34. C. Acad. 3.15.34 (CCL 29:54–55); my trans., based on Kavanagh, FOTC 5:207–9. (continued)
Plotinus, Platonism, and the
Authority of Christ
The following passage touches on Augustine's early optimistic assessment of Plotinus and Platonism.35 Note his crucial distinction between reason and authority. From Against the Skeptics, Book 3:
(18.41) Not long after [Cicero], when all the obstinacy and all the sophistry had died down and when the clouds of error had been dispelled, then Plato's doctrine—which is the purest and brightest in philosophy—shined forth, especially in Plotinus. Indeed, this Platonist philosopher has been regarded as so like Plato that the two seemed to have lived at the same time, but there is such a long interval of time between them that Plato might be seen as having come back to life in Plotinus.
(19.42) Today we see hardly any philosophers except for Cynics or Peripatetics or Platonists. We have Cynics just because a certain "liberty" and license in life delights them. But as regards erudition and doctrine, as well as morality, by which the soul is ruled, a system of philosophy—the truest philosophy, in my opinion—has crystallized over many centuries and after many disputes because there has been no lack of men with the greatest acuity of insight and quickness of mind who, in their disputations, continued to teach that Aristotle and Plato concur with one another even though to the inattentive and the unskilled the two seem to be out of harmony. Now this is not a this-worldly philosophy, a philosophy which our sacred mysteries would rightly detest. It is a philosophy of the other world, the intelligible world, a world to which even the most acute reasoning would never call back souls blinded by errors' many-sided darkness and smeared deeply by the body's grime. That reasoning could not do so had not the most high God—through a gentle mercy towards all humanity—bent down and submitted the authority of the divine intellect even to a human body, and caused it to dwell therein so that souls would be awakened not only by divine precepts but also by divine deeds, and thus would be enabled to turn back within themselves and to gaze upon their homeland, without any disputatious wranglings.
(20. 43) . . . So, then, that you may have, briefly, my whole position: Whatever may be the mode of human wisdom, I see that I have not yet perceived it. But though I am now in the thirty-third year of my life, I do not think that I should despair of reaching it some day, for I have resolved to disregard all
35. On Plotinus, see Dominic J. O'Meara, Plotinus: An Introduction to the Enneads (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Pierre Hadot, Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision, trans. Michael Chase (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Lloyd P. Gerson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).