The Guise of the Bad in Augustine’s Pear Theft

Abstract

In the second book of his Confessions, Augustine of Hippo presents his famous juvenile Pear Theft as an apparent case of acting under the guise of the bad. At least since Thomas Aquinas' influential interpretation, scholars have usually taken Augustine's detailed discussion of the case to be dispelling this Bguise of the guise of the bad^, and to offer a solid Bguise of the good^-explanation. This paper addresses an important challenge to this view: Augustine offers two different Bguise of the good^-explanations in his text rather than just one, and the two explanations seem to be mutually exclusive. A number of more recent attempts to reconcile Augustine's two lines of explanation are discussed and found wanting, and a new suggestion is made. The proposed solution focuses on the Pear Theft as a joint action, and it departs from the Aquinian interpretation in that it accounts for a way in which the Bguise of the bad^-hypothesis survives the explanation.Keywords Evil . Guise of the good . Joint action . Augustine . Aquinas 1In the second book of his Confessions, Augustine of Hippo famously recounts how one night in his sixteenth year, he teamed up with a couple of friends to break into a neighbor's garden:BThere was a pear tree close to our own vineyard, heavily laden with fruit, which was not tempting either for its color or for its flavor. Late one night -having prolonged our games in the streets until then, as our bad habit was -a group of young scoundrels, and I among them, went to shake and rob this tree. We carried Ethic Theory Moral Prac (2018) 21:71-89 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-017-9854-6 I'm grateful to the participants of the Guise of the Bad-Workshop at the University of Vienna, the participants of an academia.edu session on a draft version of this paper as well as to two anonymous referees for many helpful suggestions.