Why Steal a Pear You Don’t Want?

There’s a detail in Augustine’s Confessions that I keep coming back to. As a teenager, Augustine stole pears from a neighbor’s tree with a group of friends. He had better pears at home. And what did they do with the pears once they had them? They threw them to the pigs.

Suppose he’d been hungry. We could understand that. Suppose these were particularly delicious pears. We could understand that too. But why steal something you don’t even care to eat? Years later, as Augustine tells the story to God, that’s the part that still puzzles him. He remembers the sweetness of the whole thing. Where did that sweetness come from?

What makes a good thing good?

To understand how Augustine gets at this question, it helps to take a little detour through Plato. In the Symposium, Plato explores how the beauty we encounter in one particular thing can draw us toward beauty itself. Augustine takes up this way of thinking about lower and higher goods and gives it a Christian meaning.

Let me give an everyday example. Why do you go to work? You might say, “Well, I need to make some money.” Fair enough. What do you want the money for? “I’d like to take a day off and go to the beach.” And why the beach? “Because if I get there at the right time, I can sit and watch the sunset.”

Now, if I ask you why you want to watch the sunset, I suspect the question feels a little different. You might simply say, “Because it’s beautiful.” For a few minutes you’re quite happy to sit there and look. The work, the money, the trip to the beach have all made possible an encounter with something you love for its own sake. Augustine would take us one step further. Where does the beauty of that sunset come from? For him, something of God’s own beauty is given to us in the things God has made. Even the pear on the neighbor’s tree was beautiful in that way.

So what went wrong at the pear tree? One of the things Augustine genuinely loved that night was the company of his friends. He could hardly imagine doing this by himself. There’s a pleasure in being with people when somebody suggests doing something ridiculous and, before you’ve even decided to go along, you’re already laughing. We can probably all recognize that feeling. And friendship, for Augustine, is one of the real delights of being human.

The trouble comes when keeping my place among my friends matters so much to me that I’m willing to steal from my neighbor. I still love a good thing. But look at what I’m willing to do for it. That’s what Augustine means by a disordering of our loves. In the moment when someone says, “Let’s go steal some pears,” the prospect of belonging to this little group counts for more than the neighbor whose tree it is, and more than the God who asks me to love that neighbor.

What did Augustine get to feel for a moment?

That still leaves a question. If Augustine simply wanted to be with his friends, they could have done any number of things together. What was so enjoyable about doing something forbidden?

Here Augustine makes a rather surprising move. He asks what quality of God he might have been trying to imitate when he stole the pears. What could stealing possibly have to do with imitating God?

Think about anger for a moment. When somebody has wronged me, I want justice. That desire makes sense in a world made by a just God. But see how easily I can go from wanting justice to wanting the power to pronounce the final judgment myself. I can hear it in the certainty with which I tell the story. I know what the other person did. I know why they did it. I know exactly what they deserve. There’s something of a parody here. I’ve taken a quality that belongs to God and tried to make it my own on my terms.

So what was the parody at the pear tree? Augustine wonders whether, for a moment, he enjoyed a kind of counterfeit omnipotence. Put more simply, I can do this, and nobody can stop me. The fact that it was forbidden was part of the pleasure. For one evening, with his friends beside him, he could feel what it was like to be a law unto himself.

I think that insight has something to say to us about power. In Hollywood, in politics, and painfully, in the church, we’ve seen what happens when people use their position to sexually exploit someone. There’s an enormous difference in the harm done. But Augustine gives us a question worth asking about the person who abuses power. How much of the attraction lies in the conviction that I can do this, and nobody will call me to account?

Learning to enjoy the pear

What moves me about Augustine is that, even after all this searching, he can still look back and see the beauty of the pear. God made it. He can still speak tenderly about friendship. God made that possible too. What he longs for is the freedom to enjoy each of these things in its proper place.

What would that freedom have looked like that night? Perhaps something as ordinary, and as difficult for a teenager, as letting his friends go on ahead without him. He could love them and still let them think he’d spoiled the fun. Their affection would still matter to him. It simply wouldn’t have to carry the weight of being the highest good in his life.

Early in the Confessions, Augustine says that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. I think the pear story helps us understand what that restlessness feels like in practice. It’s the anxiety of needing the people I love to approve of me. It’s the anger that keeps me rehearsing what somebody deserves. And what would rest feel like? Perhaps I could sit with a friend and take real delight in their company, even on a day when we disappoint each other. Perhaps I could watch the sunset all the way to the end and receive its beauty as a gift.

There’s a lovely possibility in the way Augustine remembers that night. The boy had a pear in his hand and was too caught up in the pleasure of stealing it to taste it. Years later, talking it over with God, he can finally appreciate the thing that grew on his neighbor’s tree.

(Disclaimer: This blog post is a synthesis of my video from Patreon channel https://www.patreon.com/epaulpeter/posts/two-loves-in-of-146720314 Culture and Christ^TM