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St. Ambrose and Plotinus
On many points, Manichaeanism merely continued Gnosticism, but it promised demonstrations. This is what attracted Saint Augustine.7 But the problem of evil obsessed him as well: "I was still trying to discover the origin of evil, and I could find no solution."8 And he is haunted by the idea of death.
"[These were the thoughts which I turned over and over in my unhappy mind,] and my anxiety was all the more galling for the fear that death might come before I had found the truth."9 Greek in his need for coherence, Christian in the anxieties of his sensitivity, for a long time he remained on the periphery of Christianity.
It was both the allegorical method of Saint Ambrose and Neoplatonic thought that convinced Saint Augustine. But at the same time they did not persuade him. The conversion was delayed. From this it appeared to him that above all the solution was not in knowledge, that the way out of his doubts and his disgust for the flesh was not through intellectual escapism, but through a full awareness of his depravity and his misery.
To love these possessions that carried him so low: grace would raise him high above them. Saint Augustine found himself therefore at the crossroads of the influences that we are here attempting to determine. But what is the precise extent of these influences? This is what must be defined.
What Saint Augustine demanded beside faith was truth, and beside dogmas, metaphysics. And through Augustine, Christianity itself demanded it. But if one moment he adopts Neoplatonism, this was in order soon to transfigure it. And through Augustine, Christianity itself demanded it.10 Our task is to clarify the meaning of this transfiguration.
As we have seen, Plotinus provides Saint Augustine with a doctrine of the intermediate word and, what is more, a solution to the problem of evil. The hypostasized intelligence actually clarifies the destiny of Christ as the word of God. "We have learned from a divine source that the Son of God is none other than the Wisdom of God–and most certainly the Son of God is God . . . but what do you think the wisdom of God is if not truth. And indeed, it has been said: I am the truth" (De Beata Vita, ch. IV, no. 34, P.L.I. 32, col. 975).
As for evil, Plotinianism teaches Augustine that it is tied to matter and that its reality is entirely negative (Conf. VII, 12, VIII, 13). And by this all Saint Augustine's doubts seem to have vanished. But for all that, conversion did not come.
There is this curiosity about the author of the Confessions, namely, that his experience remains the perpetual reference for his intellectual pursuits. Satisfied but unconvinced, he himself remarks that it is the Incarnation and its humility that Neoplatonism has been unable to offer to him. Only after having understood this did an outburst of tears and joy come to deliver him in the garden of his home. It was virtually a physical conversion, so total that Saint Augustine moves progressively toward renouncing all that was his life and to consecrating himself to God.
It is therefore this place, given to Christ and the Incarnation in Christianity's originality, that one must note in Augustine. These are the formulas and themes that he asked of Neoplatonism. The figure of Jesus and the problem of Redemption will transfigure everything. It is this conjunction of Greek themes and Christian dogmas that we must attempt to examine in a few points of Augustine's doctrine.
