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In the passages I have chosen out of St. Augustine’s Confessions the author considers the nature of sin. On the one hand, he explores this topic because he desires more than anything to be in perfect accord with his God. On the other hand, he explores this topic because it involves important questions that must be answered in order to make belief in God consistent with itself and consistent with the world as it stands. This is considered by many to be the main goal of much of Medieval Philosophy. Unfortunately, many people also take this emphasis on God and reconciling faith in Him with Reason to be a superstitious, tradition-ridden way of thinking that carries no philosophical weight outside of the sometimes very esoteric realm of theology. This thought is mistaken as will be seen here. In treating sin St. Augustine hits on themes that strike at the heart of what it means to be human and in the end it must be admitted that the philosophy of St. Augustine, though he constantly refers to scripture and writes rapturously of his wondrous God, is really just as valid as any more modern and less pious philosophy.

To prove that point and to explore some of these questions myself I’d like to consider St. Augustine’s confession of a theft committed when he was a youth of sixteen years. He and a group of friends entered a neighbor’s garden, shook the pears from the neighbor’s tree, ran off with the pears and, though they ate perhaps a few of them, they threw most of them away. This may seem almost innocent to the modern mind, a mere prank: regretted but not unnecessarily rued. But St. Augustine sees it in quite a different light.

He begins his analysis of this thievery by stating that he already had enough of the object of his thievery and of much better quality. His motivation for stealing did not lie in coveting an object owned by someone else. He stole for the mere pleasure of it, becoming a thief "to enjoy the theft itself and the sin." The "real pleasure consisted in doing something that was forbidden." St. Augustine has now established his motivation for the crime as being nothing less than a rank will to sin. He didn’t want the pears at all, he wanted to sin; and wanted to sin only because it was wrong.

In the next section St. Augustine tries to show why his sin, and indeed all sins committed merely for their own sake are more evil than sins committed for other ends. He showcases some examples of sins that a person might commit in order to show that all the usual crimes can be explained by discovering what "good of the lower order" a person wished to gain or avoid losing. His strongest example was a man named Catiline who was said to have been cruel and vicious for no other reason than that he enjoyed it. But it turns out that this wasn’t true since Catiline did all that he did in order to gain wealth, honor and the throne of Rome. St. Augustine however did his deed with no hope of personal gain of any kind.

In Section six St. Augustine tries to determine if there are any other way to interpret his actions as a child of sixteen except as an act of evil for evil’s sake. He describes many of the things that a human does in feeble imitation of God’s power. It seems that in attempting to use power equal to God’s a human not only naturally falls short of perfection but sins in setting him or herself up against God in perverse imitation. I interpret that to mean that a person might vainly think themselves equal to God, which would mean that a person would be thinking that they have no need for God. St. Augustine describes this by saying that "the soul defiles itself with unchaste love when it turns away from you [God] and looks elsewhere for things" that it can only find in God. But St. Augustine thinks that his thievery is nothing like any of the self-centered actions he describes in this section (from pride to lust and from sloth to anger). His crime’s motivation rested solely in that he wanted to do something that was forbidden.

But why was it that St. Augustine thought that sins committed for their own sake are worse than sins that are only means to an end? At the end of section six he describes his theft by saying that he had no real power to break God’s law. He asks, "was it that I enjoyed at least the pretence of doing so [breaking God’s laws], like a prisoner who creates for himself the illusion of liberty by doing something wrong, when he has no fear of punishment, under a feeble hallucination of power?" St. Augustine is saying that we can’t break the laws of God and that when we sin it isn’t that we actually do something that isn’t allowed by God; we only pretend that we have the freedom to defy God.