The Ascendency of the Physical

Augustine died in the year 430, making his own journey from the visible to the invisible world. At the time of his death, vandal forces were laying siege to Hippo Regius, the North African city in which he had spent the last thirty-nine years of his life, most of them as bishop. Other regions of Europe were beset by similar difficulties, for the disintegration of the Western Empire was well in train. Rome, the eternal city, had fallen to Alaric the Goth in 410, and in what was virtually a formality, the rule of the last Western emperor, Romulus Augustulus, came to end in 476. With the fall of the empire and triumph of the barbarians, the Dark Ages ensued. Thereafter, virtually until the eleventh century, the fires of Western civilisation were kept burning in isolated monastic communities. In cloister and cell, Catholic Christianity was preserved and nurtured, and along with it those vestiges of Platonic philosophy which had been fortuitously incorporated in the body of Christian faith.