LOVE AND INSPIRATION

Augustine learned from many sources, but his varied learning is often originally ill-digested and years later far from totally assimilated. When a degree of assimilation occurs, it may have been prompted by challenges which have arisen almost by chance. Especially in the decade or so after his conversion, Augustine was constantly driven to reassess what he had learned from the Greek philosophical tradition: from the Stoics and to a greater degree from the Platonists. For although he had learned from Plotinus how to surmount various forms of materialism, his experience of Christian life, first as a devout layman, and later as a priest and bishop, made him increasingly aware of new and hitherto unexpected ways in which the tenets and goals of Neoplatonism and Christianity are in conflict. Even at the time of his conversion, though believing Neoplatonism to be compatible with Christianity, he already held it to be incomplete.

We have already seen how Christian experience and biblical reflection affected Augustine's treatment of a series of traditional problems about the relationship of the soul to the body; but nowhere is Augustine's reassessment more evident, or more far-reaching, than in his account of moral behaviour and of virtue; and nowhere is it more acute than in his treatment of the Christian commandment to love one's neighbour.

It is not difficult to understand why love of neighbour presented problems for Augustine both at the philosophical and at the personal level.