do not think it has any comparable predecessors. Saint Augustine is in some ways similar to
Tolstoy, to whom, however, he is superior in intellect. He was a passionate man, in youth very
far from a pattern of virtue, but driven by an inner impulse to search for truth and righteousness.
Like Tolstoy, he was obsessed, in his later years, by a sense of sin, which made his life stern
and his philosophy inhuman. He combated heresies vigorously, but some of his own views,
when repeated by Jansenius in the seventeenth century, were pronounced heretical. Until the
Protestants took up his opinions, however, the Catholic Church had never impugned their
orthodoxy.
One of the first incidents of his life related in the Confessions occurred in his boyhood, and did
not, in itself, greatly distinguish him from other boys. It appears that, with some companions of
his own age, he despoiled a neighbour's pear tree, although he was not hungry, and his parents
had better pears at home. He continued throughout his life to consider this an act of almost
incredible wickedness. It would not have been so bad if he had been hungry, or had had no
other means of getting pears; but, as it was, the act was one of pure mischief, inspired by the
love of wickedness for its own sake. It is this that makes it so unspeakably black. He beseeches
God to forgive him:
"Behold my heart, O God, behold my heart, which Thou hadst pity upon in the bottom of the
abyss. Now, behold, let my heart tell Thee, what it sought there, that I should be gratuitously
wicked, having no temptation to that evil deed, but the evil deed itself. It was foul, and I loved
it; I loved to perish, I loved mine own fault, not that for the sake of which I committed the fault,
but my fault itself I loved. Foul soul, falling from the firmament to expulsion from Thy
presence; not seeking aught through the shame, but the shame itself!" *
He goes on like this for seven chapters, and all about some pears plucked from a tree in a boyish
prank. To a modern mind, this seems morbid; †but in his own age it seemed right and a mark
of holiness. The sense of sin, which was very strong in his day, came to the Jews as a way of
reconciling self-importance with outward defeat. Yahweh was omnipotent, and Yahweh was
specially interested in the Jews; why, then, did they not prosper? Because they were wicked:
they
* Confessions, Bk. II, Ch. IV.â
€I must except Mahatma Gandhi, whose autobiography contains passages closely similar to
the above.