The Confessions of Augustine (354 - 430) show us, more clearly than any other literary work of late antiquity, what it was like to approach Christianity through the outlook of Greek philosophy, and more generally from the literary and cultural background of the later Roman Empire.

Augustine was born in an empire that officially accepted Christianity, but where traditional religion and non-Christian cults and philosophies retained much of their influence. The official Catholic Church, then as now, did not seem to have much to offer to an educated, curious, and intense person such as Augustine. Compared with the zealous Donatist schismatics (who disavowed clergy who had shown weakness in persecutions) or the sophisticated Manichean elite (to be discussed shortly), the body of Catholics seemed lazy and complacent. Ordinary Christians did not understand Christian theology, and Augustine was later appalled by the ignorant and superstitious views that he derived from his Catholic upbringing. Many Catholics accepted their Christianity rather nominally; they believed that once they received baptism they would have to give up sin, and to avoid such a grave inconvenience they did their best to postpone baptism until their deathbed. Augustine's parents and others of their social class held their Christianity together with basically pagan, ultimately Homeric, ambitions for wealth, success, and honour; and for Augustine, as for the young men who admired Gorgias, these ambitions led naturally to a career in rhetoric and public speaking.

To someone who had absorbed the normal literary education, the Christian Scriptures sounded primitive and uncouth. Christian doctrines sounded naive and unpersuasive to anyone acquainted with philosophy. It is surprising that Augustine eventually accepted Catholic Christianity. He wrote his Confessions to explain how and why this happened. 'Confession' no doubt includes confession of sins and errors, but it also includes the acknowledgement and open statement of God's nature and actions (as in 'confession of faith').

When Augustine began to study law, he fell in with a group of rowdy young men calling themselves the 'Wreckers', who apparently enjoyed flouting conventional morality. His reading of Cicero encouraged him to study philosophy; and at about the same time he joined the Manicheans. This sect held a basically dualist conception of the universe as the result of a conflict between good and evil principles. The difficulties in Stoic explanations of the problem of evil suggest why dualism might seem a reasonable solution. Since good and evil seem to conflict and to interfere with each other, we might trace the conflict to an unresolved conflict between the cosmic principles themselves.

This cosmological dualism offers to explain both the New and the Old Testament. It demonstrates the necessity of the death and resurrection of Christ, the son of the good God, who struggles with the evil God of the Old Testament. His followers are those who identify themselves with the good and the light, and who gradually purify themselves from the evil aspects of this world. This view allows Christians to dismiss the uncouth and bloodthirsty aspects of the Hebrew Scriptures as the record of the misdeeds of the evil God.

The Manicheans took very seriously Christ's claim to be the light overcoming the darkness, and they gave this claim their own particular interpretation. They accepted Stoic materialism, and conceived the light as a mass of material particles trapped in human beings and in other material bodies. The Manichean's task was to release the light in other things and to absorb it, by the appropriate dietary and ritual practices. Manichean cosmic dualism and materialism are easily comprehensible answers to evident problems in Jewish and Christian theology; and the rigorous but clear-cut demand for ritual purity promised a radical break from the difficulties and compromises of the ordinary moral life. It was not at all foolish of Augustine to find the Manichean way plausible and appealing.

Augustine became dissatisfied with the Manichean system, even before he had found another positive outlook to replace it:

Finally I despaired of getting any benefit from that false doctrine, and I began to hold more slackly and carelessly those very doctrines that I had resolved to be content with if I found nothing better.

Following Nebridius, he asks the Manicheans what the evil substance (the material substance that the Manicheans identified with the evil principle) would have done if the good substance had refused to fight it. Either the good would have suffered nothing (and so did not need to defend itself), and would have had no reason to fight, or it would have suffered something.

Augustine argues that if we conceive a vulnerable and corruptible being, that being is not God: in conceiving something incorruptible

I was able to attain by my thought to something that would be better than my God, unless You were incorruptible . . . And what is the point of explaining at length why the substance that is God is not corruptible, since if it were corruptible it would not be God?

He assumes that we know that any vulnerable, corruptible being cannot be God. While this assumption might seem strange to Homer and to many Classical Greeks, it would not seem strange to Plato or to the prophets who tried to free the Hebrews from an excessively anthropomorphic conception of God.

Augustine's assumption does not rule out cosmological dualism. It shows at most that the Manicheans ought to describe themselves as atheists. The question about God's vulnerability shows why the Christian conception of God could not fit into cosmological dualism.

When Augustine was attracted by Manichean views, he did not see anything wrong with conceiving God as a material substance; and even when he rejected the Manichean position, he did not see what other sort of thing God might be. Cosmological dualism made the Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation difficult to accept: if flesh is evil, God's incarnation seems to imply his corruption. Manichean objections to Catholicism seem powerful if God has to be regarded as a material being. Neoplatonism, therefore, raises an important new possibility for Augustine, by suggesting how to conceive an immaterial reality. Augustine regards Plotinus as Plato come to life again; and he relies, within strict limits, on Neoplatonist doctrines to make some aspects of Christian theology more intelligible.

The possibility of immaterial reality makes it easier for Augustine to conceive the relation between the three persons of the Trinity. Plotinus suggests that Intellect and Soul are in some way distinct realities--different things are true of them--and yet they are both expressions of the nature of the One, and the best way for us to form the least inadequate conception of the One that we can form. Augustine finds that the relation between the three Plotinian hypostases removes some objections to the Christian conception of the Trinity.

The difficulties about God and evil that attracted Augustine to Manicheanism rested on the assumption that evil had to be a substance--some positive reality in its own right--and that this cosmic substance must be the source of evil in human wills. Neoplatonism changes Augustine's attitude to this question too. The natural universe has the limitations inseparable from its being material; but such limitations do not make the material universe evil in itself. Since everything comes from, and depends on, a perfectly good God, he argues, it has to be good: 'To You evil utterly is not--and not only to You, but to Your whole creation likewise, evil is not.' We imagine that some created things are evil because we notice that they conflict with other things--a flood destroys the work of many human beings. But though things conflict with each other, they do not conflict with the universe as a whole: 'God forbid that I should say: I wish these things were not.'

To account for moral evil Augustine refers to the rebellion of the human will against God. It is not the action of some reality independent of God, but the result of human decision. Augustine must still claim that the creation would not have been better without the existence of moral evil; and here his solution to the problem of evil runs into the usual difficulties. (Why, for instance, could God not have created human beings with free wills that did not make wrong choices? Even if some wrong choices are inevitable, why must they have the catastrophic results that they sometimes have?) Still, he can reasonably claim that Neoplatonism has opened possible positions that free us from the unattractive choice between the Manichean position and a crude version of Christianity.

Augustine found that in the Neoplatonist books he never read about the Incarnation. He came to regard this as a serious gap, once he had reread Saint Paul, and especially the Letter to the Romans. Paul rejects the view of moral and spiritual growth that renounces the body and the moral and social concerns of ordinary life; in his view, such renunciation only increases conflict within the self. Augustine felt conflict all the more keenly the more he was attracted by Neoplatonism.

He agrees that Neoplatonic mysticism leads the soul to some awareness of ultimate reality. But he found that the Neoplatonist discipline allowed only fleeting glimpses of the goal. Rejection of the body did not prevent him from returning to the body most of the time. In so far as he took Manichean purification or Neoplatonic mysticism as a guide for his life, he rejected Christian claims about the incapacity of human beings to achieve their own good from their own resources: 'for I was not yet humble enough to take the humble Jesus as my God; nor had I come to know what his weakness would teach me.' He accepted the Incarnation once he realized his own incapacity.

Augustine was struck by the moral demands of Christianity; for he had tried both Manichean and Neoplatonist measures for renouncing the flesh, or for separating his true self from it and treating it as an unwelcome appendage, and none of these measures had prevented him from being distracted by the demands of the flesh. But if Paul's demand had simply been a moral demand, it would have been as unrealistic as the counsels of Manichean and Neoplatonist perfection that Augustine had already tried. Paul's demand is different. It implies a person's acceptance of his own inability to achieve his own good.

The Catholic faith that Augustine eventually accepted would have seemed unintelligible to the prophet Isaiah, and alien to Saint Paul; it is more similar to the historic Christianity familiar to us than to the faith of the New Testament. Augustine approached it through Manicheanism and Neoplatonism; and the version of Christianity he eventually accepted was deeply influenced by Greek philosophical ideas. Still, it remains 'foolishness to the Greeks'; it still rests on the doctrines of Creation and Incarnation from which, in the view of orthodox Christianity, all the least credible aspects of Christian theology inescapably follow.

It should not now be surprising that the last three books of the Confessions are devoted to an account of the nature and action of God in the Creation. For the Creation shows the nature of the God that Augustine discovers in the course of the Confessions. In the Creation God did something at some time, and changed things from the way they were before, because he wanted to. In Augustine's view, however, God is eternal, changeless, immaterial, and self-sufficient, and on these points he is like the ultimate reality of Neoplatonism. How could such a being act in time, and why should he want to change things if he needed nothing? If he made the world, why is the world as bad as it is?

Augustine insists that despite the difficulties of explaining how and why God created the world, he did create it, and, as Genesis says, 'it was very good'. It is neither an illusion nor an evil substance opposed to the good God. Though Augustine faces serious difficulties in explaining evil as the product of free human choice, he does not resort to the intuitively easier answers offered by cosmological dualism. He insists that the creator of the world and of human nature also sent his son to release human nature from the bad results of free choice; the Incarnation is the continuation and completion of the work begun in the Creation.

Since other people are a part of the creation, Augustine's belief in the God who created the material universe requires him to extend his concern for other people beyond the concerns of his earlier life. Manicheans and Neoplatonists rejected the concerns of ordinary social life in favour of small groups of the elite pursuing the life of renunciation of the flesh. Augustine spent much of the rest of his life, however, as a priest and a bishop, preaching to ordinary people and administering his diocese. In the organized teaching of the Church, Christian doctrine influenced people outside the educated classes--people largely untouched by the whole course of Greek philosophy.

Not everyone will agree that when Augustine returned to Catholic Christianity he made the right choice. From the point of view of Greek philosophy, his choice might appear to be a retreat, not an advance. Parmenides, Heracleitus, and their successors invite their audience to judge their arguments by reason, and Augustine sometimes seems to accept that standard; he wanted to be as sure of the truth of the Catholic doctrine as he was that 7 + 3 = 10. The Church, however, did not even claim to meet his demand for rational proof, and did not remove his doubts by the sort of proof he initially wanted. Augustine's conversion might understandably seem to be a relapse into blind faith and superstition of the sort that the Presocratic naturalists tried to destroy. The anthropomorphic aspects of the Christian God, the hopeless obscurity of the Trinity and the Incarnation, and the anti-humanist tendency of the Christian doctrines of sin, grace, and faith--all these might seem to constitute an outlook that could commend itself only to blind faith despairing of human nature and rational inquiry.

Augustine shares the aim of many other Fathers of the Church in wanting to show that the alleged contrast between Christianity and Greek philosophy rests on a mistake. Paul argues that the Christian doctrine of sin and grace makes sense to those who have taken the moral insights of Jewish and Greek ethics as seriously as they can. Similarly, Augustine argues that rational inquiry shows the need for faith. Rational inquiry shows us the possibility of conceiving God as an immaterial reality; and it shows us the possibility of a moral life free of conflict within ourselves and with other people; but it cannot show us how to achieve the ideals it offers us. Christianity shows, in Augustine's view, how to achieve what a philosopher can only hope for. For this reason he claims that Christianity comes not to destroy, but to complete.