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LIONEL TRILLING
in his grim, brilliant way, there is none that he nags so persistently,
none that seems to lie so far beyond the reach of his ready compre–
hension of sin. He did not steal the pears because he was hungry.
He did not steal them because they were delicious-they were pears
of rather poor quality, he had better at home. He did not steal them
to win the admiration of the friends who were with him, although
this comes close, for, as he says, he would not have stolen them
if
he had been alone.
In
all sin, he says, there is a patent motivating
desire, some good to be gained, some pleasure for the sake of which
the act was committed. But this sin of the stolen pears is, as
it
were,
pure-he can discover no human reason for it. He speaks again of
the presence of the companions, but although their being with him
was a necessary condition of the act,
it
cannot be said to have
motivated it. To the mature Augustine, the petty theft of his youth
is horrifying not only because it seems to have been a sin committed
solely for the sake of sinning, but because, in having no conceivable
pleasure in view, it was a sort of negative transcendance-in effect,
a negation-of his humanity. This is not strange to us-what I have
called the high extruded segment of our general culture has for
some time been engaged in an experiment in the negative tran–
scendance of the human, a condition which is to be achieved by
freeing the self from its thralldom to pleasure. Augustine's puzzling
sin is the paradigm of the modern spiritual enterprise, and in his
reprobation of it is to be found the reason why Dostoevsky con–
temned and hated the Christianity of the West, which he denounced
as, in effect, a vulgar humanism.
To be aware of this undertaking of negative transcendance is,
surely, to admire the energy of its desperateness. And we can compre–
hend how, for the consumer of literature, for that highly developed
person who must perforce live the bourgeois life in an affluent
society, an aesthetic ethos based on the devaluation of pleasure can
serve, and seem to save, one of the two souls which inhabit his
breast. Nearly overcome as we are by the specious good, insulted
as we are by being forced to acquire it, we claim the right of the
Underground Man to address the "gentlemen" with our assertion,
"I have more life in me than you have," which consorts better with
the refinement of our sensibility than other brags that men have
made, such as, "I am stronger than you," or "I am holier than
