ABSTRACT
A chapter on what the unconverted Augustine read might provide a simple and necessary answer to the core questions of this book: Augustine’s debt to Cicero, for instance, or Plotinus. It would be good to know what educated and earnest Milanese intellectuals were reading in the 380s AD. Such work has been done and done well. (See e.g. O’Donnell 1992.) What I want to investigate in this chapter is the way that Augustine goes about thinking about his debt to what he read. Augustine knows he owes his ability to read and write, his ability to think, and some of his most profound insights to his non-Christian education, to the whole culture in which he grew up. This was a tension felt, and felt very strongly, by others across the late antique world. Recall, for example, Jerome waking ‘trembling from a dream in which Christ had called him a “Ciceronian not a Christian”’ (Brown 1967:265). By contrast, as Brown sees, ‘Augustine was untroubled by nightmares. He avoided them in a characteristic manner: by hard thinking and by the application of a few basic formulae’ (ibid.). I hope, in this chapter, to explore some of this ‘hard thinking’ in detail.
