He shows us (Bk.
V, Ch. X, 19) that almost the sole cause of his intellectual
perplexity in religion was his stubborn, materialistic prejudice
that if God existed he had to exist in a body, and thus had to
have extension, shape, and finite relation. He remembers how the
"Platonists" rescued him from this "materialism" and taught him
how to think of spiritual and immaterial reality -- and so to
become able to conceive of God in non-dualistic categories. We
can follow him in his extraordinarily candid and plain report of
his Plotinian ecstasy, and his momentary communion with the One
(Book VII). The "Platonists" liberated him from error, but they
could not loose him from the fetters of incontinence. Thus, with
a divided will, he continues to seek a stable peace in the
Christian faith while he stubbornly clings to his pride and
appetence.
In Book VIII, Augustine piles up a series of remembered
incidents that inflamed his desire to imitate those who already
seemed to have gained what he had so long been seeking. First of
all, there had been Ambrose, who embodied for Augustine the
dignity of Christian learning and the majesty of the authority of
the Christian Scriptures.
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