Plotinus is the last flower of the world as Greek. After him it is the Roman influence that ascends in cult and culture, and its power comes in two flavours: practicality, and legality. Both these, along with Plotinus, and the Judeo-Christian scriptures fuse in the anabatic mind of Augustine, fifth century bishop of Hippo, the last great philosopher and theologian before the crepuscule of the Dark Ages, the father of the theories of original sin, predestination, illuministic spirituality, and, not least, blain on my pre-adolescent mind.
Augustine adopts Plotinus’ revision of Plato and alters it slightly. St John’s Gospel hails Christ the Logos (the thought or word of God). Jewish scripture speaks of God’s spirit hovering above the abyss as creation dawns. By Augustine’s hand Plotinus’ Mind is elevated into the One and made to correspond to the scriptural Logos, and the World Soul is also elevated into the One and made to correspond to the scriptural Spirit of God. The first and second emanations become one with the One, a divine trinity, a tri-unity baptized Being, Knowledge, Love. But, this God is still immutable and pure spirit, although now omniscient and omnipotent. Plotinus’ need for some agent to awaken the soul to its true nature causes Augustine to focus on the need for God to illuminate the mind before man can understand truth and goodness, and on the need for introspection to discern this gift of light. Greek thought stressed the value of theory over practice, intellection as the basis of the moral life. Augustine claimed will, and specifically love as the highest aspect of will, superior to intellection and the proper basis of the moral life. Nevertheless, the spectre of the Greek proclivity to introspection weaves its way throughout Augustine, leaving his vision ambivalent. Plotinus’ discounting of the universe as a field of non-being (a state of lacking, “meta-evil”) causes Augustine to discount the material world, especially anything to which the word “flesh” might apply. Augustine had for a time a less inhibited life before his conversion, and he seems always to drag about a bit of guilt, a bit of distrust for the world. This distrust of the world and human nature are exemplified in his analyses of the story of Adam and Eve, and of an obscure reference by St. Paul regarding divine pre-destination.
Augustine took literally the mythos of Adam and Eve, and taught that as a result of their freely willed disobedience, all human nature had been corrupted, and could escape its propensity toward evil only by the assistance of God. Further, he misread St. Paul and failed to understand that Paul considers not merely a select few, but the entire universe predestined for revaluation, salvation, and divine embrace in the agency of Christ. Thus, for Augustine not only is all humankind at a moral loss except that God intervene, God will intervene only in certain pre-assigned cases. It is a rather morose vision of the God called Love. A degree of this declivity may well reside in Augustine’s guilt. He had, however, other, more tangible enemies ferociously touting positions he deemed to be heretical. He attempted to meet them on their own ground, their terms and terminology. Such polemical activity is usually more offensive than defensive, and tends to produce statements meant to cut off another’s argumentation more then to define one’s own boundaries. Furthermore, Augustine lived at the end of times. His final days were witness to the Vandals destroying the Roman hold on northern Africa. Upon the horizon stood the fall of Rome itself. Such ominous events imbue their psychic potencies across all boundaries. Yet, Augustine was not a man wanting for practicality or warmth, for this is the man who can summarize moral action with the dictum “Love God and do as you will”, and encapsulate the meaning of Christianity by presenting the consecrated bread to the communicant saying “Body of Christ, behold thyself”.
Fundamentally, Augustine needed to reconcile Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christian theology. Given this, it is not to be unexpected that he is not always consistent, bequeathing us a patois of yearnful spirituality and farraginous philosophy. He, like so many others, treated scripture and philosophy as cognizant equals, not recognizing that beyond their heuristic and speculative roots, philosophy is rational and investigative in its speculation, and scripture spiritual and submissive in its envisioning. It is muchly because of Augustine’s work and the reverence with which it was so long (and is still) accorded that Christian theology and spirituality hobble, gyved in the irons of Plato’s god and trying ever to manifest Christ’s loving father.