However, there will be a price to pay for this belief that the ultimate meaning of reality can be found in our own spiritual nature. Our interest in the outside physical world, the realm of nature and science, by necessity drops to second place. What vital truths does the world of sensory experience offer us? The Augustinian Christian will answer as Plato does in the Theaetetus: None. “It is not necessary to probe into the nature of things,” Augustine will write, “as was done by those whom the Greeks called physicists.” There is nothing there to interest the searcher after wisdom, only more
...more
