ABSTRACT

Nebridius of Carthage, dear friend and often companion of Augustine, was delighted to find Augustine’s letters full of Plato and Plotinus, as well as full of Christ: ‘illae mihi Christum, illae Platonem, illae Plotinum sonabunt’.1 That conjunction, however, which Nebridius found so pleasant and so edifying, has been a major problem for modern students of Augustine. For well over a century now, no aspect of Augustinian studies has been more marked by controversy than the question of his ‘Platonism’, and the vast body of scholarly literature devoted to the subject leaves many of the issues unresolved.