“To do what was wrong simply because it was wrong – could I have found pleasure in that?” (St. Augustine, The Confessions II.4)
When St. Augustine was a youth, he and his friends got the brilliant idea to steal pears from an orchard. This seemingly harmless prank became a serious point of reflection for the saint many years later. When writing his famous Confessions, Augustine took this moment in his life to question why we sin.
St. Augustine struggled with the reality of his sin. When Augustine and his friends robbed the pear tree, they did so not because they were hungry. They did it because “we derived pleasure from the deed simply because it was forbidden.” (The Confessions. Book II, 4, 37) Augustine had such a difficult time understanding this sin because it seemed so morally insane. We desire sin because of some kind of good. As Augustine said, “Sin gains entrance through… good things when we turn to them with immoderate desire…” (The Confessions. Book II, 10) But Augustine was tormented by this memory because it was not the stolen pear that gave him pleasure, but the stealing: “I feasted on the sin, nothing else, and that I relished and enjoyed.” (The Confessions. Book II, 12)
This touches on the great paradox of human nature: we are made in God’s image and likeness and yet we are attracted to sin. We are not pure angels nor are we vile beasts. We have the contradiction of both light and darkness in us. As we read in the previous week, Augustine holds that we are not evil because of our material nature, but it is with every human as a kind of second nature.
Augustine raises the idea that we feel the attraction to sinful things simply because they are wrong. As Augustine points out in the quotes above, we desire some good inside of every sin. Even the ancient philosophers like Plato made the point that human beings desire the good and not the bad in itself. But there is something so irrational about wanting something that is bad, simply because it is bad. If we are made in God’s image, how can we be attracted to evil for itself?
Before the Fall, human beings were made free from sin in God’s image and likeness. But after Adam and Eve disobeyed God, our human nature was broken by Original Sin. One the lasting effects of Original Sin is that it gives us something called “concupiscence,” which is our human attraction to sin. Concupiscence is the reason that something becomes more desirable to us if it is forbidden. If I tell you “Don’t wiggle your toes,” you may suddenly feel the urge to move them simply because I told you not to do so. One of my favorite flavors of ice cream is Friendly’s “Forbidden Chocolate.” The makers of that desert know that by calling it “forbidden” it stirs in us a desire for that indulgence.
Because of this, it is not enough to arm people only with knowledge of what is right and wrong. Concupiscence can make it easy to ignore the greater good. We could be tempted to think about humanity only in terms of our concupiscent nature. If we do that, we could be like John Calvin and write of human beings as being totally depraved. Are we so broken that we are beyond the pale?
I do not think Augustine is making that point. But if we treat our fellow human beings as completely depraved, we will fail to see Christ inside of them. To see the human person as fundamentally bad would be to deny the essential nature of our being in God’s image and likeness.
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