Christianity gave him the schematic principle guiding his inquiries. His aim was to direct his labours with Christianity as an end—τελικῶς εἰς χριστιανισμόν, as he says so pregnantly. He would use Greek philosophy as a propaedeutic for Christianity; he would seek from geometry and astronomy what might serve to explain Scripture; and so with all branches of learning.[1]
This was the expression of a mind of prodigious energy. For more personal disclosures we may turn at once to the Latin Fathers. Hilary, Bishop of Poictiers (d. 367), was a foremost Latin polemicist against the Arians in the middle of the fourth century. He was born a pagan; and in the introductory book to his chief work, the De Trinitate, he tells how he turned, with all his intellect and higher aspirations, to the Faith. Taking a noble view of human nature, he makes bold to say that men usually spurn the sensual and material, and yearn for a more worthy life. Thus they have reached patience, temperance, and other virtues, believing that death is not the end of all. He himself, however, did not rest satisfied with the pagan religion or the teachings of pagan philosophers; but he found doctrines to his liking in the books of Moses, and then in the Gospel of John. It was clear to him that prophecy led up to the revelation of Jesus Christ, and in that at length he gained a safe harbour. Thus Hilary explains that his better aspirations had led him on and upward to the Gospel; and when he had reached that end and unification of spiritual yearning, it was but natural that it should thenceforth hold the sum of his intellectual interests.
A like result appears with greater power in Augustine. His Confessions give the mode in which his spiritual progress presented itself to him some time after he had become a Catholic Christian.[2] His whole life sets forth the same theme, presenting the religious passion of the man drawing into itself his energies and interests. God and the Soul—these two would he know, and these alone. But these alone indeed! As if they did not embrace all life pointed and updrawn toward its salvation. God was the
- ↑ Epistola ad Gregorium Thaumaturgum.
- ↑ Cf. Boissier, Fin du paganisme.
