St. Augustine was neither a philosopher nor his-
torian, but a theologian who used philosophy and history, as well
as all other fields of thought known in his time, to build a massive
apologia for the Catholic church. His writing was affected deeply
by the convulsions of expiring Roman society of which he is the
greatest witness, and the Roman turmoil is paralleled by that in
his own life, during which he passed from Manichaeism through
neo-Platonism to Catholicism. Incapable of impartiality, he
writes almost always in attack or defense, and nowhere more
than in his magnum opus, The City of God.

Although neither Augustine's style nor his thought are at all
simple, his postulates are fairly clear. The most important one is
his belief that God rules this world and the next, and that the
best way to understand God's will is through the Bible, as inter-
preted by the church. No secular author, not even Plato, the
greatest of philosophers, can be compared with the Bible, the
revelation of reality itself. God and the soul he once said, were
the only things he wished to know, and the only significant parts

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