In each case, Augustine’s criticism is designed to show how praise of pagan virtue, of courage, modesty, justice, and so on, in fact expresses moral collapse. But it’s a transparent trick, cheap and easy. We’ve seen it before. Reduce a virtue to its semblance and then decry this counterfeit perfection and resent its unmerited praise. Cast its friends among the morally lost, its critics among the elect, and then propose an authentic alternative, not a vice clothed in virtue’s garb, but a real perfection. Augustine resorts to this trick against his own ambivalence about all human virtue, even the best of which he considers morally ambiguous, and it is his critical ambitions that get the best of him.78