Augustine and the Philosophers

Because of the immensity of Augustine’s corpus and the complex intellectual patrimony that informs it, attempts to place him within the history of philosophical traditions are often partial and in need of supplementation. In treating below of Augustine’s engagement with Aristotelianism, Middle Platonism, Neoplatonism, and Stoicism, I shall be drawing attention to particular topics, lexical points, and philosophical arguments that have not received much attention in the literature up to this point, despite their centrality to Augustine’s own philosophical interests. Discovery of the new philosophical material I present here is possible thanks to the use of a method only recently beginning to gain currency: that of looking for philosophical arguments and developments in Augustine’s sermons and other exegetical texts (see e.g. Atkins and Dodaro 2001: xi–xii; Byers 2003: 433–4). In the past, philosophical scholarship on Augustine has treated the genre of a text as indicative of its discipline, an approach that has resulted in a fairly strict separation of philosophical research from rhetorical, “theological,” or “pastoral” texts (this approach relies on methodological assumptions more appropriate to medieval scholasticism than to Augustine). In contrast, the alternative “integrative” method employed here yields a more complete picture of Augustine’s relationship to various philosophical traditions. The reliability of this method is clear from the fact that its results cohere with what Augustine says on the same topics in his other, more systematic or straightforwardly philosophical works, as we shall see below. Thus the new claims here do not concern whom Augustine read (Plotinus in the translation of Victorinus or someone of similar interests and abilities, Apuleius, Cicero, Varro, Gellius, and Seneca), but rather to what degree he assimilated what he read. We turn first to what is perhaps the most controversial question, that of Augustine’s Aristotelianism.