 Love is a crucial and overarching notion in Augustine’s ethics. It is closely related to virtue  and often used synonymously with will (e.g., De trinitate 15.38; in the cogito-like arguments, love and will are interchangeable, cf. De civitate dei 11.27 with Confessiones 13.12) or intention (intentio). Augustine’s basic text is, of course, the biblical command to love God and neighbor (Matthew 22.37; 39), which he is however prepared, throughout his life, to interpret in terms of Platonic erotic love (Rist 1994: 148–202). As in the Symposium and in Plotinus (Enneads I.6), love is a force in our souls that attracts us to the true beauty we find nowhere else but in and above ourselves; it drives us to ascend from the sensible to the intelligible world and to the cognition and contemplation of God (Confessiones 10.8–38, esp. 38). Even Christian fraternal love can be described, in a manner reminiscent of the Phaedrus, as a kind of seduction through another’s real or assumed righteousness (De trinitate 9.11). In a more general way, love means the overall direction of our will (positively) toward God or (negatively) toward ourselves or corporeal creature (De civitate dei 14.7; Byers 2013: 88–99; 217–231). The former is called love in a good sense (caritas), the latter cupidity or concupiscence (cupiditas), i.e., misdirected and sinful love (De doctrina christiana 3.16). The root of sin is excessive self-love that wants to put the self in the position of God and is equivalent with pride (De civitate dei 14.28). It must be distinguished from the legitimate self-love that is part of the biblical commandment and strives for true happiness by subordinating the self to God (O’Donovan 1980). In his earlier work, Augustine has some difficulties incorporating love of neighbor into the Platonic and eudaimonist framework of his thinking (De doctrina christiana 1.20–21, see  7.1 Happiness).  After 400, in the context of his reflections on the Trinity and his exegesis of the First Epistle of John (esp. 1 John 4:8; 16, “God is love”), he finds the solution that love is by its very nature self-reflexive. In loving our neighbors, we of necessity love that love which enables us to do so itself, which is none other than God; love of God and love of neighbor are, accordingly, co-extensive and, ultimately, identical (De trinitate 8.12; In epistulam Iohannis ad Parthos tractatus decem 9.10). Right and perverse love or intention—charity or concupiscence—thus becomes the predominant and even the single criterion of moral evaluation; Augustine’s ethics may in this sense be labeled intentionalist (cf. Mann 1999 on Augustine’s “inner-life ethics”). He keenly insists that each and every action, even if it is externally good and impressive, can be motivated either by a good or an evil intention, by right or perverse love, by charity or pride. This goes for the actions prescribed by the Sermon of the Mount and even for martyrdom (In epistulam Iohannis tractatus decem 8.9, partly relying on 1 Corinthians 13:3). It is therefore impossible to give casuistic rules for external moral behavior. The only thing possible is the general recommendation to “Love and do what you will” (ib. 7.8), i.e., to take care that the inner disposition or intention behind one’s actions is love of God and neighbor and not self-love or pride. It is important not to misunderstand this as moral subjectivism, which Augustine’s ontological and ethical assumptions exclude. He never excuses evil deeds done “with the best intentions” or with a subjectively pure conscience, and he does allow for actions that are always condemnable because they cannot possibly result from love, such as heresy. In a sense, his ideal agent is a successor of the Stoic and Neoplatonic sage, who always acts out of inner virtue or perfect rationality (the latter Augustine replaces with true love) but adapts his outward actions to the external circumstances (cf. Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos 11.200–201 = 59 G Long-Sedley; Diogenes Laertius 7.121; Porphyry, Sententiae 32). Augustine’s intentionalism has, however, the ambivalent implication that, since love and will inevitably belong to the privacy of the mind, the inner motives for a person’s external agency are unknowable to anyone except the agent herself and God. On the one hand, this limits the authority of other people—including those endowed with worldly power or an ecclesiastical office—to pass moral judgments. Augustine repeatedly recommends withholding judgment so as to preserve humility (De civitate dei 1.26; Sermon 30.3–4). On the other hand, Augustine makes our inner motivational and moral life opaque even to ourselves and fully transparent only to God (Confessiones 10.7; In Iohannis evangelium tractatus 32.5). We can never be fully sure about the purity of our intentions, and even if we were, we could not be sure that we will persist in them. All human beings are therefore called to constantly scrutinize the moral status of their inner selves in a prayerful dialogue with God (as it is dramatized in the Confessiones). Such self-scrutiny may well be self-tormenting; the obsession of Western Christianity with inner latent guilt here has its Augustinian roots. The public staging of Augustine’s confession before God in the Confessiones may, among many other things, represent an attempt to remedy the loneliness of Christian self-scrutiny (cf. Confessiones 10.1–7).