Virtues in Augustine's On Free Choice of the Will

We've been studying St. Augustine's On Free Choice of the Will in my Introduction to Philosophy class these last two weeks (here's video 1, 2 and 3 of the sessions).  This book has long been one of my favorite Augustinian works -- ranking up there with his Confessions, the City of God, On Christian Doctrine, and (what might come as a surprise, since they are considered minor works), the treatises On Lying and Against Lying.  On Free Choice of the Will is really quite masterful as a dialogue -- real discussion and exploration is going on in that text -- problems are raised, resolved, just to give rise to new deeper problems -- and gradually, a through what initially appear digressions, a complex picture gets systematically sketched out.

Time is always an issue in teaching Introduction classes -- there's never enough, even if everything goes exactly as it ought to, to devote adequate attention to everything in the monumental texts I am privileged to teach -- and one of the casualties this time around, specifically with respect to this text, is Augustine's discussions about the virtues, mainly carried out in books 1 and 2.  There's nothing like a full-blown and systematic Augustinian treatment of the virtues and vices in On Free Choice of the Will -- we learn much more, and much that is important, from other writings of his, not just from major works and specific treatises, but even from remarks made in his various Letters.  In fact, only the four cardinal virtues are examined in this work.  But, what he does say is interesting in its own right -- if all we had of Augustine was this one work, it would still represent an advance -- or, perhaps a departure -- in the tradition of virtue ethics.