What Augustine didn't find in the books of the Platonists

A Greek of the fourth century before Christ reached, alone, by pure reasoning, a principle that is beyond being itself, and called that principle the Good. Almost eight hundred years later, another man, also alone at first, read that very thing in Latin and asked the question that is left hanging: if he got that close alone, what was missing? The man who answered that best was Augustine, and his answer begins by admitting how much Plato had gotten right.

The books he read were not Plato's

It is worth correcting a common mistake from the start. Augustine did not read Plato. In the Confessions, Book VII, he tells how, before converting, he read "some books of the Platonists, translated from Greek into Latin." The identity of those books is well known: they are works by Plotinus, and for part of the tradition also Porphyry, in the Latin translation of Marius Victorinus, the same Victorinus whose own conversion Augustine records a few pages earlier. He reads them in Milan, still a professor of rhetoric, still divided, before the garden scene that decides everything.

The distinction matters because it changes what the story means. This is not the case of a man opening Plato's text and understanding it on his own. It is the case of a man who reaches the same principle Plato had reached, eight hundred years earlier, by a Platonic but indirect road: through disciples who had already inherited, discussed, and refined that Good beyond being.

It is worth remembering who Augustine was at that moment, because that too is part of the argument. He does not come to the Platonists as a calm man in search of general culture. He arrives as a professor of rhetoric in Milan, after years of trying to find an answer that would hold: first in Manichaeism, which he had already abandoned as untenable, then in a kind of skepticism that also fell short. It is in that state, unsatisfied with everything he had already tried, that someone hands him these books translated by Victorinus, and something different happens.

What he found there, without opening the Bible

And what he finds in these books is, by his own account, striking. In Henry Chadwick's translation for Oxford World's Classics, Augustine writes that there he read, "not of course in these words, but with entirely the same sense and supported by numerous and varied reasons," that "in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God." It is the very same opening of the Gospel of John, the one that opened this whole module on Greek philosophy.

Notice the size of this. A pagan philosopher, reading another pagan philosopher, with no Scripture in hand, reaches the same principle that opens the Gospel of John: a Word, an original Reason, that is with God and sustains everything that exists. If you followed the article on the sun analogy, it is the very same Good, beyond being, that Plato had reached by oar, centuries earlier, with no revelation at all.

What was missing, and he says it plainly

But Augustine does not stop at what he found. He records, with equal precision, what he did not find. And this is where the comparison becomes the whole argument of the chapter: he read, in that same place, that the Word was not born of flesh, nor of blood, nor of the will of man, but of God. But, he writes, "that 'the word was made flesh and dwelt among us,' I did not read there."

That is the exact line, and it is a thin one. It is not a failure of argument, nor a step that was left unclimbed. It is a different order of thing altogether. Plato, and later the Platonists Augustine read, managed to deduce that there exists a principle above everything, on which everything depends. That is the work of reasoning, the very same oar that carried the whole of Plato's second sailing. What none of them could deduce, no matter how much rigor they applied, is that this principle should decide to come down, take on a body, gain a face, a name, an address. That cannot be deduced. Either someone tells you it happened, or no one knows.

You may have lived a small version of that same distance yourself. There are truths you reach by thinking, given time and attention, and there are things you only know because someone told you, because they happened to someone and reached you by way of an account. No one deduces that they were loved; someone has to say so, or show it. That, more or less, is the border Augustine finds at the end of those books: an entire principle deduced with rigor, and an event that can only be known because it was told.

Who climbs and tells, and who comes down on purpose

There is still a second difference, and it concerns the price of having reached that far. In Plato, whoever climbs up to the edge of the Good and comes back to tell others runs the same risk his own master ran, Socrates: the city does not forgive whoever saw too much. He climbs, sees, comes back, and dies for it. Christianity reverses that whole movement. It is not someone who climbs and is punished for telling what he saw. It is the principle itself, the Good itself, that comes down, on purpose, knowing exactly what would happen to it for coming down.

That is why Augustine's answer is not "Plato was wrong." It is more interesting than that: Plato reached as far as human reasoning can go alone, and he went far, by oar, with no help at all. What was missing is exactly the point no reasoning reaches, because it is not a conclusion drawn from premises, it is an event that has to be told by someone who was there. Spelling out that border precisely, between the Word that opens the Gospel of John and the Word made flesh, is what sustains much of the Christian theology that comes after Augustine, and it is also why the Confessions are still read by people who never meant to read a book of theology.

What this comparison leaves us with

There is no need to choose between admiring Plato and taking seriously what Augustine saw as different. Both things fit together, and that is exactly what the story itself teaches: a man can go very far thinking alone, with rigor and attention, and still be missing something that no amount of extra reasoning would have supplied. Augustine does not dismiss the path he walked before converting. He recognizes that path brought him within a single step, and he tells, with precision, exactly what that step was.

This is the same class, in the voice of the one who teaches it, with the exact quote on screen: it is in the link just below.

Continue: The sun analogy: Plato's Good is beyond being · Plato and the World of Forms: the measure no one gave you · What is the Logos, in the Gospel of John · To read is not to agree: the hardest Odyssey passage
Source class: F&T 2.4, Platão I: o Mundo das Ideias e a busca pela transcendência