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This is a part of St. Augustine's confessions:
[QUOTE]In what appears to be an almost innocuous event, Augustine aptly demonstrates the implications of personal sin in his recounting the theft of some pears during his adolescent years. On the surface the event seems harmless enough: the young Augustine and his friends stop in a neighbor’s orchard and steal some of his pears. They stole the pears, he writes, not because they were hungry, but simply for the sake of taking them, for afterwards they threw them to the pigs to eat. The strange part of the story for many contemporary readers is that Augustine makes this little foible out to be the worst kind of sin imaginable [Conf. 2.4]. Is this guy for real?
What is the point of this weird little story? Does it represent, as one author puts it, nothing more than a demonstration of Augustine's "neurotic verbal flagellation" [Miles, Desire and Delight, 28]? I believe that we can read this story as a kind of symbolic representation of all human sinfulness. What makes Augustine's act so darn bad is that he has now reached the age of reason and he clearly has some idea of what is right and wrong. He knows that God's law prohibits theft of any kind, and yet he steals anyway. His real sin is not theft, but pride--thinking that he is above God and His Law [2.5 -2.6].
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