It is clear that Augustine sees very little (if anything) good about culture. He rebukes it as a torrent of hell that drags everyone toward damnation. Jove (Zeus) was the renowned thunderer and adulterer and Augustine claims that the poets did not ascribe sinfulness to the gods but rather turned sinful men into gods and so encourage everyone to sin and to sin proudly. Furthermore, people pay good money to learn this vileness and are accounted wise when they do.
This was how Augustine was educated as a child and he confesses that he learned it willingly and with delight. I think that he saw the sin of the world as his own sin in a stronger way than we live with our doctrine of original sin.
I think that I always just accepted that the world was sinful and that I ought not to follow it and that I was also sinful which was why I needed Jesus. I've been a believer my whole life and so I have been saved from a lot of bad whereas Augustine was a notorious and very proud sinner until he came to faith.
It is very good that the Lord redeemed Augustine's sinful life and inspired him to do great works of faith and so lay so much foundation for western Christianity but it makes me stop and wonder for a second if it is better off to have come to faith after being a notorious proud sinner than to have just always had faith. I say "stop and wonder for a second" because the answer immediately comes to me, "no." While the Lord can redeem a sinful life to great ends for his kingdom (Augustine's groundbreaking theological work for instance) it need not be this way. God can just as easily inspire one who has always been faithful. Furthermore works, as desirable as they may be, do not make one any more or less loved, accepted, or saved by God. Further still the rewards of heaven for faithfulness will be greater than the rewards on earth for good works. Faithfulness and wisdom are to be pursued and it is antithetical to pine after a worse life of sin to give you life experience before you came to faith.
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