The Pear Tree

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? JEREMIAH 17:9

It is one of the oddest things in the Confessions. A bishop of the church, writing his life for God and for posterity, passes lightly over the years of his sexual sin and his false religion, and spends the better part of a book on a handful of stolen pears. He was sixteen. He and a gang of friends, out late in the streets, shook a neighbour’s tree, carried off the fruit, tasted a little, and threw the rest to the pigs. The pears were poor. He had better at home. He did not want them. And that, he says, was the whole point. “I loved mine own fault, not that for which I was faulty, but my fault itself.”

Why a small sin

Augustine chose the pear tree because it was small. A great crime can always be explained. A man steals because he is hungry, kills because he is afraid, lies because he wants something. We understand those sins, even as we condemn them, because we can see the good thing the sinner was reaching for. But a boy who steals what he does not want, for no reason except that it is forbidden, has shown something more frightening. He has shown a will that takes pleasure in rebellion for its own sake. Augustine looked at that night and saw into the root of the human problem.

Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant. PROVERBS 9:17

He did not let himself off by blaming his friends, though he notes honestly that he would never have done it alone. The company made it fun; the fun was the shared defiance. Much sin is like that. We do in a group what we would be ashamed to do by ourselves, and we call it belonging. Augustine calls it what it was.

Love disordered

The pear tree led Augustine to his great insight about sin. Sin is not, at bottom, the love of evil things. There are no evil things, strictly speaking, in God’s creation; the pears themselves were good, he says, because God made them. Sin is love out of order. It is loving a lower good in place of a higher one, the creature in place of the Creator, my own will in place of God’s. Every sin, however ugly, is a counterfeit of something good. Pride imitates greatness; ambition imitates glory; even the pear-thief’s defiance, he says in Book II, was a crooked imitation of God’s own freedom, a creature trying to be a law to itself.

Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. ROMANS 1:25

This way of seeing sin is searching. It means that the question to ask of any temptation is not simply, is this thing wrong? but, what am I asking this thing to be? A meal, a friendship, a success, a pleasure can be received with thanks as a gift, or seized as a god. The thing is the same. The love is different.

Born into it

Augustine did not think the pear tree was where his sin began. In the first book of the Confessions he looks back further, to infancy, and refuses the sentimental notion that babies are innocent. “Myself have seen and known even a baby envious,” he writes: too small to speak, it turned pale and glared at its foster-brother at the breast. The weakness of infant limbs, he says, is its innocence, not its will. What a baby lacks is not a selfish heart but the strength to act on it.

Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me. PSALM 51:5

This became the ground of his teaching on original sin, which he set out most fully in the Enchiridion and in his writings against Pelagius. Adam, created good, turned from God by his own free will; and through him, Augustine taught, the whole race was corrupted and fell under the penalty of death. We do not start life neutral and then choose. We are born already bent.

Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned. ROMANS 5:12

Where he pressed too hard

The heart of this teaching is simply what Scripture says and what honest experience confirms. But Augustine’s way of explaining how original sin is passed on must be read with care. In the Enchiridion he describes Adam’s descendants as being the offspring of carnal lust, and elsewhere he tied the transmission of sin closely to the sexual passion by which children are conceived. Behind this lay his own long struggle; the desire that had enslaved him for years seemed to him the clearest proof of the soul’s disorder. But Scripture does not say that sexual desire within marriage is the channel of sin’s inheritance, and it calls the marriage bed honourable (Hebrews 13:4). Augustine’s view has left a long shadow of suspicion over the body and over marriage in the Western church, and many believers, especially women, have carried a shame God never laid on them. Hold fast to what he saw — that the heart is bent from birth — and let go of what he added.

The only cure

Why dwell on all this? Because the doctor who does not diagnose cannot heal. Augustine’s unsparing account of sin was not the gloom of a man who hated himself. It was the relief of a man who had finally been told the truth, and found that the truth had a remedy. In Book II, right after the pear tree, he breaks into praise: God had forgiven him these heinous deeds, and even the sins he had not committed he owed to God’s keeping. That is how the knowledge of sin is meant to work. It drives us not to despair but to grace.

Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me. PSALM 51:10

But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound. ROMANS 5:20

The boy under the pear tree did not know it, but the God he was defying was already on his track. The very honesty with which the bishop could later tell the story was a sign of how thoroughly he had been found.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Recall a sin from your past that had no real reason behind it except that it was forbidden. What does it tell you about your heart?

2. Think of a sin you commit mostly in company. Ask whether you would do it alone, and decide what you will do next time the group goes that way.

3. Choose one good thing in your life and ask honestly whether you receive it as a gift or seize it as a god.

4. If you have carried a sense of shame about your body or your marriage that Scripture does not teach, bring it to God and to a wise believer, and let His Word set it right.

5. Read Psalm 51 aloud this week as your own prayer.

A PRAYER

Lord, I have loved my own way for its own sake, and taken pleasure in what You forbid simply because You forbid it.

I was bent from the beginning, and I have bent myself further. I do not excuse it, and I cannot cure it.

Create in me a clean heart. Put my loves back in their right order, with You above them all.

Thank You that where my sin abounded, Your grace has abounded more, in Jesus Christ my Lord. Amen.