To Know God and the Soul

To Know God and the Soul presents a collection of essays on Augustine of Hippo written over the past twenty-five years by renowned philosopher Roland Teske. They reveal Teske's principal interests in Augustine, especially Augustine's discovery of a spiritualist metaphysics in the philosophy of Plotinus that allowed him to break away from Manichean and Stoic corporealism so that he could conceive of God as incorporeal and non-temporal and of the soul as incorporeal. Augustine's assimilation of Plotinian thought as a means of understanding Catholic Christianity provided key answers to some of the problems that he had had with the Christian faith, but it also led to other problems because some aspects of Platonism were incompatible with the Christian faith, as can be seen in Augustine's early account of the love of neighbor and in his understanding of the motive of creation.