Late Antiquity

The passage from the classical world to the Christian one, in nine works, most of them by one man. Augustine was a professor of rhetoric who read Plotinus, heard a voice in a garden, and became the most influential Christian thinker after Paul. The Confessions is his account of how it happened, addressed to God, and it is the first book in which a person examines his own inner life at length. The City of God is his answer to the fall of Rome: there are two cities, and the one that fell was never the one that mattered. The shorter works, on the teacher, on free will, on how to read scripture, are where his philosophy is worked out.

Boethius closes the era. A Roman senator under a Gothic king, condemned to death, he wrote the Consolation of Philosophy in prison: a dialogue with Philosophy herself, in prose and verse, on fortune, providence and whether a good man can be harmed. It was the most read book of the Middle Ages after the Bible.

The Quran, revealed in the same centuries at the other end of the Mediterranean, is here because Notre Dame and St. John’s assign it, and because the Islamic philosophers of the medieval shelf cannot be read without it. Athanasius, on the incarnation, is the theology the councils were fighting over.