Pears for the Pigs

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” — Jeremiah 17:9 (KJV)

When Augustine was sixteen, his schooling stopped for a year. His father, “but a poor freeman of Thagaste,” was scraping money together to send him to university in Carthage, and the town admired him for it. But Augustine notes that the same father “had no concern how I grew towards Thee, or how chaste I were,” as long as his son became a brilliant speaker. So Augustine had a year with no school, no structure and plenty of friends.

He is honest about what happened next. That year, sexual desire “took the rule over me, and I resigned myself wholly to it.” His mother took him aside and warned him privately “not to commit fornication; but especially never to defile another man's wife.” He thought these were “womanish advices, which I should blush to obey.”

Then he admits something that is almost painfully familiar. His friends bragged about what they had done, and he was embarrassed to be less bad than they were. So he made things up: “I would say that I had done what I had not done, that I might not seem contemptible in proportion as I was innocent; or of less account, the more chaste.” He lied to look worse than he was.

And then he tells the story everyone remembers:

“A pear tree there was near our vineyard, laden with fruit, tempting neither for colour nor taste. To shake and rob this, some lewd young fellows of us went, late one night (having according to our pestilent custom prolonged our sports in the streets till then), and took huge loads, not for our eating, but to fling to the very hogs, having only tasted them.”

That's it: some teenagers stole pears and threw them to the pigs. Why does a great thinker spend a whole section of his life story on it? Because he can't explain it. He wasn't hungry. He had better pears at home. He didn't even like these ones. “It was foul, and I loved it; I loved to perish, I loved mine own fault, not that for which I was faulty, but my fault itself.” He did it because it was forbidden. That is what frightens him.

He keeps digging, and he finds one more thing: he would never have done it alone. In his own words, “alone I had never done it.” The fun was in the group, in getting away with it together. “O friendship too unfriendly!” he writes, for “when it is said, 'Let's go, let's do it,' we are ashamed not to be shameless.”

But he doesn't leave it there. Looking back, he gives thanks “that Thou hast melted away my sins as it were ice.” And he tells readers who never did anything like this not to look down on him. If they were kept from it, that was God's mercy too.

You have probably done something in a group that you would never have done on your own: a joke that went too far, a message you forwarded, a dare. Augustine isn't saying your friends are bad. He's saying that sin loves an audience, and that the human heart can want wrong things simply because they are wrong. That's not a reason to despair. It's a reason to stop trusting the crowd's “Let's go” and to bring your heart to the one who can melt it.

One thing to do this week: the next time a group says “Let's go, let's do it,” pause long enough to ask: would I do this if I were alone? If the answer is no, be the one who says, “I'm out.”