Lesson · 4 min Steady
The Stolen Pears
In one line Augustine stole pears he did not want, and found the cause of wrongdoing in love aimed the wrong way.
In the Confessions, Augustine recalls stealing pears from a neighbor’s tree as a teenager. He was not hungry, and the pears were not good. He and his friends threw most of them to pigs. What he enjoyed, he says, was the theft itself, and doing it with the others.
The memory troubles him because the act seems to have no motive. His answer draws on the Platonists he had read: evil is not a thing in its own right but a lack, a turning away from a greater good toward a lesser one. Even the thief loves something good, such as friendship or daring, in the wrong order.
Augustine calls this disordered love. The habit worth keeping is to ask what good is really pulling at you when you do wrong.
Go deeper
Augustine later wrote that two loves built two cities: love of self, to the contempt of God, made the earthly city, and love of God, to the contempt of self, made the heavenly one. He wrote The City of God after Rome was sacked in 410, partly to answer pagans who blamed Christianity for the city’s fall. The idea of ordered love runs through both books.
The prank
A group of coworkers hides a colleague’s keys as a joke. Sam joins in, though he has no grudge and feels bad about it later.
Asked why, he can only say that he wanted to be part of the group. The good he was after was belonging. What went wrong was putting that good above being fair to the colleague.
Try this today Recall one thing you did mainly to fit in with a group, and ask what good you were really after.
Cite or share this lesson
A plain reference you can paste into notes or an essay:
Quest2Reason. “The Stolen Pears.” https://quest2reason.com/learn/lesson/the-stolen-pears. Accessed 13 November 2026.
Sources
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Augustine” — Covers evil as privation, disordered love and the two cities.
- Augustine, Confessions (Christian Classics Ethereal Library) — Book 2 tells the theft of the pears; book 11 asks what time is. Paraphrase.