I love thinking about friendship. Even more, I love having friends. In my most recent reading of Augustine’s Confessions, I couldn’t help but notice the respectable bishop seemed to share some of my feelings of longing and affection when it comes to possessing and enjoying the good of friendship. Though Augustine never wrote a treatise on friendship, scholars generally consider Augustine as the first to seriously consider the role of friendship in the Christian life. The Confessions serves as a preliminary examination of the subject as Augustine details some of his own friendships from childhood to adulthood as well as the way friends have influenced him— both positively and negatively— along his spiritual journey. Upon a closer look into the text and what smarter people have to say about it, I was surprised to find Augustine was far more concerned with crafting careful warnings against the dangers and vulnerabilities of friendship than promoting it outright. One of the “teaching moments” that stands out to me most was one that occurred where I didn’t expect it. The infamous pear tree incident says a lot about the nature of sin and the condition of the human heart, but I hadn’t quite formed those conclusions into anything that could bear upon something as concrete as friendship.
At the opening of Book II, Augustine launches into recounting his life as an adolescent by confessing that the “single desire that dominated my search for delight was simply to love and to be loved” (Conf. II.ii.2). Not only does this phrase “to love and to be loved” reveal a desire for admiration from others and a wish for belonging, the phrase also alludes to a speech given by Cicero against Catiline’s riotous revolutionary recruits recorded in Sallust’s Catiline’s War. Essentially Cicero characterizes these young men as “smooth pretty-boys… versed not only in loving and being loved (amare et amari), or singing and dancing, but lunging with rapiers and dosing with poisons” (Wills, 58). They were were romantic, but uncivil— even violent. By employing this phrase, Augustine associates his youthful desire “to love and be loved” with the shameful behavior of the Catiline’s revolutionary cronies. Additionally, the phrase introduces and frames Augustine’s own band of youths thereby asserting a similarity between the two. According to Sallust’s history Catiline encouraged the mischief and violence of these gangs in order to create a political disturbance in his favor; the unruly adolescents, however, seemed to act without purpose committing acts of vandalism and violence for the enjoyment of the crime itself (Wills, 59). This will to sin apart from personal gain apparent among Catiline’s revolutionary bands foreshadows the nature of Augustine’s own youthful behavior among his gang of friends.
Augustine’s desire for inclusion and adoration drives him into senseless acts of mischief, the most notable being the infamous theft of the pears. Not only does this episode, heavily alluding to the garden of Eden, serve as a springboard into questions concerning human sinfulness, the passage also introduces the role of friendship in Augustine’s life. Participating in the activities of “a gang of naughty adolescents,” Augustine and his companions steal pears from a neighbor’s tree, not to enjoy for themselves or to gain profit, but only to take and toss to the pigs (II.iv.9). Reflecting upon this incident, Augustine searches for a motive, an explanation for why he stole the pears, but finds none. For though the “fruit was beautiful… I had a quantity of better pears. But those I picked solely with the motive of stealing. I threw away what I had picked” (II.vi.12). It was for the crime alone that the crime was committed. And yet, in Augustine’s final ruminations on this incident, he realizes that “had I been alone I would not have done it,” suggesting that the pleasure of the crime came in committing the sin in company (II.viii.16). He reasons:
If I had liked the pears which I stole and actually desired to enjoy them, I could by myself have committed that wicked act, had it been enough to attain the pleasure which I sought. I would not have needed to inflame the itch of my cupidity through the excitement generated by sharing the guilt with others. But my pleasure was not in the pears; it was in the crime itself, done in association with a sinful group. (II.viii.16)
Our actions follow our desires. Because Augustine had no desire for the pears themselves, he would not have stolen them. However, when spurred on by the “excitement generated” by a shared participation in the transgression, the inclination toward cupidity becomes “inflamed” arousing one to commit sins they otherwise would not. Indeed, the thieving of the pears was still committed for its own sake, but committed in the pleasure of collusion among companions.
Scholars have identified two texts Augustine draws upon as resources to understand the nature of Augustine’s youthful misdemeanor and the influence of friends on his behavior: Cicero’s Friendship and Scripture.
In Cicero’s treatise on friendship, the politician warns against “the communal ‘friction igniting the desire for wrong’ that comes from a desire to go along with the gang”– the very pitfall the teenage Augustine seems to have fallen into (Wills, 60). Just as friendship can serve as a source of goodness and growth in virtue, it can also lead the soul astray into acts of wickedness greater than what one could have accomplished alone. Furthermore, Cicero stresses that such camaraderie in evil fails to even qualify as real friendship, achieving only a twisted distortion of the real thing. Therefore, the ‘good of companionship’ potentially gained through such behavior is, in reality, nothing at all— a fact Augustine readily admits in his reflections. Partaking in the communal guilt ultimately failed to produce the pleasures of real friendship.
This sin of solidarity, however, seems not unlike the sin of our first parent. Throughout Augustine’s retelling, the image of the pear tree recalls the ‘forbidden fruit’ taken by Adam and Eve in the garden. Augustine both uses this parallel to underscore the gravity of his sin– even a sin seemingly slight– as well as explore the desires of his heart at the moment of sin. Wills comments that, for Augustine, “the greatest sin”–Adam’s sin–“was caused by a false ideal of companionship” (Wills, 61). Taking into account Paul’s first letter to Timothy, in which the writer asserts that, unlike Eve, Adam was not deceived, Augustine argues that Adam willfully and knowingly walked into sin, swayed by an “associative tie” (sociali necessitudine) (Wills, 61-62). Just as Adam, refusing to be divided from his partnership with Eve, committed the sin that alienated him from God, so Augustine, prizing his place among friends, deliberately sinned against the law of God. In the end, Augustine concludes: “Friendship can be a dangerous enemy, a seduction of the mind lying beyond the reach of investigation” (II.ix.17). While Augustine explicitly warns against the pitfalls of friendship, he refuses to reject it altogether; friendship, as with everything else in the world, is good when properly ordered and directed. Nonetheless, this episode certainly measures the depths to which such a good can lead the soul astray when placed above virtue, goodness, and God.
Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Wills, Garry. “Augustine’s Pears and the Nature of Sin.” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, 3rd ser., 10, no.1 (2002): 57-66.
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