It is here, when we seem to be approaching familiar and reassuring territory, that we encounter Augustine’s theological purposes. For it turns out that what he observed—wishes, indignation, revenge—marked for him the full presence in the infant of the moral catastrophe of adult life. It is all there already in the nursery: the violence, the will to enslave others, the urgency of capricious desires. The fact that the infant is impotent—that he can merely fling his arms about and cry—does not alter what for Augustine is the hard truth: there is something morally wrong with us from birth.
