Book II

Augustine announces his intention to recount his past sins not out of love for them, but to draw closer to God through honest remembrance and to experience God's sweetness.

Augustine describes how his pursuit of lustful desires fragmented his soul, causing him to lose himself in multiplicity and distance from God, the One Good.

Augustine confesses that in his youth he burned with desire to satisfy carnal appetites and pursued various shadowy loves, losing his beauty and becoming displeasing to God.

Augustine explains how he confused the desire to love and be loved with base carnal lust, allowing muddy concupiscence to cloud his capacity to distinguish true love from lustfulness.

Augustine reflects on how God's wrath was upon him though he did not perceive it, and how God allowed him to wander further away while remaining ultimately patient.

Augustine laments that no one restrained his youthful disorder, and wishes he had heeded the biblical instruction to channel his desires toward marriage rather than pursuing unlimited lust.

Augustine acknowledges that he should have listened more carefully to scriptural warnings about chastity and the single life's advantage for serving God.

Augustine marks his sixteenth year as the time when unchecked lust took dominion over him, while his friends cared only that he become an eloquent speaker rather than chaste.

Augustine explains that his father prioritized funding his rhetorical education despite limited means, while showing no concern for his moral development or chastity before God.

During a period of idleness while staying with his parents at age sixteen, Augustine allowed desires to grow unchecked without anyone to restrain them.

Augustine's father witnessed signs of his emerging manhood and rejoiced, seeing in this the prospect of descendants rather than concern for his spiritual development.

Augustine's mother, in whom God had begun to establish a temple, feared for his soul and warned him against fornication and adultery, though he dismissed her counsel as womanish.

Although Augustine's mother spoke God's words to him, he treated her warnings as shameful feminine advice and failed to recognize them as God's voice.

Augustine describes how, among his equals, he was ashamed to appear less shameless than others, even claiming sins he had not committed to avoid seeming innocent or contemptible.

Augustine characterizes his life in the city as wallowing in mire, pursued by invisible evil forces, while his mother—though still partly bound to worldly hopes—remained concerned about his chastity.

Augustine's parents, especially his mother who relied on God's aid, granted him excessive freedom, believing worldly education would help rather than hinder his spiritual development.

Augustine observes that theft is punished by God's law and by conscience written in human hearts, yet no one will willingly be branded a thief, not even the wealthy.

Augustine confesses to stealing pears not from hunger or need, but compelled by excess and depravity, taking them only to discard them and to delight in the sin itself.

Augustine emphasizes that his delight was not in the pears but in the theft itself, and that he loved to perish and loved his own fault rather than any external object.

Augustine catalogs the various attractions of worldly goods—beautiful bodies, gold, honor, power, friendship—noting that sin arises when these lower things are pursued instead of God.

Augustine argues that crimes are typically understood through pursuit or preservation of lower goods, as people would not believe anyone could commit evil purely for evil's sake.

Augustine questions what he could have loved in the theft itself, concluding that the pears were fair as God's creation but his wretched soul desired only to steal them.

Augustine systematically examines the theft and concludes it possesses no true beauty—neither in justice and wisdom, nor in any form of genuine goodness.

Augustine presents an extended series of vices—pride, ambition, cruelty, wantonness, curiosity, sloth, luxury, prodigality, covetousness, envy, anger, fear, grief—each as a false imitation of God's true attributes.

Augustine explains that the soul commits fornication when she turns from God to seek fulfillment elsewhere, though all perversions imply God's existence as the Creator.

Augustine speculates that his theft was an attempt to mimic God's power by doing forbidden things with impunity, creating a darkened likeness of divine omnipotence.

Augustine declares that when remembering his great sins, his soul is not frightened but instead grateful to God for forgiveness and the melting away of his iniquities.

Augustine acknowledges that his purity comes not from his own strength but from God's grace, which both forgave his actual sins and prevented him from committing even worse ones.

Augustine appeals to those who have avoided his sins not to despise him but to love God more, recognizing that his recovery from sin's consumption is evidence of God's healing power.

Augustine reflects that the theft was nothing, making him miserable for loving nothing; he realizes he could not have done it alone and thus loved the company of accomplices.

Augustine explains that his pleasure came not from the pears but from the offense, which required accomplices; he had no desire to enjoy the pears themselves.

Augustine identifies his delight as the sport of deceiving others and the shame of shamelessness felt among peers, explaining the social nature of his sin.

Augustine characterizes his corrupt companionship as unfriendly friendship, an incomprehensible inveigler of the soul that drove them to commit mischief for mirth and wantonness.

Augustine declares the twisted knottiness of his sin too foul to contemplate, expressing hatred for it and longing instead for God's righteousness and innocency.