How did Augustine's adolescence indicate his understanding of who God is? Describe how this particular aspect informs Augustine's understand of God.
I think the excerpt posted below will help you understand this concept.
"When he (Augustine) wants to penetrate the depths of his own iniquity, he chose to describe the theft of a few pears from a neighbor's tree (2.4-9). This narrative is placed in his sixteenth year, an idle time spent at home, his education interrupted by penury, his energies at the disposal of his fancies. An unflattering portrayal of his father's reaction to his new maturity shows that it was a time when the powers of the flesh were beginning to flourish. Then suddenly we have him and a few friends snatching pears. To ask whether the theft is meant to represent symbolically the sexual indiscretions of youth is literal-minded, but some broad analogy at least is probably implied. Although the moral consciousness begins to function in childhood, it is with adolescence and adulthood that the trivial indiscretions of childhood begin to harden into ugly excrescences of moral insensitivity. The adolescent is father to the man. Of that much at least Augustine meant to speak when he chose the pear theft for his meditation on sin.
In speaking of the pears, he strips away irrelevancies and focuses on the sinfulness of the sin. Most immoral acts are undertaken with a purpose--or at least a rationalization --that is at least in part expressly moral. Some innate, positive attraction of the act draws the individual. Even so morally austere an author as Dante could portray the love of Paolo and Francesca with sympathy for a fall that had come through excess of love and enthusiasm; Augustine could well have recounted his own amours at least as deftly. But there was nothing at all redeeming about the theft of the pears. The pears themselves were paltry and unattractive, and the thieves did not even keep them; the comrades with whom he made the theft were not particularly his friends, nor did he want their approval; what attracted him was simply the thrill of the theft itself: forbidden fruit.
Surely Augustine never expected to be cast down to hell for a few pears. But at the same time he felt with awe and horror that the obscure craving that had led him to the pears was the sort of desire by which hell is chosen. To delight in evil for its own sake, to assert one's own primacy in the world by arrogating other's goods to oneself for whatever purpose--there is the embodiment of all evil. The second book of the Confessions ends with Augustine facing his own adolescent act in all its trivial magnitude:
