Augustine, like Newman, was not by temperament inclined to acquiesce in prolonged or systematic doubt. Yet his growing dissatisfaction with Manichaeism, whose dogmatic dualism he had embraced as an eighteen-year-old in 372, made him a temporary skeptic in about 383 or 384, at a particularly insecure and unstable period of his life. A year or two later he encountered Platonism in Milan, and gradually laid the foundations of the theory of cognitive certainty that characterizes his earliest extant writings. He was subsequently to argue polemically that skepticism is a form of despair of finding truth. Yet he considered the refutation of skepticism to be of primary importance. He devoted the first of the programmatic series of philosophical writings of 386-387, Contra Academicos, written in the aftermath of his conversion, to criticism of skeptical positions and defense of the attainability of knowledge. He continued, moreover, to use skeptical arguments and method in his writings: they are found, for example, in his anti-Manichaean polemic from 388 onwards, and some survived in his later, mature thought.

The topic of memory in Augustine's thought includes much of his philosophy of mind, for memory is not a distinct power or faculty of the soul, but the mind itself, from which memory, understanding, or will are distinguished only in terms of their different activities. Memory for Augustine has not merely the rather straightforward role of retaining recollections of past experiences, but also the much more problematic tasks of holding in mind present realities and even of anticipating the future. Augustine's account of memory shows a marked development from his early writings, in which he accepted a Platonic doctrine of reminiscence, up to the works of his maturity, in which he clearly rejects almost all, if not all, traces of such a teaching. In the Confessions, Augustine devotes the first half of Book 10 to a description of the contents of his memory as he searches for God, and in Book 11 memory plays a key role in the perception of time. In De Trinitate, Augustine finds in the memory, understanding, and will of the human soul a series of psychological analogies or images of the three persons in one God.

If there is a God, it is possible that he cannot be known by our reason. If reason could attain to religious truths, faith would be unnecessary. If faith is needed, reason is somehow inadequate. But why? Either because the human mind cannot comprehend the mysteries of God in whole or in part, so that (at least some) religious truths - such as the Resurrection or the Day of Judgment, according to Augustine (De vera relig. 8.14, cf. De Trin. 4.16.21) - are inaccessible to unaided reason; or because such truths cannot be demonstrated and can only be shown to be more or less plausible or possible; or because our minds are now damaged and need to be habituated - by faith, by the practice of the virtues or by both - to reason more effectively, and above all not merely to rationalize.

Augustine's most extensive discussions of philosophical and theological cosmology are found in his commentaries on Genesis (De Genesi contra Manichaeos, De Genesi ad litteram imperfectus liber, De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim), in the last three books of the Confessions, and in Books 11 and 12 of the De civitate Dei. The main lines of his view of the creation are as follows. God created both the spiritual realm of angels and the visible world, including the incarnated souls, out of nothing (ex nihilo), without any pre-existing matter or other things outside God, so that ontologically new beings came into existence. The creation was based on an eternal free act of God's perfectly good will. It took place through God's omnipotence without toil, effort, or industry. God created simultaneously all first actualized things and, through “seminal reasons” inherent in them, the conditions of all those things which were to come up to the end of the world. God is the only creator. Created beings cannot bring things into existence out of nothing. God created time in creating movement in the universe. The story of the six days of creation is a metaphor which helps human imagination. Augustine sometimes interprets the “beginning”' (in principio) of Gen. 1.1 as a temporal beginning, but following an established tradition, he also takes it to refer to the Word or the Son of God (John 1.1-3): “In this beginning, God, you made heaven and earth, in your Word, in your Son, in your power, in your wisdom, in your truth” (Conf. 11.9.11).

In Rome at the beginning of his stay in Italy, Augustine became disenchanted with the Manichaeism he had provisionally embraced in Carthage. He found himself increasingly attracted to the skeptical position taken by the Academics, the followers of Arcesilaus and the New Academy, who, as he writes in his Confessions, “held that everything is a matter of doubt and asserted that we can know nothing for certain ” (5.10.19). What Augustine knew of ancient skepticism, including the debate between Arcesilaus and the Stoic Zeno of Citium, he seems to have learned from Cicero's Academica.

By “post-medieval Augustinianism” I shall mean characteristically Augustinian concepts, questions, arguments, responses, and ways of thinking that are prominent in various modern philosophers, whether or not those philosophers ever acknowledge the Augustinian provenance of these aspects of their own thinking. On this way of understanding “Augustinianism ” Descartes is perhaps the most Augustinian of modern philosophers, even though Descartes himself declined to acknowledge that there was any significant affinity between his own thought and that of Augustine (let alone that Augustine had actually influenced his thinking!). Both because Descartes was so profoundly Augustinian in his ways of thinking and because he inaugurated the “post-medieval” period in Western philosophy, I shall begin with him.

In 386, at the age of 32, Augustine converted to Christianity. As he tells the story in the Confessions, the complex and dramatic events that constituted his conversion brought to successful conclusion a search he had begun as a teenager at Carthage with his reading of Cicero's Hortensius. Cicero had inspired in him a passionate yearning for the sort of immortality that comes with wisdom. After more than a decade of fruitless searching, Augustine finally discovered that the wisdom he had longed for was to be found with the God of Christianity. The discovery came in a moment of intellectual vision in which Augustine glimpsed and thereby came at last to understand the divine nature. “At that moment,” he tells us, “I saw [God's] 'invisible nature understood through the things that are made' [Romans 1.20]” (Conf. 7.17.23).

Before his conversion to Christianity, Augustine conceived of God as a supremely good being who is “incorruptible, inviolable, and immutable ” (Conf. 7.1.1). At the same time, he was aware of the existence of evil in the world, evil that can be divided into two major classes. First, physical objects have limitations and defects. In particular, the limitations of living things result in hardship, pain, illness, and death. Secondly, there are people who behave wickedly and whose souls are characterized by such vices as pride, envy, greed, and lust.

Augustine regards ethics as an enquiry into the Summum Bonum: the supreme good, which provides the happiness all human beings seek. In this respect his moral thought comes closer to the eudaimonistic virtue ethics of the classical Western tradition than to the ethics of duty and law associated with Christianity in the modern period. But even though Augustine addresses many of the same problems that pagan philosophers do, he often defends very different answers. For him, happiness consists in the enjoyment of God, a reward granted in the afterlife for virtue in this life. Virtue itself is a gift of God, and founded on love, not on the wisdom prized by philosophers.

The topic of Augustine's political philosophy must be approached with care. Augustine never devoted a book or a treatise to the central questions of what we now call “political philosophy.” Unlike Aristotle, he did not attempt serially to address them and to draw out the institutional implications of his answers. Unlike Thomas Hobbes, he did not elaborate a philosophical theory of politics, if by that is meant a synoptic treatment of those central questions which relies on theoretical devices contrived for the purpose. Discussions of politics can be found in a number of Augustine's writings, but these are generally conducted in service of conclusions which neither we nor he would regard as philosophical. Indeed it is questionable whether Augustine thought that political philosophy has a subject-matter which should be sharply distinguished from the subjectmatters of other areas of philosophy or of political enquiry. His own treatments of political subjects draw heavily upon ethics, social theory, the philosophy of history, and, most importantly, psychology and theology. It is possible to recover a distinctive set of political views from Augustine's texts. That set constitutes not a political philosophy, but a loose-jointed and heavily theological body of political thought which Augustine himself never assembled. It does not fit comfortably into any one of the disciplinary categories now standardly associated with the study of politics.

Augustine began writing commentary on scripture not long after his conversion. His first such work, meant as a counterblast to Manichaean attacks on the creation account, was De Genesi contra Manichaeos (388-390). In many ways it sets the tone for much of his later work: Augustine admits an allegorical sense but warns against overenthusiasm for allegory and denigration of the literal sense; we see also from the outset Augustine's interest in scripture as a controversialist and polemicist. After his ordination to the priesthood in 391, he seems to have gone through something of a writer's block, starting but leaving incomplete a treatise on exegetical theory (De doctrina christiana, begun 396 but not completed until 427), another commentary on Genesis (De Genesi ad litteram imperfectus liber, 393-394), and an exposition of Romans (Epistolae ad Romanos inchoata expositio, 394-395). He did manage to finish a verse-by-verse commentary on Galatians, giving the literal sense (Epistolae ad Galatas expositio, 394-395) and a commentary on the Sermon on the Mount (De sermone Domini in monte, 393-396). His Expositio quarundam propositionum ex epistola ad Romanos (394) derives from conversations with the monks at Hippo, who recorded his answers to their questions about Romans; Augustine tells us later that he missed what he eventually came to see as the main point of the epistle.

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Philosophers have come to speak of an Augustinian picture of language. The picture is not really Augustine's, as we shall see, but it makes a good starting point for exploring what his views actually were. Those views, though not as crude as the “Augustinian picture,” will turn out to be mainly unoriginal, following a tradition that was already several hundred years old in his day, and helping to sustain that tradition for a further millennium and more. We know better now, thanks mainly to the fundamental insights of Frege and Wittgenstein.

In writing De Trinitate Augustine had three main objectives. He wished to demonstrate to critics of the Nicene creed that the divinity and co-equality of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are rooted in scripture. He intended to tell pagan philosophers the need for faith in a divine mediator so that divine self-revelation and redemption can occur. Finally, he wanted to convince his readers that salvation and spiritual growth are connected with knowing themselves as images of the Triune God, from whom they came and toward whom they go, with a dynamic tendency to union realized by likeness to God who is Love.

Christianity teaches that the world is in a state of what it describes as 'fallen' disorder. There have been two classic attempts to understand why this is the case. The first, by Irenaeus, claimed that God intended it to be so that God's creatures could live lives of 'recapitulation' in which they constantly grew in grace. The second, by Augustine, claimed that human disobedience caused the disorder. Neither of these attempted explanations is satisfactory. Disorder and evil have to be lived with for the mystery they are. According to one biblical view, the state of conflict is represented by the 'principalities and powers' which are part of the created order (Rom. 8:38), and they are variously described in the Bible and its translations. Although they were among the 'all things' redeemed by Christ's death (Col. 1:20), they will remain in existence until Christ's return in glory. (1 Cor. 15:24). Only then will the struggle cease. This is a biblical way of describing the world's disorder. Human beings are part of this. They are seen as fallen creatures. Though they were created in and still bear the image of God as an alien dignity, their propensity to sin manifests itself in all that they do. Nothing remains untainted. Human beings are, however, the agents of God's grace in the world, but at the same time they remain part of its essential problem.

IS THERE SUCH A THING AS ‘NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS’?

The moral teaching of the New Testament epistles may be summed up as a radical reinterpretation of the scriptures and the story of Israel in the light of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. This teaching took shape to serve the needs of groups of believers in the first century seeking to live out their Christian discipleship in the towns and cities of the Roman empire, from Palestine and Syria in the east to Rome in the west. Taken together, it is a body of practical wisdom on how to live in holiness as the people of God in the time between the resurrection and parousia of Christ. This practical wisdom covers matters like Jew-Gentile relations,how to avoid idolatry, food and sex rules, household order, work and obligations to those in authority. It is indebted to the moral traditions of Israel on the one hand and Greece and Rome on the other, all refracted through the lens of the story of Jesus and the experience of the Holy Spirit in daily life and in gatherings for worship.

John Elford's chapter has set the broad context of Christian approaches to war and of attempts over the centuries to establish just war criteria. In this chapter I will focus, instead, upon the arms trade (or, more accurately, international arms transfer) set in the specific context of the wars or conflicts in the 1990s, first in the Gulf, then in Iraq and finally in the Balkans.

Christian versions of just war theory are essentially attempts to limit the horrors of warfare rather than means of justifying particular wars. Although initially derived by Ambrose and Augustine from pre-Christian, Greek and Roman sources, as John Elford has shown, just war theory has long been shaped by Christian theologians and now represents one of the more abiding theological heirlooms in the modern world. It is intentionally a limiting framework. Given that countries are, and always have been, tempted on occasion to go to war, just war theory introduces notes of moral caution into a situation. It offers broad criteria in order to encourage people to see some forms of warfare as considerably less justified than others. Down the centuries many Christians have voiced strong anxieties about warfare and have sought to constrain countries from going lightly into battle and then to limit the horrors of war once it starts.