In the Confessions of Saint Augustine, this great philosopher experiences many problems and emotions related to sin and evil. As a boy, he often felt darkness, blindness, and confusion as he tried to find rest in God. Augustine began in childhood with a restless heart because he had to live in two different worlds. These worlds consisted of his mother's Christian faith and the world of everything else. These two worlds confused and disturbed Augustine as a child. Augustine's father was a pagan and his mother was a Christian, and both wanted him to be very successful in the world. When he became confused, he began asking unanswerable questions, such as: “Human beings often feel restless, but what do they need to feel at rest (Chadwick, 1992)?” Do they need God? Augustine wanted to know the truth about sin, evil, and God, so he did so by searching for the truth. During his research he was influenced by the Manichaeans, the Neoplatonists and the Christians. This journey was difficult for him because he had to overcome his misunderstanding of evil and his own sin. Augustine was born into the world with original sin. As a child, if another child was breastfed, he or she wanted to breastfeed too. As a boy at school, he found it difficult to discipline himself and often criticized his teachers for making him read fictional stories. Aside from his mother's teachings, Augustine felt as if he was malformed at an early age. This behavior carried him into adolescence, as he was addicted to sex. He also had an episode where he and some friends stole pears from someone else's pear tree out of mischief. This was an act of rebellion and he then compared this act to that of Adam and Eve. He questioned the act of destruction: “What are…half the paper…and finally the vision. In this vision he was in a garden and saw a child singing to him “take it and read” and there he began to read the epistles of St. Paul, which revealed the truth he was looking for. He realized that “Only a God who made himself “tangible”, one of us, was finally a God to whom he could pray, for whom and with whom he could live (Chadwick, 1992).” Now he knew that God, who had previously seemed so far away, had become close to him and even just like him. His first step towards conversion was to be baptized. Now he had a different look at evil; he knows that evil has no substance. Through his journey and discovery of truth, Augustine learned that evil is the result of the abuse of free choice through rational thought. Works Cited Chadwick, Henry. (1992). Confessions of Saint Augustine. New York: Oxford University Press inc.