Augustine was just in the opposite situation. While in Plato a great aristocratic tradition came to an end, in Augustine a new tradition started. It was, so to speak, a new archaism into which he came, and was brought into it. So immediately he had something which made it possible for him to participate in the new tradition. He had a pagan father and a Christian mother. The pagan father gave him the possibility to participate in paganism – of course, in what was greatest in paganism at that time; what was lowest in it, for him personally, we don’t know – and his Christian mother made it possible for him to enter into another tradition, a new archaism. Thus the simple empirical fact of a man with a pagan father and a Christian mother means almost everything for our understanding of him.
2) He discovered the problem of truth. This was the second step, connected with the fact that he read Cicero’s book “Hortensius”. Here Cicero deals with the question of truth. But this question in Cicero means choosing between the existing ways of truth, between the different philosophies. And Cicero, though a great Roman statesman, answers in terms of a kind of eclectic philosophy, (as I believe every American statesman, if he wrote a book on truth, would answer, showing those elements in philosophy which are most adequate to the political situation in which he finds himself.) So it was truth from a practical point of view. Cicero is not an original philosopher. This was impossible after the catastrophe of Greek philosophy.
Therefore he used, from a pragmatic point of view, the Roman Empire – what enhances good citizenship in the Roman Empire is of philosophical value. And the ideas which enhance are: providence, God, freedom, immortality, rewards, and things like that.
Augustine was in exactly the same situation. But for him it was not the civitas terrenae but the Christian city of God; it was the Christian tradition. So he developed a pragmatic philosophy, with Platonic and other elements, on the basis of the need of the Christian life and not on: the basis of Roman citizenship. But the basic form was very similar – it was pragmatic-eclectic. Augustine is not an original philosopher in the sense in which Plato or the Stoics were. But he is a philosopher in whom the great synthesis between the Old Testament idea of Yahweh and the Parmenidean idea of being, was combined. He is responsible for the communion of Jerusalem and Athens, more than anybody else in the history of the Church.
