Paper:"Reaction to Confessions by St. Augustine"
Year in School: College Freshman
Class: Conversations of the West: Renaissance & the Antiquities
Date written: April 2, 2001
With regard to Augustine’s belief that a tiny infant is such a great sinner, I think that it is very interesting to view a baby using this kind of perspective. Augustine states that an infant has a limited number of ways to request things it needs/wants and few physical abilities to see to it that its requests are done. Augustine states that a baby is selfish and offers no sort of thanks. He says that babies make demands on everyone and ‘rewards’ them with obnoxious weeping. I have really never considered a baby’s behavior in this sort of standpoint. I suppose I can see where a person would think this, since it is all true in a sense; a baby does all these things, however, one must understand that a baby doesn’t know that it is doing wrong. A baby does not have a lot of knowledge, so it must use what it can to get what it needs. Maybe that is what makes a baby a sinner, simply by not knowing the difference between right and wrong yet. In my view though, if a being doesn’t know that something is wrong/unaccepted then it can’t be held completely responsible. With a baby’s case though, it isn’t anyone’s fault that the baby doesn’t know what is wrong, because the baby will learn as it grows. They aren’t supposed to be born knowing everything. Parents aren’t supposed to teach a baby everything either. A child learns as it grows. So, to call a baby a sinner and actually be serious is somewhat irrational. It is worthy of note to think of a baby in such a way, however, it just isn’t realistic.
