Augustinian Studies 33:1 (2002) 79–90

Augustine’s Inner Self

John Peter Kenney

Saint Michael’s College

The discovery of invention is a trope of post-modern times. Everywhere

we discern intellectual construction in our predecessors, efforts to build mean-
ing and to invent order. Future scholars will doubtless reflect on our current
predisposition towards invention, and will perhaps one day offer theories to
account for this preoccupation.
In a substantial and provocative new book, Phillip Cary has contributed to
this genre in reference to Augustine. His work is entitled Augustine’s Inven-
tion of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist.1 His thesis is that
the idea of a private inner self is something that Augustine invented in the
strong sense, that is, it is an idea that he came up with and did not just dis-
cover in antecedent sources and then embellish. As such, Augustine was
attempting to solve a problem in later pagan Platonism—the nature and origin
of the individual self—and was offering his own distinctively Christian solution.
Cary has invited responses to his position, in an effort to catalyze renewed
discussion of the issue; this paper is an acceptance of that invitation. It begins
with a brief survey of the scholarly terrain and then lays out Cary’s argument
in some detail. Since Plotinus is pivotal to the story that Cary presents, dis-
cussion turns next to the nature of the self in Plotinus. My argument is that
matters are more complex in the Enneads than Cary represents them, and that
the overall account will accordingly require modification. The paper concludes
with a sketch of what that new story might look like, along with some obser-
vations on current tendencies in Augustinian scholarship.

1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000

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In many respects, this subject has been familiar territory since Charles
Taylor’s Sources of the Self. Taylor stressed Augustine’s move to the subject
and his making interiority central to his thought. The self-reflexive presence
of mens, its self-sufficiency and immediacy, these all became the corner-
stones of Augustinianism in subsequent Western philosophy according to this
account. In Taylor’s historical narrative, Augustine is the antique mediator
between Plato and Descartes. Cary represents his own reading as a move
beyond Taylor, yet very much rooted in what we might call Taylor’s modern-
ist account of Augustine. Yet for Cary, more than just interiority and subjectivity
are involved in Augustine, more than just the self’s privileged access to its
own interior mental states. The key move for Augustine is the addition of
privacy to interiority: the special privacy of the inner self. Augustine under-
stands the self not just to be a mental subject, but also to be alone in its
interior space. Cary considers this to be an Augustinian development from the
Plotinian doctrine of psychic interiority. Thus Augustine should be read as
engaging in a deepening of Platonic interiority. This general approach to interi-
ority in Augustine is shared by a number of other recent scholars, including
Brian Stock and Stephen Menn,2 as well as the late and lamented R. J. O’Connell,
whose work Cary quite explicitly invokes, along with Taylor’s, as founda-
tional to his own project.
It bears mention that this treatment of Augustine as a novel successor to
Plato or Plotinus and as an antecedent to Descartes is not currently well
received by some, most notably John Milbank. Milbank regards this line of
analysis stemming from Taylor to be misguided. As Milbank says: 3
What must be argued . . . against Charles Taylor and others, is that
Augustine’s use of the vocabulary of inwardness is not at all a deepening of
Platonic interiority, but something much more like its subversion.
The key to Augustine’s interior self is not the closed, private, inner individu-
ality that subsequently became a basis of the modern Cartesian self. Rather,
the interior self is always to be understood as incomplete and other-directed.
Milbank sees Augustine’s texts as articulating an inwardness that “involves

2. Brian Stock, Augustine The Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), and
Stephen Menn, Descartes and Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
3. John Milbank, “Sacred Triads: Augustine and the Indo-European Soul,” Modern Theology,
13.1997, 465.

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remaining within our createdness and not imaging that some psychic aspect
of ourselves is really part of an eternal substance.” 4
This is a centrally important dispute, and we will return to it briefly at the
end of this paper. But I want, at the outset, to underscore that Cary’s reading
of the Augustinian self is based on the modernist tradition of Taylor, and thus
centers on Augustine’s development of antecedent Platonist conceptions of
the self. Since the purpose of this paper is to reflect on the Cary thesis, I will
follow his exegetical lead and concentrate on the question of the Augustinian
departure from Plotinian interiority, reserving the larger issue of method until
the last section.
Cary’s principal thesis is that Augustine invented the idea of a private inner
self out of the earlier Plotinian idea of an inner but still public self. The basic
claim is that the intelligible self in Plotinus is impersonal; what Augustine does is
personalize and spatially privatize the Plotinian soul. Cary recognizes that it is
impossible to prove a universal, contingent negation, so he eschews the stron-
gest version of the thesis—that no one ever thought of the idea of a private self
before Augustine. He argues instead for the more modest claim that Augustine
deepened and modified the Plotinian notion of the interior self. Not surprisingly,
this development is represented as occurring in the Cassiciacum dialogues, esp.
the Soliloquies, and definitively, in the Confessions. Quoting from Cary:5
Augustine’s problem is how to locate God within the soul, without affirming
the divinity of the soul. He wants (like Plotinus) to find the divine within the
self, while affirming (as an orthodox Christian) that the divine is wholly
other than the self. He solves this problem by locating God not only within
the soul but above it (as its Creator) thus modifying Plotinus’ turn “into the
inside” into a movement in then up—first entering within the soul and then
looking above it.
Cary says that Augustine develops a theological movement of the soul:
first into itself, then up above itself to God. The contrast is between the
Plotinian “in alone” and the Augustinian “in then up.” The Plotinian soul goes
into itself to find the god within, while the Augustinian soul goes into itself to
find the God that is other than the self, above and outside it.

4. Milbank, 465. A similar line was argued in an earlier article by Susan Mennel, “Augustine’s ‘I’:
The ‘Knowing Subject’ and the ‘Self’,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1994): 291–324.
See especially p. 324. There is a good review of this entire subject in the paper by Wayne J.
Hankey, “Between and Beyond Augustine and Descartes: More than a Source of the Self.”
Augustinian Studies, 32,1 (2001): 65–88.
5. Page 140.

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Central to Cary’s invention thesis about the Augustinian self is the Plotinian
soul and its relationship to the intelligibles, the noetic cosmos or nous. Cary
emphasizes that Plotinus was influenced by Alexander of Aphrodisias, the
hallmark of whose work was the identity theory of intellectual knowledge. On
this theory, “the soul is the form it knows.” Alexander says that the soul, in its
fully actualized state of intellectual knowledge (noesis) is identical to what-
ever intelligible form it is contemplating. In its Plotinian version, this
epistemological theory suggests that there is no real difference between the
rational soul and the intelligibles that it contemplates, to the extent that it is
exercising its capacity for rational theoria. The rational soul is potentially
identical to all forms and actually identical to any form it is contemplating.
Hence knowing forms amounts to establishing identity with the eternal, with
the divine, with nous. So we can go into the intellect and re-assert our identity
with the intelligibles.
Cary has identified here one significant theme in Plotinus’s treatment of
contemplation. Moreover, we know that Plotinus was famous among ancient
Platonists for several innovations that have a direct bearing on the nature of
interiority. The first is the doctrine “that the intelligibles are not outside the
intellect.” Rather they are the divine intellect, constituting a collective
monadology. Each form is a self-thinking mind making up a collective nexus
which is nous, the divine intellect. Plotinus held this position in sharp contrast
to the conservative Platonism of Atticus, Longinus, and the Athenian school,
whose views were closer to the paradigmatism of the Timaeus, according to
which the paradigms and the demiurge were to be kept distinct. But Plotinus’s
position was also quite different from Middle Platonists like Alcinous or
Neopythagoreans like Numenius, who accepted the theory that the intelligibles
could not be distinct from the intellect, but interpreted that notion as entailing
that the forms were thoughts within a divine mind. 6
What matters for Cary’s thesis is the impersonal implication of interiority:
going into the self in contemplation of the forms seems to occasion access
not to a private inner self, but to a realm of universals. Cary points out that
this corollary is further supported by another Plotinian innovation, the doc-
trine “that the soul does not descend entire.” Plotinus and his school were
unique among ancient Platonists in holding that the soul does not fully de-
scend or fall into the lower world. So the higher part of the soul, the noetic

6. John Peter Kenney, Mystical Monotheism: A Study in Ancient Platonic Theology (Hanover and
London: Brown University Press, 1991).

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self, is always contemplating the intelligibles, and is, therefore, eternally asso-
ciated with the forms it contemplates. This is the undescended aspect of the
self. Hence our true self is always present to the divine.
This is the key move for Cary:7
In obedience to the divine command “know thyself,” the Plotinian soul turns
to see not a private inner space but the intelligible world.
Hence in this earliest version of Western inwardness the inward turn moves
from lower to higher, from mortal to divine, from perishable to eternal, and the
inner space is not a private realm but the intelligible world, the Mind of God.
On this reading of Plotinus, the fall, the act of tolma or audacity generates
the phenomenon of separation and individuality. Particular souls are, therefore,
not aboriginal, for, if souls had never fallen, there would have been no principal
of individuation to separate them from the intelligibles and from each other.
Difference or otherness—heterogeneity—is the curse now fully expressed in
temporal and spatial embodiment. When the soul turns, however, within itself, it
has the power to reverse this differentiation and alienation. Cary argues that this
inward turn is not really a move into a private self that is being reclaimed:8
When the soul does turn inward, therefore, it gazes not at a private space,
but at the one intelligible world that is common to all; and likewise when the
soul is united to the core and center of its own being, it is united to the core
and center of all things.
So, interiority is the source of salvation for the fallen self, but at the expense
of its individuality.
Cary reminds us that Plotinus was the only great philosopher that Augustine
studied in any depth. Cary is very much in the O’Connell camp in seeing a
long, rich, and sustained engagement with Plotinus as a hallmark of Augustine’s
thought. He is quite explicit in viewing Augustine as a Christian Platonist who
addresses the problem of the self with a cogent theory that rivals Plotinus’s
and advances beyond it. 9
In contrast to Plotinus, the inner space of the Augustinian soul is not divine
but is beneath God, so that turning into the inside is not all there is to
finding God. We must not only turn inward but look upward, because God is
not only within the soul but also above it. In the interval between the turn-
ing in and looking up one finds oneself in a new place, never before conceived:

7. Cary, 25.
8. Cary, 29.
9. Cary, 39.

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an inner space proper to the soul, different from the intelligible world in the
Mind of God. The soul becomes, as it were, its own dimension—a whole
realm of being waiting to be entered and explored.
What this suggests is twofold. First, Augustine believes that if we can turn
to the highest and best part of ourselves, our inner most self, we still find only
our own self. Moreover, there is no immediate access to the divine there, only
an intense sense of absence and distance.
On Cary’s reading, the soul in Augustine is created by God, but falls, and
so acquires its own private space, separate from others selves. Privacy is not
a natural aspect of the created soul, but is the result of the fall and the natural
opacity that fallen embodiment interposes between souls. “Without sin there
would be no separation of souls and therefore no inner privacy.”10 On this
reading, if there were no fall, we might have had bodies, but we would not
have had inner privacy.
Allow me to give one final long quote to wrap up Cary’s position.11
Since the mature Augustine has no immutable part of the soul to anchor the
fallen soul in eternity, the unfallen state of the soul must be an occurrence in
time—more precisely, at the beginning and end of time, that is, when all
souls were one in Adam (or, as Augustine occasionally says, when we all
were that one man) and when souls in the Heavenly City are united in the
mutual consent of charity, seeing clearly into each other, no thoughts hid-
den by the opacity of fallen bodies. Bodies indeed we shall have in the end,
but they shall be heavenly and spiritual rather than fallen and mortal, so that
[quoting from De Genesi contra Manichaeos] “in the transparency and sim-
plicity of heavenly bodies I do not think any motion of the mind shall be
hidden.” The privacy of the inner self is thus a temporary phenomenon, not
a necessary feature of the inner self but strictly a consequence of the Fall, a
result of ignorance and discord that divides soul from soul in our present
state of sin and punishment. The opacity of our fallen bodies is a result of
this fundamental division of souls rather than a cause of it; hence when
souls are fully blessed, no longer divided by conflicting, evil wills, bodies
will no longer serve to divide one soul from another, and the inner world will
not be private. Our inmost selves will be open to each other’s gaze, as they
were always meant to be.
Such is Cary’s understanding of Augustine’s overall position on privacy, inte-
riority, and individuation.

10. Cary, 117.

11. Cary, 122.

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Cary’s interpretation of the salience of Augustine rests on the central idea

that Augustine’s private inner self is the intensification and modification of the
Plotinian self. But, even if we concede that this general approach is reason-
able, there are serious issues that emerge. The principal question is whether the
self in Plotinus has been properly characterized by underscoring the impersonal
aspect of noesis. Here I have serious doubts, based on the view that the self is
much more complex in Plotinus than this account would suggest. Let me now
sketch out an alternative model of the inner self that Augustine discovered in
the libri Platonicorum; one which will recover the private, personal voice that
is the real key to Augustine’s departure from Plotinus.
There are three levels of the soul to be found in the Enneads:
1. the temporal/ descended/ embodied soul
2. the intelligible soul
3. the unitive/erotic soul
The embodied soul is the seat of our daily consciousness, enmeshed in time
and the exigencies of bodily existence. But the intelligible or higher soul is the
undescended portion of the self which has not suffered this fate. Always
engaged in contemplation, it remains within the inner realm of the intelligibles.
The unitive soul is the soul as it turns toward the One, manifesting an “aware-
ness” (parousia) beyond intellection. Here we discover the self in the One, the
alone in the alone.12
It is important to note that all these levels of psyche are levels of the per-
sonal self—at least in an attenuated sense. The intelligible soul is indeed part
of the noetic cosmos and deeply rooted there, but as a part within a larger
whole, an individual within an aggregate. The contemplative self is thus not
lost or absorbed when it engages in noesis, and, when it is united to the core
of all things in nous, it does not lose its identity, but rather recovers its true
identity in association with all other real beings.13 In emphasizing Alexander of
Aphodisias and his influence on Plotinus, Cary has lost sight of a critical
aspect of psychic individuality in the Enneads. He has constructed an account
of the inner self that assumes that there is no individuality to be found there in
the higher or intelligible world. But Plotinus is acutely aware throughout the

12. VI.9.11, 51. Cf. VI.7.35 discusses the “nous in love” in reference to the Symposium, and V.5.4.
13. On the recovery of the truest self in the intelligible world and in the One: J. P. Kenney,
“Mysticism and Contemplation in the Enneads,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly,
vol. 71, no. 3 (1997).

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Enneads that the foundation of our grosser, embodied self lies in the intelli-
gible self, whose individuation is realized in a different fashion. This aspect of
Plotinian thought has been characterized by some modern commentators as
the theory of “forms of individuals,” the notion that there is a form corre-
sponding to each human person. 14 It is this individual or personal form that
undergoes reincarnation in separate bodies at different times. Neglecting this
point leaves Plotinus as a formalist on the higher, inner self.
But there is an alternative explanation of the relation of Augustine to Plotinus
in reference to the private, inner self. It centers on what might be called the
“cursive self.” Plotinus often speaks of the soul as if we have a choice of
where we want to put down our cursor and choose from the menu of levels
of the self iterated above. This voice is very important in the Enneads, repre-
senting the soteriological hopes of the Platonic religion. Frequently Plotinus
tells us that “we” have certain options. In doing so, he is relying both upon his
tripartite ontology of the self and upon our ability to decide at which level of
reality we wish to abide. It is up to us alone to locate ourselves in one of these
aspects. This peregrine voice is dominant in the protreptical passages of the
Enneads, exhorting us to choose the best and highest aspect of ourselves and
reminding us of our true but transcendent heritage.
The importance of this additional aspect of the self, or perhaps one should
say “meta-self,” is considerable, since it grounds the moral force of Plotinus’s
philosophy. The spiritual drama of the Enneads results from this sense of
personal movement among the underlying aspects of the soul. It is this “cur-
sive self,” and the sense of moral privacy that accompanies it, to which
Augustine was especially alert. This element in the Enneads indicates quite
clearly that Plotinus did not ignore the private, personal self, although it emerges
in ways that are subtle and nuanced. Some of the most moving passages in
the Enneads depend upon it.
A good example is of this ability of the self to choose its level among the
aspects of soul is found at Ennead V.3.—a late treatise.15 Here Plotinus tells us
that we live a divided life, indeed, multiple lives. Yet we have the choice of
where we wish to center ourselves. The passage is characteristic of this odd
sense of the “cursive self” in the Enneads. Here Plotinus is inviting us to recover
the intellective soul, or, absent that, to find some level from which to ascend.

14. On the theory of forms of individuals and its implications for Plotinus’s realism see Kenney
1991, 124.
15. Ennead V.3.9, 20 ff. Translations are taken from the Loeb edition of A. H. Armstrong.

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And soul must draw conclusions about what Intellect is like, starting its
investigations from itself, but Intellect knows itself without drawing conclu-
sions about itself; for it is always present to itself, but we are only so when
we attain to it; for our life is divided and we have many lives, but Intellect
has no need of another life or other lives, but the lives which it gives, it gives
to others, not to itself; for it has no need of the worse, nor does it give itself
the less when it has the all, nor the traces of reality when it has the primary
realities, or rather does not have them, but is them itself. But if someone is
unable to grasp this kind of soul which thinks purely, let him take the soul
which forms opinions, and then ascend from this. But if he cannot even do
this, let him take sense-perception which acquires the forms in broader ex-
tension and sense-perception by itself with its powers which is already in
the forms. But if someone wants to, let him descend to the generative soul
and go right on to what it makes, and then ascend from there, from the
ultimate forms to the forms which are ultimate in the opposite sense, or,
rather, to the primary forms.
This text exhibits the personal self and its dilemma of options. The indi-
vidual self moves over a range of its own “lives.” It is clearly a private self
which is alone making decisions, not a universal self dissolved in the imper-
sonal world of the intelligibles. Nor is it simply the self that emerges from
embodiment that is under discussion here, yoked to the body and sense per-
ception. This is the characterization of the personal and private self—the self
as a metaphysical pilgrim—that Cary’s account misses.
Nor is this a fugitive conception, unimportant in the scheme of things. For
critical moments in Plotinian theology are often articulated in terms of this
pilgrim self. A case in point is the remarkable description of the soul’s recog-
nition of its fall in V.1:16
What is it, then, which made the souls forget their father, God, and be igno-
rant of themselves and him, even though they are parts which come from his
higher world and altogether belong to it? The beginning of evil for them was
audacity and coming to birth and the first otherness and the wishing to
belong to themselves. Since they were clearly delighted with their own inde-
pendence, and made great use of self-movement, running the opposite course
and getting as far away as possible, they were ignorant even that they them-
selves came from that world.
The self’s ability to choose its place in reality is here given great weight. It
has the ability to forget its origins and to descend by its own decision and thus
to exacerbate its individuality. Notice that there must be some sort of “higher”

16. V.1.1,1–9.

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individuality that grounds this choice. This is the same conception as that
found in V.3.9—a personal self that can determine how much difference or
otherness it wishes to acquire, how much it wishes to leave its place in the
composite unity of the intelligible world. Notice too that the true self is a part
of the father’s transcendent world and really belongs there. But where it chooses
to be is up to its own private decision.17
There is companion passage from another early treatise that also exhibits this
sense of the “cursive self”—VI.9.3.18 Here we find an unusual expression of the
self’s fears at ascending to the unfamiliar level of the One, lacking as the One
does any finite specification of its nature.
What then could the One be, and what nature could it have? There is noth-
ing surprising in its being difficult to say, when it is not even easy to say
what Being or Form is; but we do have a knowledge based upon the Forms.
But in proportion as the soul goes towards the formless, since it is utterly
unable to comprehend it because it is not delimited and, so to speak, stamped
by a richly varied stamp, it slides away and is afraid that it may have nothing
at all. Therefore it gets tired of this sort of thing, and often gladly comes
down and falls away from all this, till it comes to the perceptible and rests
there as if on solid ground; just as sight when it gets tired of small objects is
glad to come upon big ones.
There is a deep spiritual poignancy in this passage, indicative of the anxi-
ety that the self has with efforts to return to its original source. This is the
personal voice of the private self in Plotinus, fraught with the perils of ethical
choices, which are also decisions of metaphysical location. Far from being
devoid of the private and the personal, the Enneads chart their own special
sense of the spiritual mobility and ontological ambiguity of the private self.
My argument, then, is that Cary’s contrast between Plotinian interiority,
which is public, and Augustinian inwardness, which is personal and private,
is just not adequate. There are many senses of the self in Plotinus, and several
different aspects of personal individuation and privacy. Most importantly,
Plotinus speaks in these passages as if there is a private self that can choose
upon which spiritual level it intends to live. This is the sense of the self that
was crucial to Augustine, although he completely revises its nature and its
scope. He also added a dimension of inner spatiality, which Plotinus carefully

17. Admittedly, this passage refers to souls in the plural, suggesting a corporate fall. But that usage
does not obviate the personal character of the individual choices involved.
18. VI.9.3,1-11.

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avoided, given his sensitivity to the importation of spatial and temporal images
into metaphysical reflection. This inner spatiality and the associated notion of
vast expanses in the palaces of the memory are distinctively Augustinian im-
ages. They constitute the characteristic models of the inner self in Augustine
and are different from Plotinus. But this only underscores the basic insight that
Augustine shares with Plotinus—that there is a dimension of the self which is
private and which is the seat of our ability as humans to exercise moral choices
of great spiritual significance.
Two points are apposite in closing. The first concerns Cary’s intentions in
telling this tale of Augustinian interiority and the invention of the private
self. Cary is strongly opposed theologically to Augustine’s effort to find God
within the soul. He views interiority as the wrong direction to find the Chris-
tian God, and considers this move as an impediment in the recognition of the
flesh of Christ. He suggests that, as an “orthodox Christian” in the Reformed
tradition, he is compelled to reject Augustinian interiority. 19 These are deep
matters that extend well beyond the range of this paper into the recesses of
crypto-Barthian theology and its continuing appeal among some contempo-
rary American Protestants. But it warrants mention here because it is attested
by Cary as the basis for his misease with Augustinian interiority and what
might be called the “contemplative Christianity” that it engendered. Those
schooled in this Augustinian tradition, especially within Roman Catholicism,
may well be perplexed by Cary’s insistence on an exclusive disjunction be-
tween the inner and outer paths to God.
A larger, historical point follows from this question of interiority and
Augustine’s emphasis upon it—one that Cary misses in his contemporary re-
jection of this theological vector. Late antiquity saw the emergence of
sophisticated accounts of divine transcendence and their widespread diffusion
and adoption. The great cultural shift to monotheism in the period was also a
movement towards accepting a level of reality both independent of space and
time, and superior to that realm. As Augustine tells us in Confessions 7, this is
what so excited him about the libri Platonicorum. The same motivation seems
to have been at work in Ambrose, Victorinus, and the Cappadocians. They were
all taken with transcendentalism, and were part of the post-Nicene emergence
of a Christian orthodoxy which rejected the various forms of materialism that

19. See pp. x–xi and 140–145. Being more orthodox than Augustine seems rather like Congress-
man Phil Crane’s efforts to be more conservative than Ronald Reagan in the Presidential
primaries of 1980—there is not much room out there.

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were still current in the late antique world. In Augustine’s case, he saw the
Platonists as part of a larger transcendentalist movement against materialism,
especially Manicheanism. Thus one can discern a coalescence of Platonism and
orthodox Christianity in the period against a variety of materialisms: Stoic,
Manichean, even orthodox Christian, such as Tertullian. Mention of Tertullian
should remind us as well of old alliance of apocalyticism and materialism, one
which the great post-Nicene churchmen sought to dislodge with their orthodox
transcendentalism. Interiority was the key vector in this search for transcendence.
That is what Augustine tells at Confessions 7.10.16—when he is admonished to
return into himself in order to find a transcendent God. Not a God out in the
heavens, but a God outside space and time. Only after discovering immaterial
truth within can he discern God’s invisible nature understood “through the things
which are made.”20 Interiority and transcendence are tightly linked, therefore, from
a historical standpoint. They became central to the normative self-definition of
Catholic Christianity, and to the larger cultural shift to monotheism. It is this his-
torical convergence, of ancient orthodoxy and classical transcendentalism, that is
entirely lost in Cary’s account.
In making this point, I do not want to ignore Milbank’s insistence on the
Christian salience of Augustine. For too long we have tended to see Augustine
as a “Christian Platonist”—to use Cary’s subtitle, as someone presenting a Chris-
tian variation on Platonism. This seems to be at the root of Cary’s concerns
about Augustine. Yet this is a self-inflicted hermeneutical wound, one that is
the result of an older reading of Augustine that sought to emphasize his Plotinian
sources. That approach was imbedded in several modern cultural dynamics, in-
cluding a preference for classical antecedents of ancient Christian thought. To
move beyond such issues, we need to be much clearer on the specifically Chris-
tian transcendentalism of Augustine—clarifying the distinctive and substantive
departure of Augustine from Plotinus, charting the separate Platonist and Au-
gustinian theologies. Only then will we be free from the “Christian Platonism”
of Augustine.21

20. 7.20. 26; cf. Romans 1:20.

21. This paper was read at the annual meeting of the North American Patristics Society in May,
2001. My thanks to the participants on that occasion for their comments

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