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 aims to provide a survey of the recent and emerging conversations between theology (and more specifically moral theology or Christian ethics) and social anthropology (and more specifically the anthropology of morality). These conversations are presented as starting from two sides, as being a matter of theology attending to anthropology, and of anthropology engaging with theology. Banner’s The Ethics of Everyday Life is taken as providing an indication of the nature and promise of the first conversation for enriching theology’s social intelligence and its self-understanding (illustrated in particular by a discussion the Alder Hey scandal and of reproductive surrogacy), and Robbins’s Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life is taken as indicating the potential for the second, namely that beyond religious life providing material for ethnography, theological ideas and concepts may contribute to anthropological theory, even in relation to such central categories as the gift. The chapter closes with a consideration of some future directions which these conversations may take.

Rules are a ubiquitous normative form across the human experience. The recent anthropology of ethics and morality has, however, tended to focus elsewhere, in part to redress a perceived earlier over-emphasis on rules within anthropology. Bourdieu’s scepticism as to the value of structuralist talk of rules, and favouring instead of ‘practice’, has been more widely influential. This chapter makes the case for a renewed and more sophisticated attention to rules within the anthropology of ethics. While the roots of anthropological rule scepticism lie in debates – often inspired by Wittgenstein – over whether the implicit norms of ‘ordinary’ social life should be thought of as ‘rules’, the prominence of explicit rules in many of the world’s great ethical traditions seems hard to ignore. And yet, the conceptual tools available to anthropologists for their nuanced ethnographic appreciation remain under-developed. Some potential resources from analytic and legal philosophy and moral theology are brought to bear on examples from the author’s research on the use of religious rules, specifically those of the Islamic sharia. Having demonstrated the diversity, complexity, and ethnographic interest of the practice of moral rules, the chapter ends by considering why some social contexts appear more ‘ruly’, or legalistic, than others.

This chapter examines several elements of Grotius’s teachings on the laws governing promises, contracts, and treaties, as expounded in his De jure belli acpacis. Grotius distinguished between promises and contracts. A promise to transfer a property right is binding when the promisor expressed his intention with an external sign, and the promisee has accepted the promise. As the binding effect is based on the free will of the promisor, the so-called vices of the will (duress, fraud etc.) can invalidate the agreement.

Scholars have typically turned to Aquinas’s Summa theologiae for the moral theology of Dante’s Purgatory. However Dante is, in fact, following an older, more conservative tradition of Christian ethics represented by Peraldus’s De vitiis et virtutibus. In the thirteenth century, theologians moved from trying to displace the structuring principle of the seven capital vices with other alternatives to reforming it from within, and Peraldus and Aquinas adopted markedly different approaches to this reform.

Peraldus’s rationale impels him to treat the vices separately, according to disordered love by excess or deficiency (gluttony, lust, avarice, and sloth) or to love of an evil (pride, envy, and anger). Aquinas, by contrast, introduces an Aristotelian anthropology and a new positive teleological frame, enabling him to treat vices and virtues together in terms of shared good objects desired or avoided. A comparative critique highlights the characteristics, including the weaknesses, of Dante’s poetic treatment (which clearly follows Peraldus’s treatise).

The parallel in ethical content between Peraldus and Dante is matched, furthermore, by a parallel in form: Peraldus’s De vitiis invites us to imagine Dante assuming in the Purgatorio the role of a venacular preacher against vice, with the reader envisaged as a Christian sinner.

This chapter reappraises Dante’s relationship with his reader in Purgatorio through the interpretative paradigm of medieval preaching against vice. The terrace of pride is particularly interesting, in this context, as the medieval Church provides its implicit backdrop. The terrace’s centrepiece is Dante-character’s encounter with three prideful souls (Purg. XI, 37–142), and this encounter is framed by the three examples of humility (Purg. X, 34–93) and the twelve examples of pride (Purg. XII, 25–63). This chapter interprets these three groups together as a triptych.

Dante openly acknowledges that he sinned gravely in pride, and he models a spiritual exercise of conversion from pride to humility. As sinner and preacher, he invites his reader to reflect upon the three prideful souls identified (Omberto, Oderisi, and Salvani) and upon the three groups of prideful examples (delineated by the acrostic ‘VOM’) in counterposition with the three exempla of humility (Mary, King David, and Trajan).

Dante’s choice of exempla (which has puzzled critics) becomes understandable when, and only when, we interpret them in relation to each other in terms of his moral purpose for the terrace as a whole.