On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts

by James K.A. Smith

But this gearing together of Platonism and Christianity would generate its own tensions and cause Augustine to have to make a choice. Much has been made of Augustine’s Platonism, and it’s beyond question that Platonism—or, more specifically, the Neoplatonism of Plotinus—provided a crucial intellectual scaffolding at the time of his conversion and through the rest of his life. In Of True Religion, one of his earliest works, Augustine paints Christianity as the completion of Platonism—that if Plato were alive in the Christian era, he too would be a follower of Jesus.30 Yet to overstate the continuity is to miss what Augustine sees as a fundamental distinction of Christianity that makes all the difference: humility. Platonism lifted his attention from the temporal and material to the eternal and invisible. Platonism helped him conceive of an ascent to higher things, to the purity and eternity of the Good. But what Platonism could never have imagined was that the Good would descend to us; that the eternal God would condescend to inhabit time and a body; that the divine would humble itself and swing low to carry humanity home.