These Sober Pages

Augustine's Metaphysics stretches from Nothing to the Selfsame, Truth. Imperative for understanding the Confessions is the ceaseless realization that no negative exists in Augustine's world. Nothing is less than zero. Against the Manichean schizophrenia of positive and negative, evil and good, Aug ustine imagines events and the world itself to be laid out along the plane of concrete being. The pear stealing episode represents the negative end of this continuum, and presents the Confession's first concrete example of an action that can be understood as Nothing. It is not, of course, that the action itself did not exist. The theft was as physically real as the conversion experience or any of the other episodes suffered through the autobiograph ical chapters. Given that the thievery did exist, the key for understanding Augustine's evil lies in distinguishing the aspect from which a certain example of it—the pear stealing episode—is Nothing. O. W. Holmes wondered how Augustine could have remained so leaden in a boy's mistake. Augustine's relation of the theft is for the most part a string of questions that sometimes occasion blatantly inadequate answers and other times no answers at all. Would the pears have been stolen had Augustine been alone? Could the community of 'thieves' be blamed en masse, was the individual in the community responsible, was he entirely responsible ... Indeed, it becomes difficult not to sympathize with Holmes frustration at being dragged through this unresolvable 'tangle' in which Augustine's indulgent self reflection comes closer to Monty Python humour than reasons and a reasonable answer.