Augustine and the Pears

2. Is the writer Augustine being too harsh in the way he looks back on his relationships with his friends with whom he stole the pears?

       I don't think that Augustine was being too harsh in the way he looks back on his relationships with his friends. Augustine says explicitly that friendship is a tender bond between humans that God created, so he is not saying that friendship is bad. He says however that the relationship in friendship can be abused, and people can motivate their friends to do sinful things. This is what Augustine's analysis of his friendship with these boys was; that the bond between him and his friends was a sinful one, and it caused him to do sinful things. This lines up with his view of sin in general- that everything made by God is good, but we as sinful beings can abuse the relationship of those things, and that is where sin happens.