Augustine likes to distinguish different grades in the range of knowledge of which the human mind is capable. We have already noted one distinction, that between belief and understanding. Understanding, Augustine seems to suggest, is the distinctive work of human reason: it is the result of its application and pursuit. When he is concerned to contrast understanding with belief, Augustine normally speaks of intellectus, intelligere, intelligentia; when he discusses the result in the mind of the work of reasoning, he speaks of scientia. Thus one of his definitions of scientia in effect almost identifies it with intellectus: in the course of a lengthy discussion of the distinctive character of human knowledge (scientia) he likens the relationship between reason and knowledge to that between looking and seeing: knowledge is the success of the enterprise of reason. Its chief characteristic is rational cogency; something is known when it is fully clear and transparent to the mind, and is, so to speak, seen by it.

Before we examine the various mental processes involved in different kinds of knowledge, we must note a distinction which Augustine introduces within scientia: he defines wisdom (sapientia) as knowledge of a special kind. He calls it a ‘contemplative knowledge’, and describes it as being concerned with eternal objects, whereas the remainder of scientia, to which he now confines the term in a narrower sense, is concerned with temporal things. Knowledge and wisdom differ only in virtue of the difference in the objects concerned, and Augustine allows that their distinction is not radical: the words may indeed be used interchangeably.

Clement was born probably of pagan parents about the middle of the second century and died probably before 215. He sat at the feet of a succession of Christian teachers, of whom the last was the Alexandrian Pantaenus, a Stoic philosopher converted to Christianity (according to the report of Eusebius). In the Alexandrian church of the second century a cleavage had arisen between the simple believers, whose fear of Gnosticism had made them the more tenacious of unreflecting ‘orthodoxy’ (the term itself is beginning to become current at this time), and the educated Christians among whom tendencies towards Gnosticism were powerful if only because the most intelligent Christians at Alexandria had been Gnostics. Pantaenus was distinguished, according to Clement, by the fact that he intelligently expounded Scripture in a way that did not depart from the apostolic doctrine. It appears that this was a little unusual. Clement understands his task as a continuation of this demonstration that authentic Christianity is not obscurantism and that there is a proper place within the Church for a positive appreciation of the human values of Greek literature and philosophy. Clement's argument is therefore directed simultaneously against the Gnostics, against the obscurantists in the Church, and against cultured despisers of the faith who were representing it as hostile to civilization and culture generally. He builds on Justin's thesis that while polytheism is to be rejected absolutely, the values in the best Greek literature and philosophy find not merely toleration but their actual fulfilment in Christianity. This thesis he combines with a Philonic view of the relation of reason and revelation.

Christian philosophy does not strictly begin with the New Testament,but even at this early stage it is easy to discern statements and propositions that implicitly and indirectly point towards certain metaphysical positions. The origins of Christian philosophy are therefore more than a matter of discovering passing echoes of Greek ideas within the New Testament writings, for example the Platonic and Philonic overtones of the Epistle to the Hebrews. The prologue of St John's Gospel, with its identification of the Logos as the light lightening every man with the Logos made flesh in Christ, initially provokes the expectation of an indirect apologia to the Greek world; but the remainder of the Gospel is more concerned with other questions that are oddly nearer to Kierkegaard than to Plato, who cannot be said to be more than a remote influence in the background of the evangelist's thought. In St Paul there are some occasional Platonizing hints, especially in the discussion with the Corinthians about immortality in II Cor. iii–v. The indictment of pagan cult as a worship of the creature in place of the Creator in Romans i is qualified by a recognition that ‘that which may be known of God’ may be grasped by the natural reason through the contemplation of the world. In Romans ii St Paul freely draws on Stoic notions of conscience and natural law, and writes nobly of self-sufficiency and natural goodness in Philippians iv. But it is a common mistake to see early Christian ethics as a mere assimilation of current Stoic ideals and to take Tertullian's Seneca saepe noster as a simple account of the phenomena.

Introduction

Neoplatonism is a term usually designating Plato's philosophy as reinterpreted by Plotinus and post-Plotinian Platonists. The term is slightly misleading, in that to some it may suggest a more radical difference between the philosophies of Plato and Plotinus than is warranted, in that it tends to obscure the debt of Plotinus to Platonists before him, particularly the Old Academy and the Platonism of the period between the first century B.C. and his time (today often designated as pre-Neoplatonism or Middle Platonism), and finally in that it suggests that all post-Plotinian Platonism bears the stamp of Plotinus' philosophy, whereas in many cases his influence on other Platonists was only limited.

However, in what follows we shall, in the main, limit ourselves to indicating those Platonic and post-Platonic philosophic doctrines which were probably of major importance for Plotinus, and the knowledge of which helps us to place his philosophy in historic perspective. No attempt will be made to ascertain the primary sources of these doctrines or to reconstruct systems of which only fragments have survived, nor do we plan to compete with an apparatus fontium. We shall simply present those major philosophic doctrines which we, in explicit form, still possess and which Plotinus knew, or in all likelihood knew. The framework of our presentation is provided by four passages in Porphyry's Vita Plotini. In the first, Porphyry says that Plotinus' writings contain Stoic and Peripatetic doctrines, and that all of Aristotle's Metaphysics is present there in condensed form.