In De trinitate X Augustine seeks to discover the nature of mind (mens). As if recalling Plato’s Paradox of Inquiry, he wonders how such a search can be coherently understood. Rejecting the idea that the mind knows itself only indirectly, or partially, or by description, he insists that nothing is so present to the mind as itself. Yet it is open to the mind to perfect its knowledge of itself by coming to realize that its nature is to be only what it is certain that it is.

Augustine devoted two treatises to the topic of lying, De Mendacio and Contra Mendacium ad Consentium. The treatises raise interesting questions about whatlying is while defending the thesis that all lies are sinful. The first part of this essay offers an interpretation of Augustine’s attempts at definition. The second part exanlines his argunlents for the sinfulness of lying used to trap heretics and for the more general thesis that all lying is sinful.

Augustine defends three claims about the passions: (1) The Stoic position differs only verbally from the Platonic-Aristotelian position. (2) The Stoic positionis wrong and the Platonic-Aristotelian position is right. (3) The will is engaged in the different passions; indeed the different passions are different expressionsof the will. The first two claims, properly understood, are defensible. But the most plausible versions of them give us good reason to doubt the third claim.

The paper begins by describing two episodes of personal grief recounted by Augustine in the Confessions, that at the death of an unnamed friend and thatat the death of his mother, Monica. It is argued that Augustine intended to show that the earlier fried, and an early phase of his grief for his mother, were sinful. However, contrary to arecent account of Augustine's grief, it is argued (by an examination of the later phase of his grief for his mother) that Augustine does not hold that it is wrong to grieve at the death of a loved one, provided that one grieves for the right reason.