Augustine's Confessions Rhetorical Analysis

Based on the book of Genesis, evil first came into the world when Adam and Eve, God’s first human creations, defied him and ate of the forbidden fruit, gaining God’s knowledge. This act was essentially caused by pride and envy; Adam and Eve craved to know what God knows and thus feebly attempting to imitate him through sin. For St. Augustine, imitation of God’s goodness is the cause for all sin. In Book 2 of his Confessions, perturbed by his petty theft, Augustine questions the motivation for his sin. Augustine compares his sin to “knot, which cannot be unravel. Indeed, he never truly reasons out his theft, but his rhetorical journey in order to solve its complexity is still intriguing. Through the use of his characteristic dialect and Neoplatonic

thinking, Augustine questions the complexity and depth of goodness and attempts to unravels the nature of sin.
Augustine first suggests degrees of goodness.

He accepts that such things as honor, power, and friendship have goodness, but that they can lead to sin and so are inferior goods. For Augustine, the only true good stems from God, but he is well aware that inferior goods dominate most of our decision making. To further explain this concept, he uses the example of Catiline, a notorious Roman dissident and murderer. Augustine argues that Catiline did not just simply murder because he enjoyed the bloodthirsty act, but for other complex, “good” reasons. Augustine writes:

His objective was to capture the city by violent crimes to obtain honours,

government, and wealth; to live without the fear of laws and without the difficulty

of attaining his ambitions because of the poverty of his family estate and his

known criminal record. No, not even Catiline himself loved his crimes;

something
else motivated him to commit them. (Confessions, 2, 5, 11)
Indeed, just as Catiline murdered in hopes of bettering his social status, all humans sin in order to obtain a pseudo-good. Although he accepts this to be true, Augustine still cannot find a good in his theft of the pears.
Furthering his inquiry, Augustine questions why humanity chases these inferior goods. Through exquisite use of rhetoric, Augustine explains that these inferior goods are all imitations of the superior good, which is God. For example, the proud seek to be lofty, but God alone is the highest, supreme being. He further clarifies:
So the soul fornicates when it is turned away from you and seeks outside you the
pure and clear intentions which are not to be found except by returning to you. In
their perverted way all humanity imitates you. Yet they put themselves at a
distance from you and exalt themselves against you. But even by thus imitating
you they acknowledge that you are the creator of all nature and so concede that
there is no place where one can entirely escape from you. (Confessions, 2, 6, 14)
Augustine’s proposition at first appears to be contradicting; how can one turn away from God while seeking to come closer to him?
Augustine reasons that this contradiction comes from human perversion, but does not necessarily clarify where this perversion comes from.

Augustine’s dabblings in Manichaeism may cause one to infer that he perhaps is clinging to the idea that there is something inherently evil about matter. Augustine, however, mentions that the “soul fornicates” which would go against Manichaeistic thinking, since they would hold that the soul was essentially good. When he suggests this corruption of the soul, Augustine is alluding to his acceptance of free will, which he elaborates on in Book 7. Free will is what causes corruption and the immersion of evil. Even in this book, Augustine confesses that he did these evil things out of his own accord. Although Plotinus would have found issue with the soul being corruptible, since for him it is suppose to govern the body in perfect harmony, Augustine’s response is reminiscent of his writings. Plotinus stressed the idea that humanity has moved away from the ideal Oneness that is God and they desperately crave to reunite with Him. This parallels Augustine’s idea that humanity wishes to imitate God to be closer to

Him.
After examining sin in a much broader sense, Augustine begins to concentrate on the pear incident. As Catiline loved not his murder, but what it would beget, Augustine ponders if he loved the result of the theft. He reason that he did not, because to him association with his friends was a nothing. This is strange because previously Augustine refers to friendship as an inferior good. Perhaps in this particular case of friendship, he does not see how it could be a crude imitation of one of God’s qualities. Indeed, he calls the group sinful. Nonetheless, the point remains ambiguous. Augustine ultimately concedes that there was no ulterior motive in his sin and that the pleasure he received from this evil was from the evil itself. He cannot understand, however, why he found pleasure in the act if he would never have enjoyed alone. He mentions friendship to be a “dangerous enemy” which makes one “ashamed to not be shameless”. (Confessions, 2, 9, 17) Again Augustine presents another contradiction, which only makes the nature of his sin even more perplexing.
His failure to adapt his sin theory to his own evil partially discredits his analysis, but this does not mean there is no merit in his work. Augustine’s sin theory explains moral evil in a Christian context nicely. It would only make sense that as a Christian, one would know God is the supreme good and they would act accordingly to achieve his goodness. His connection of human perversion to free will brilliantly preludes his theodicy in Book 7. Augustine’s use of examples and analogies heighten the reader’s experience and makes his arguments more discernable. The book is thought-provoking and causes the reader to synthesize contradicting ideas that would never have made sense without Augustine’s master writing. This book is just a small testament of the philosophical and theological beauty of the work in whole.