This chapter finds that Augustine self-consciously departed from Stoicism and Platonism (while remaining within eudaimonism) in finding that there were other natural objects of human beings’ eros-love besides the highest good. This finding leads to a new explanation of Augustine’s distinction between use and enjoyment and to a new explanation of his view that grief would be found not only in the lives of the vicious but in the lives of the virtuous as well.

This chapter asks whether Augustine agreed with the Stoics and Platonists that there were no necessary outward differences between the lives of the vicious and the virtuous. Answering this question requires investigating whether he thought in terms of political virtues; this chapter finds that he did not. It finds that, for Augustine, justice – whether human justice or true justice – was not a political virtue, because it was primarily a description of our loves: the humanly just and the truly just differed at the level of their loves, but not at the level of their actions.

The purpose of this chapter is to outline in a more systematic way Augustine’s understanding of the nature of sin. This involves exploring a number of issues which have not been discussed in the previous chapters, namely, Augustine’s insistence that even when we were virtuous, we might also be sinful; his understanding of original sin; and his idea of sin as consent to carnal concupiscence.

This chapter finds that Augustine thought of self-love and neighbour-love as both eros and philia and that he found that vicious people were able to love other people unselfishly, even though their love for others would always be sinful as the love for something temporal. This chapter establishes that eros for our neighbours was not a self-centred love – it did not instrumentalise others by making them the ‘means’ to our happiness; rather, for Augustine, eros for the neighbour, whether this love was sinful or virtuous, was a form of benevolence.

This chapter asks whether Robert Dodaro and John Milbank are correct in their claim that Augustine thought that the earthly city was necessarily a place of political vice. To this end, this chapter examines Augustine’s idea of the love of material possessions, the love of glory, and the love of domination, and finds that while he looked on these loves as always sinful, he held that they did not necessarily lead people to commit politically vicious actions, but could in fact act as a restraint on people’s actions, ensuring that people conformed their lives to the highest political and social standards.

This chapter turns to Augustine’s account of his own Christian conversion in Confessions. It offers a new account of what Augustine thought it meant to be a Christian – in particular, this chapter finds that the idea of God as the saviour of sinners (and therefore the giver of virtue) stood at the heart of Augustine’s conception of Christianity. This finding allows this chapter to show that Augustine’s intellectual and moral conversion coincided in the garden in Milan and also that Augustine made his criticisms of Manicheanism and Platonism from within the eudaimonist tradition.

This chapter establishes that Augustine held that the sins of Christians were venial sins and that these sins were always committed through weakness or ignorance, with the result that Christians remained virtuous while they committed these sins. In contrast, the sins of non-Christians were always damnable sins and these were committed through pride. Through a study of Augustine’s account of the theft of the pears, and of Adam and Eve’s Fall, this chapter shows that Augustine thought that sinning through pride could take two different forms, and that this supported his view that anti-social, other-harming actions (like theft or murder) were not inevitable in the earthly city.

This chapter notes that current scholarship on Augustine’s idea of pagan virtue and current scholarship on his political thought contain different, and conflicting, interpretations of his notions of virtue and vice, or sin. This chapter proposes that to determine which interpretation is correct we need to situate Augustine’s moral thought in relation to the ancient moral tradition of eudaimonism. Oliver O’Donovan and Nicholas Wolterstorff have proposed that Augustine broke with classical eudaimonism, but this chapter argues that their interpretation of the Stoic and Platonic tradition in eudaimonism is incorrect, and that a correct understanding of this tradition leads to the conclusion that Augustine in fact remained faithful to the eudaimonist approach to ethics.

This chapter asks whether Augustine criticised Stoicism and Platonism because he thought that there was something fundamentally flawed about the eudaimonist approach to ethics, or whether he criticised Stoicism and Platonism because he thought that these philosophies had insufficiently understood eudaimonism itself. It finds that the latter explanation is correct: in reaching this conclusion, this chapter establishes that Augustine defined virtue and vice, or sin, from within the eudaimonist tradition, making use of the ideas of love as eros and philia, and of the highest good, or summum bonum.