The pear theft — adolescence and motiveless sin

Book 2 covers Augustine's sixteenth year — a year of enforced idleness in Thagaste while his father Patricius accumulated the funds to send him to Carthage for advanced studies in rhetoric. The idleness, Augustine says, was dangerous. Monica warned him about women and about the wrong kind of friendships; he dismissed her warnings as maternal sentiment. He was sixteen, already drawn by the "cauldron of unholy loves," already allowing the company of the wrong crowd to carry him further than he would have gone alone.

Then the pear theft. A group of boys, in the night, shake a pear tree in a neighbour's orchard. They take the pears not because they are hungry — there were better pears at home — and not because the pears are especially desirable. They take them because the tree is not theirs, because the act is forbidden, because doing it together in the dark is pleasurable in a way that has nothing to do with pears. They take what they take and throw it to the pigs.

Augustine returns to this incident five times. He wants to understand what he was after. Every other desire he has had in his life has had an object: he wanted pleasure, knowledge, fame, love. But the pear theft has no object. The theft was the point. This is what troubles him: the possibility of an evil that is not the misdirection of a genuine good but is, in its essence, the desire for transgression as such. His conclusion — that such desire is ultimately a shadow of the desire for God, the desire to do as one wills without accountability — prefigures his later theological arguments about the nature of sin.