ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the pneumatology of the Cassiciacum dialogues. It demonstrates that Augustine's earliest doctrines of the Holy Spirit and the soul are fully congruent with the Catholic theology of his day, and that he appropriates the Plotinian Psyche for the latter, not the former, of these doctrines. The chapter also explains that Augustine's engagement with Neoplatonic psychology was sufficiently determined by the Catholic context of his readings and by the specific texts that he read to have rendered him largely unaware of the discord between the Soul of Plotinus and the Spirit of Nicaea. The baptism of the Plotinian model engendered a hierarchal ontology that Augustine found compelling given its integration of Neoplatonism and orthodox Christian theology. The chapter shows what Augustine does say about the third hypostasis and to the possibility that together his words constitute something like an incipient pro-Nicene pneumatology.
