The Christian Platonism of ST Augustine: Janet Coleman

CHAPTER 3
The Christian Platonism of St Augustine

Janet Coleman
The writings of St Augustine (AD354-430) exercised a massive

influence not only on the Western literary imagination but also on
the development of medieval scholastic philosophy and theology,
and the emergence of the Western mystical tradition. His doctrines
also became central to the Renaissance and the Reformation. As the
product of the Roman education system of the fourth century, he
was one of a generation that absorbed in a highly eclectic fashion the
themes that had been on the philosophical and theological agenda of
pagan and Christian thinkers for more than four centuries and
which stretched back to pre-Christian Stoicism and Hellenistic
Judaism. During this period a kind of Platonism continued to be
developed roughly contemporaneously with the rise and development
of Christianity. Indeed, the early history of Christianity and the
evolution of Christian asceticism can be described as the story of a
selective incorporation of a range of Platonic insights into a
Christian doctrine that explained the relationship between man and
the created world and man and God.1 But we must be aware of the
eclectic nature of both Christianity and Platonism in this period.
Just as what scholars now call Neoplatonism was not a fixed
quantity, neither was Christianity from its inception to C.AD6OO.
Indeed, the term 'Christian Platonism' for the first 1000 years AD
covers so wide a variety of differences that it is difficult to define it
accurately as a single thing.2 By focusing on Augustine's Platonism,
which was only one kind of Platonically influenced Christian
1
Werner Jaeger, Early Christianity and Greek Paideia (Oxford, 1961).
2
A.H. Armstrong, St Augustine and Christian Platonism (Villanova, 1967), reprinted with
corrections in Augustine, A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. R.A. Markus (New York, 1972), pp.
3~37> P- 3-
27
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The Librarian-Seeley Historical Library, on 05 Dec 2019 at 15:19:43, subject to the
Cambridge
Cambridge Core terms of use, available Books Online © Cambridge University
at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. Press, 2009
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511553806.004
28 JANET GOLEMAN
thought,3 we intend to highlight what, arguably, became the most

influential rendering of the Platonic tradition for the Christian Latin
West.
Augustine, the son of a Christian mother and a pagan father of
humble means, came from a rural hill town in the Latin-speaking
province of Roman North Africa (now Algeria). He was educated
locally to pursue a career which eventually led him to become a
professor of Latin rhetoric in Italy. He learned Greek to a level
sufficient to translate quite technical philosophical texts although he
never mastered Homer and Greek literature. Nor does he seem to
have made a direct study of any Greek text of Plato although such
were available.4 We do not know if Augustine read Cicero's Latin
translation of Plato's Timaeus on which Calcidius had written an
elaborate commentary in the fourth century. In his own writings,
Augustine never reveals which texts of the 'Platonists' he read or
heard discussed, but it is clear that the form of Platonic philosophy
that eventually captured him once he arrived in Italy to pursue his
career, was the 'modern' Neoplatonism of the late third century of
Plotinus and Porphyry. So enduring was their influence on him that
when he finally lay dying at Hippo during the Vandal siege of his city,
his last recorded words were a quotation from Plotinus.5
Augustine experienced a series of four conversions throughout his
turbulent life: first to the philosophy of life expressed by Cicero, then
to the dualist religious sect Manicheism, thirdly to pagan Platonism
and finally to Christianity (386). In his Confessions, Augustine retells,
stage by stage, the intellectual and spiritual journey he had
undertaken throughout his life. He explains here how at first he
thought the shift from Neoplatonism to Christianity to be easy, but
gradually he reinterpreted the move as a painful break with old ways,
a taking of sides and a cavernous divide. At first, however, he wrote
works to demonstrate his optimistic commitment to the kind of
Christian Platonism for which St Paul was only a short step further.
3
We need only mention the variety of types of twelfth-century Platonism that derived not only
from Augustine but from Boethius, Pseudo-Dionysius, Islamic Neoplatonism - principally
from Proclus's Liber de Causis. See M.D. Chenu, La thiologie du douiieme siecle (Paris, 1957),
chapter 5. Also R.A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, 1990), p. xii.
4
Henry Chad wick, Augustine (Oxford, 1986), pp. yf. Augustine benefited from the Latin
translations of Greek Neoplatonists made by Marius Victorinus. See Pierre Hadot, Marius
Victorinus, recherches sur sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris, 1971).
5
C h a d w i c k , Augustine, p . 2 5 .
Cambridge
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511553806.004
The Christian Platonism of St Augustine 29
In these early works we see Augustine's debt to Cicero's Platonism, 6

to that precursor and source of Christian Platonic thinking, the
Hellenistic Jew Philo of Alexandria, 7 to the Greek Fathers Clement of
Alexandria, Origen, the Cappadocians (Basil of Caesarea, Gregory
Nazianzen and Gregory of Nyssa) and to Plotinus and Porphyry. 8
Writing with the hindsight of a convert to Christianity more than
thirteen years after the event, Augustine tells us:
Therefore You brought in my way by means of a certain man - an incredibly

conceited man - some books of the Platonists translated from Greek into
Latin. In them I found, though not in the very words yet the thing itself and
proved by all sorts of reasons. [But not all of Christ was there]. {Confessions,
9
VII. 9)
In Book vm.2 he writes: 'in the Platonists, God and His Word are
everywhere implied'. He tells us that these Platonist books came from
Athens and they spoke of Old Testament history and how the Jews
changed the glory of Thy incorruption into idols and divers images . . . in
fact into that Egyptian food for which Esau had lost his birthright. . . For it
pleased You, O Lord, to take away the reproach of the inferiority from Jacob
so that the elder brother [the Jews] served the younger [the Christians]: and
You have called the Gentiles into Your inheritance. From the Gentiles
indeed I had come to You; and I fixed my mind upon the gold which You
willed that Your people should bring with them from Egypt: for it was Yours
wherever it was. And You had said to the Athenians by Your Apostle [Paul]
that in You we live and move and are, as certain of their own writers had said.
Augustine tells us that when he came to Italy and encountered Bishop
Ambrose of Milan, a Greek reader who absorbed much from Philo,
6
On Cicero's 'platonism', sec Janet Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories, Studies in the
Reconstruction of the Past (Cambridge, 1992), especially chapter 3, pp. 39-62. See Cicero's De
oratore, 1.12 on men gifted with divine eloquence; Tusculan Disputations, 1, pp. xix-xxv on
Plato's authority and on the self identified not with the body but with incorporeal soul.
7
On Philo, sec Henry Chad wick ' Philo', in The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early
Medieval Philosophy, ed. A.H. Armstrong (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 137-57, a n ^ H.A. Wolfson,
Philo, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1947). See also Philo, in ten volumes and two supplementary
volumes, ed. and trans. F.H. Colson, G.H. Whitaker and R. Marcus (London, 1929-62).
8
See Jaeger, Early Christianity and Greek Paideia, pp. 43-4, and in general H. Chad wick,
'Clement of Alexandria' and 'Origen', in Cambridge History, ed. Armstrong, pp. 168-92 and
182-92 for editions of texts. In general, see Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians in the
Mediterranean World from the Second Century AD to the Conversion of Constantine (London, 1986).
Also, Judith Herrin, The Formation of Christendom (Oxford, 1987).
9
Translation of Augustine's Confessions used here: F.J. Sheed (London, 1944). Translations of
other works of Augustine are my own.
Cambridge
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511553806.004
3O JANET GOLEMAN
Origen and Plotinus and then transformed their Platonism to

produce a markedly ascetic image of the Church,10 he did not think
his own ideas on man and the universe that he had absorbed from
Cicero and the Tlatonists' required any change. Some of the themes
Augustine treats from the Christian Neoplatonist agenda of these
early years can be outlined here.11
The world can be seen with human eyes and comprehended by the
human mind as a measured and ordered hierarchy of beings. All
being is good and God is the cause of good, never of evil. God, as the
incorporeal, transcendent source of being, the transcendent One who
is in Himself ineffable and unthinkable, 'known better in not being
known' [De ordine n. 16.44), nonetheless communicates by descent
through all levels of spirit and body, from His unity down to the
multiplicity of matter and non-being, like light unto darkness. The
human soul is created and therefore, is not part of God. Although
fallen it retains some trace of the divine image and form through its
rationality and freedom. It is in exile although immortal and it
follows the hierarchical order to ascend vertically in reverse to its
goal, its true home and origin. The material world is not evil although
it is contrasted with the intelligible world. The sensible world is an
image of the intelligible world which is its exemplar [Contra academicos
in. 17.37: in. 18.40). The sensible, as an image, is therefore like the true
[verisimilem). Therefore, he says that 'whatever is done in this world
through the so-called civil virtues (which virtues are only like-the true
virtues, while the true virtues are unknown to all but the few who are
wise) cannot be called anything more than like-the true'.12 For this
reason, the body's rightful place in the hierarchical cosmos is as an
instrument: its purpose is to enable intellect's work in the rational
order as it is expressed at the lower levels of being. But the body can
also be an obstacle to man's ascent and fulfilment. Evil, as a
corruption of good, is a displacement from right order. Just as order
10
Peter Brown, The Body and Society, Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity
(London, 1989), especially part m: 'Ambrose to Augustine', pp. 339-427.
11
Edward Cranz, 'The Development of Augustine's Ideas on Society before the Donatist
Controversy', Harvard Theological Review, 47 (1954), 255-316 and for a list of early works and
their dates. This is reprinted in Markus (ed.), Augustine, pp. 336-403. Also see R.A. Markus,
Conversion and Disenchantment in Augustine's Spiritual Career (Villanova, 1989). See A.H.
Armstrong, 'Augustine and Christian Platonism' in Augustine, ed. Markus, pp. 3-37.
12
Contra academicos m. 17. 37. Sec also De libero arbitrio, 11, 15-33 and De musica vi. 1. 1, 3.
Standard editions of Augustine's works are Corpus christianorum series latina, Corpus scriptores
ecclesiasticorum latinorum, and, when texts are not available in these, Patrologia latina, edited by
j . P . Migne.
Cambridge
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511553806.004
The Christian Plalonism of St Augustine 31
brings about created being so its contrary, disruption of order, brings
about non-being. And what undergoes corruption tends towards
non-being.13 Hence, sensual delight is distrusted and must be used
rightly, for it is the rational mind, free from sensual slavery through
reason's ordered control, that leads man to God (De libero arbitrio
1.6.15). The ideal life is one of contemplation and a certain
asceticism through which one withdraws from the distraction of
material multiplicity. It is assisted by solitude and liberal studies that
train the mind away from the order of sense, leading the spiritual
mind to its goal within this life. Described here, then, is a certain
paideia of the soul, an education of mind away from the changeable
and corruptible things of the world to its true and natural focus, the
incorporeal truths and God. Liberal studies are the means by which
the soul is educated.14
In this life man is estranged from God, there is a gulf to be overcome
and this can be achieved by a kind of human self-determination
through moral discipline encouraged through the liberal studies of
the classical Greek paideia, an instruction of mind concerning its true
objects.15 Augustine believed that nothing in the material world
(significata) that is external to mind can, in the last resort, be regarded as
the source of its knowledge. Neither the sense data of experience nor
the signs that point to such sense data in language and gesture can
give knowledge without the Interior Teacher who is the source of all
truth and knowledge. This is Christ, dwelling in the mind. But the
soul must begin at the beginning. Man's reason can move 'as it were
by sure steps from things corporeal to things incorporeal' (De musica
vi. 1.1,3). There are stages in cognition that lead to salvation. There is
a ladder of perfection consisting of the seven-fold work of the spirit
which leads to God, beginning with fear and ascending through piety,
fortitude, knowledge, counsel, understanding to wisdom, the supreme
grade of perfection. Wisdom is of the intelligible order, Tor God's
kingdom is the whole world which sense does not know' (Soliloquia
1.3), and 'His law, fixed and unshaken in Him is, as it were,
transcribed into wise souls' (De ordine 11.8.25). This theory of mind's
education from things corporeal to things incorporeal would be the
most influential paradigm for all western theories of knowledge
13
De ordine i. 7. 18; De libero arbitrio 1. 16. 34, 35.
14
These views influenced the Secretum of Petrarch in the fourteenth century. See Colcman,
Ancient and Medieval Memories, pp. 551-4.
15
De sermone Domini in monte, 1. 2 . 9 ; 1. 4 . 1 1 , De quantitate animae 7 6 .
Cambridge
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511553806.004
32 JANET GOLEMAN
during the middle ages until the reintroduction of Aristotle's writings,

translated into Latin, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Just as there is a seven-stage ascent of the soul {De quantitate animae
76; Sermo ccLix.2-3), so too the history of the universe is divided into
six ages with a seventh when the saints and just men of God will enjoy
the sabbath on earth.16 This view would influence all historiography
throughout the medieval period and beyond, the soul's own history
paralleling the history of the universe. The passions can be integrated
by subjection to reason's control and mind or reason is itself subject to
what is above it in the hierarchy, God.17 Ultimately, carnal desire
must and can be tamed rather than eliminated and the consequent
achievement of peace through a right subjection to God's order is the
achievement of perfect wisdom in this life. Hence, man's quest is the
quest of his soul for wisdom and it is achieved by one of two ways:
either by reason guided by a Platonist understanding of the liberal
arts, or by authority, which is Christ and his Ecclesia, which is a
school of instruction. Indeed, the divine authority of Christ is the
highest reason, for Christ is the wisdom of God {De ordine 11.26-7). The
teaching of the Church is Tlatonism for the multitude', 18 addressing
unphilosophical minds in pictorial and figurative ways in order to
guide their conduct with reason.
Man's identity is his contemplative mind and his sense experiences
are merely images of a higher, intelligible world that can be
contemplated by mind when it is divorced from the senses {De trinitate
xiv.4-14; 24-5). The wise man's life is a progressive liberation from
the world of sense, where the soul is called back to the intelligible
world. 'This is the peace which is given on earth to men of good will,
this is the life of the man who has achieved perfect wisdom'.19 In the
world of sense, the soul is blinded by darkness of error and made
forgetful by bodily stains, images that would dominate the writings of
St Bernard in the twelfth century and Petrarch in the fourteenth.
Man must choose freely whether or not to accept right order and he
has in himself and in his power all that is necessary for the right
choices. To choose the proper order of soul is the necessary
prerequisite to proper order in society. It is possible to attain justice,
comprehensible in human terms, through the ordered arrangements
16
De Genesi contra Manichaeos i. 23. 35, De vera religione, passim.
17
De Sermone Domini in monte 1. 2. 9; De vera religione 23, 44; De musica vi. 5. 13; 15. 50.
18
Chad wick, Augustine, p . 25.
19
De sermone Domini in monte 1. 2. 9; Contra academicos m. 19. 42.
Cambridge
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511553806.004
of social living. Justice is the order by which the soul serves God and
dominates none but bestial and corporeal natures, images that would
influence political theory and practice of medieval church and regnum
('state') for centuries. (De musica vi. 15.50)
Augustine's early optimism consisted in the belief that the goal of
human striving was attainable by human effort through rationality
and he describes the apostles as having achieved it in this life.20 The
classical debate, to which Cicero had contributed, over the merits of
the three kinds of life, active, contemplative or mixed, was decided in
favour of an otium liberate (a withdrawal from public affairs to pursue
liberal studies) (De ordine 11.5.14). The life of action is linked with
multiplicity and that of contemplation is linked with unity. The
active life can only be considered the initiating step on the road to the
soul's return for the soul begins life as a pilgrim, far from its home and
seeks to steer itself to the harbour of philosophy,21 images that would
stir the imaginations of Renaissance thinkers. Hence, the main theme
of Augustine's early works as a Christian Platonist is the soul's quest
for wisdom and as a Christian he is certain that he will not depart
from the authority of Christ. As a Neoplatonist he is equally certain
that reason will find in Platonism what is in agreement with
Christianity (Contra academicos in.20.43). Christianity is the one true
philosophy, focusing as it does on the soul and the other, intelligible
world. Augustine moves with ease from the philosophical distinction
between the sensible and the intelligible to the Biblical distinction
between flesh and spirit. Plato, St Paul and Cicero seem to be talking
to one another. He has no difficulty in reconciling Plato with the
Bible, identifying the stages of God's providence in history with the
stages of the Platonist soul's ascent.22 Jewish history is, therefore, read
as an image of the Christian people and the consequence is an outline
of history in terms of universal progress. History is God's gradual
education of the human race (De vera religione).
Because Augustine began his career as an orator and became a
professor of rhetoric it is probably not surprising that he has a theory
of cognition that depends extensively on language. Indeed, much of
the grammatical, logical and rhetorical tradition of antiquity was
concerned with the ways in which language related on the one hand
20
De sermone Domini in monte i. 4. 12; 1. 9, De doctrina Christiana 1. 2 7 - 8 , De libero arbitrio 11. 25. See
M a r k u s , Conversion and Disenchantment, p . 16.
21
De libero arbitrio 11. 38. 5 3 ; De beata vita 1. 1 - 2 .
22
De Genesi contra Manichaeos 1. 23. 35!*., De vera religione, passim.
Cambridge
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511553806.004
34 JANET GOLEMAN
to non-linguistic reality (appearances and experiences) and on the

other, to the way in which human minds think and speak about
appearances and experiences. Augustine's writings introduced later
ages to these ancient concerns and his teaching on language would be
fundamental to medieval monastic and scholastic attitudes to texts
and their interpretation.23 Hence, his teaching on language would be
central to later attitudes to the literary imagination.
In his Soliloquies Augustine speaks of an internal dialogue or
conversation with the self in which the objects of knowledge are the
participants, brought to consciousness through speech. Here the
problem of knowledge is the problem of language as a system of signs.
Augustine's discussion would greatly influence medieval monastic
schools' treatment of divine and human language as signs especially
through his further elaboration in his two early works the De magistro
and the De doctrina Christiana.2* Here he explains there is a cognitive
reality behind words and if we know what the words signify we are
recalling an implicitly known truth which Augustine calls recollection.
This is a modified Platonism because the truth is not innate in man's
mind, for Augustine, but must be learned. The commemorative
function of speech is most important for the Christian because
Augustine believes that through prayer and the reading of the words
of Scripture man's memory is stimulated. Through prayer a man is
reminded of the reality of God whom he addresses. The knowledge of
God is stored away in man's memory and the believer is aided by his
memory of this anterior knowledge when he reads and studies the
Bible. Christ the word acts as a prior, interior teacher and someone
who has no anterior knowledge and memory of God within his mind
cannot understand any meaning in the sacred page. But as St Paul
had said, anyone who seeks God in the good things that are seen can
find him. Men who have no anterior knowledge of God are without
excuse (Rom. 1.19-20). Augustine says that the vast majority of men
require large quantities of human speech to orient them towards God
and stimulate their memories of the interior teacher. But a small
minority do not need to rely on the sensory stimulation provided by
the sight and sound of words because they have access to the
intelligible, acquiring faith through that inward divine speech
achieved through contemplation. Signs signify divine realities,
teaching us nothing, but pointing beyond and causing us to think of
23
See Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories, chapters 1-7, pp. 3-111.
24
Sec Markus, 'Augustine on Signs', in Augustine, cd. Markus, pp. 61-88.
Cambridge
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511553806.004
what is beyond the impression the word, as sign, makes on the senses.
This attitude was fundamental to future monastic lectio divina
(reading of scripture).
Augustine would modify and refine his theory of cognition over the
years but he would always retain his concern to establish a dominant
role for the power of thought in order that it may break through the
surface of appearance and habit, disclosing beyond it the objective,
eternal, immovable structure of the nature of things, of man and of
history, knowable to the contemplative mind alone. As a consequence
he will maintain a Platonist hierarchy in the objects of thought that
runs from a knowledge of temporal things to a knowledge of eternal
objects and it is in the intellectual realm, divorced from all sense
experience, that moral and philosophical truths reside, an intelligible
world of ideas consonant with those of the divine mind. Such moral
and philosophical truths divorced from sense experience were, for
him, the manifestations of God's interior presence in the mind of man
where Christ the word dwells in the human soul as the word of God,
illuminated as the intelligible verbum mentis (word of the mind).
Human speech, be it written or spoken, could bring forth that
immutable truth, a confidence that was not shared by Plato but one
which would inspire literary artists of the future to regard their works
as capable of revealing prophetic truth.
If we were to stop here with the discussion of those early writings
that demonstrate the overwhelming Neoplatonism of Augustine's
early Christian years, we would have presented an Augustine that
was more familiar to the Renaissance than to the Reformation. But
Augustine's thinking did not stand still. Later ages would not read
Augustine's works as having evolved and changed throughout his
turbulent life and for this reason Augustine, like Socrates, would
become all things to all men attracted to some kind of Platonically
influenced Christianity. In fact, during the 390s when Augustine
re-read St Paul, he gradually found it difficult to see how a pagan
rhetor or a Neoplatonist could pass so easily into the ranks of the
Christians.25 His later works therefore argue for a dramatic renunciation
of his past confidence in man's rational and moral capacities to
achieve perfection.26 The ordered cosmos, which he continued to
believe in, was now not open to rational comprehension. It was, like
25
M a r k u s , End of Ancient Christianity, pp. 29, 4 8 - 5 1 .
26
Confessions VII. 21. See Markus, End of Ancient Christianity, pp. 50-6, and Gerald Bonncr,
Augustine of Hippo, Life and Controversies (London, 1963).
Cambridge
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511553806.004
36 JANET GOLEMAN
God's judgements, inscrutable. Likewise, he surrendered his early

confidence in a possible ordering of men's lives, individually or
socially.27 There would be no enlightened ruler to control society with
reason. Human experience and the Christian philosopher's striving
towards felicity now seemed impossible of achievement except
through God's grace. Man simply must believe. He cannot know. Sin
took on a new power in men's lives to the extent that it seemed to
Augustine that man was powerless to free himself without God's
grace. Sin was no longer to be conceived as a disruption of the right
order of the cosmos nor was it an ignorant surrender of reason to
sensuality. The earlier paedeia describing a self-willed and self-
performed perfectionism was rejected. Now good will can only be
brought about in us by God's action. No longer was there a simple
opposition between flesh and spirit, soul and body. Rather, the soul
was to be seen as the battlefield of turbulence and the flesh, now
neutral, became corrupted by the sins of the soul, by its various lusts -
for the body and for domination of other men. There was to be no
victory of mind over body in himself, nor a distinction between the
rational philosophical Christian 'saved by liberal studies' and the
average Christian, saved by the authoritative teaching of the Church
providing 'Plato for the multitude'. Now God alone, not education,
was seen to lead to truth {Confessions vii.20).
In the end there was only one division: between those destined to be
saved and those who are reprobate, the city of God and the earthly
city. The reason for this division was hidden in the inscrutable depths
of God's will but what distinguished them in this life was the object of
their love, be it self or God. If the ordinary Christian was now no
further away from grace than the erudite or the ascetic, then
imperfection is the inescapable condition for all alike here. Mankind
after Adam is a mass of sin. Perfection - that distant goal after life and
history - can only be due to God's will. God chooses His elect on the
basis of His foreknowledge of His determination of their wills.
Reading Neoplatonists with new eyes, Augustine finally insisted that
the gulf between God and man could not be bridged through self
knowledge but could be meditated by grace alone.
Augustine would continue to speak of our ignorance of God's
essence as, nonetheless an informed ignorance, using Porphyrian
language when he speaks of the believer contemplating God as an
27
Markus, Conversion and Disenchantment, pp. 18-23, 36-40. See also Markus, Saeculum, History
and Society in the Theology of St Augustine (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 87-92.
Cambridge
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511553806.004
experience beyond intellection, such things being best known by not
being known. He would still speak of salvation as, in a way, a
deification by degree through participation in God. He would remain
a Christian Neoplatonist to the end.28 But after AD^.400 he would
increasingly seek to draw upon Neoplatonist insights only to serve
Christian doctrine as it had developed in the Latin West of the fourth
and fifth centuries, rather than conforming Christian doctrine to
Neoplatonist expectations. It was the writings of the older Augustine
that would influence the Reformation's model of man.
28
R. Russell, 'Neoplatonism in the De civitate dei\ in Neoplalonism and Early Christian Thought, cd.
HJ. Blumenthal and R.A. Markus (London, 1981), pp. 160-70.
Cambridge
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511553806.004

The Christian Platonism of ST Augustine: Janet Coleman

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Christian Platonism of ST Augustine: Janet Coleman

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

CHAPTER 3

The Christian Platonism of St Augustine

The writings of St Augustine (AD354-430) exercised a massive

thought,3 we intend to highlight what, arguably, became the most

In these early works we see Augustine's debt to Cicero's Platonism, 6

Therefore You brought in my way by means of a certain man - an incredibly

Origen and Plotinus and then transformed their Platonism to

during the middle ages until the reintroduction of Aristotle's writings,

to non-linguistic reality (appearances and experiences) and on the

God's judgements, inscrutable. Likewise, he surrendered his early

You might also like