Core profile
Joins Platonist interiority with Christian doctrines of grace, illumination, evil as privation, and the restless desire for God.
Concepts to watch
Illuminationprivationgrace
Thinker profile
Augustine
Joins Platonist interiority with Christian doctrines of grace, illumination, evil as privation, and the restless desire for God.
Dates
354-430
Tradition
Latin Christian
How to study this thinker
- 1Start with the basic problem this thinker is trying to solve.
- 2Name the concepts Aquinas receives, corrects, or resists.
- 3Return to Aquinas and ask how the borrowed insight is reordered.
Aquinas connection
Influence on Aquinas
Aquinas inherits Augustine on evil, grace, divine ideas, memory, and the priority of God in the life of the mind.
Aquinas responds
He clarifies Augustine with Aristotelian accounts of abstraction, nature, and created causes, while keeping grace as primary.