Abstract

After he was delivered from the necessity of making provision for the flesh in its concupiscence and after tendering his resignation as a professor of rhetoric, St. Augustine was, in the autumn of 386 a.d., eager to explore his newfound Christian faith and prepare for his reception into the Catholic Church. His conversion, momentous though it was, did not so much entail a repudiation of all that he had learned and studied as it did a transformation of what had brought him to the threshold of religious belief. Chief among the spoils of Augustine’s early education was philosophy, which he understood primarily as an all-encompassing love of wisdom and only secondarily as a confederacy of..