Ambrose should appear at this time.^35 The most talented and ambitious intel-
lectuals, heretofore pursuing careers as rhetors and officials, went over to the
church. It was now an institution of increasing power whose wealth and
privileges were rapidly coming to exceed those of Roman officialdom (Jones,
[1964] 1986: 904–910, 933–934).^36
The most important philosophical result came from Augustine’s effort to
win over the remnants of his own intellectual class, the sophisticated Roman
aristocracy, for whom Neoplatonism, and indeed the whole pagan philosophi-
cal tradition, was superior to the particularisms of Christian doctrine.^37 In the
late 380s, just after Augustine’s conversion, he produced his major contribu-
tions in pure philosophy. Mindful of the Ciceronian bias of rhetors like himself,
he developed a refutation of skepticism (Weinberg, 1964: 30–43; Brown, 1967:
102). Augustine’s argument was a version of the “cogito ergo sum” later used
by Descartes to undergird a system much the opposite of Augustine’s. The
proof developed by Augustine moves from the certainty of self-knowledge, to
an interior sense by which the exterior senses are judged, and to the implication
that a standard exists by which reason operates—a standard which Augustine
identifies with God. Augustine thus anticipates both Descartes and Anselm,
and elaborates a more refined psychology around the capacities of memory,
understanding, and will. In his subsequent career, Augustine was largely caught
up in harsh polemics against religious rivals. He rose to a higher intellectual
level when he wrote again for educated pagans, producing his City of God to
show the drift of world history toward the triumph of Christianity rather than
of the now crumbling Roman Empire (Brown, 1967: 299–307). Its success was
due not just to his being on the victorious side, but to its encyclopedic display
of pagan cultural capital in a Christian context.
There were intellectual consequences on the losing side as well. Theurgy
disappeared from philosophy after the failure of the pagan united front. It had
been an alliance of desperation in the heat of battle. Now the vulgar elements
could be dropped, and the integrating structure of idealism was no longer
necessary. Aristoteleanism and materialism made a comeback at Alexandria
and Constantinople (see the tail end of Figure 3.8). Ammonius (304) son of
Hermias, who held the Platonist chair at Alexandria in the late 400s, turned
from Neoplatonism back to Aristotle (CHLG, 1967: 316). John Philoponus,
a Christian and probably the last holder of a philosophy chair at Alexandria
before it was abolished by the emperor Justinian in 529, rejected Proclus’
hierarchy of spirits, and defended empirical science as more compatible with
the Christian God, creator of a material world. Philoponus attacked the idealist
elements of Aristotelean metaphysics, including the distinction between the
celestial realm of perfect mathematical motion and the sublunar world of
qualitative matter, and revived Stoic materialism and observational science
Partitioning Attention Space: Ancient Greece^ •^129