The City of God

In this book, Augustine will take on the “physical” dimension of Roman religion, a dicier proposition than addressing the “mythic” or “civic” aspects: “we shall have to cross swords not with the man in the street, but with philosophers; and that name means they profess to be ‘lovers of wisdom’” (298). Taken rightly—since God is wisdom—this should mean that a philosopher is a lover of God; Augustine is afraid that this is not always the case. His argument will be with those philosophers who agree about the existence of divinity, but who retain a polytheistic rather than monotheistic belief.

Augustine gives a brief overview of the development of Greek philosophy up to Socrates, who he sees as the first philosopher to work toward moral goodness. Socrates left his interest in the summum bonum (the highest or final Good) to his followers, who veered off in various unhelpful directions with it: the idea, for instance, that the highest good was pleasure or virtue. But Plato, the wisest of Socrates’s disciples, had better ideas. Augustine sees him as uniting the active, practical wisdom of Socrates with the contemplative, intellectual style of Pythagoras. He also introduced the division of philosophy into moral (to do with behavior), natural (to do with theorizing), and rational (to do with discernment), which correspond to the roles of God as “the cause of existence, the principle of reason, and the rule of life” (304).