciation bequeathed to us by the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and Modernity.

3 This from the author of the definitive modern three-volume commentator on Confessions! (see n. 3 above). The biography is James J. O’Donnell, Augustine: A New Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 2005). The biography has serious flaws unfortunately, which I describe in a review in Books and Culture (Sept/Oct 2005).

4 In “Book Two: Augustine’s Book of Shadows,” in A Reader’s Companion to Augustine’s Confessions, ed. Paffenroth and Kennedy, 25–34.

5 Ibid., 34.