Augustine

Augustine of Hippo was the greatest of the Latin Church Fathers, and the thinker who did most to fuse the Greek philosophical inheritance with the Christian faith. In his Confessions he tells how 'the books of the Platonists' — the Neoplatonism of Plotinus and Porphyry, read in Latin — lifted his mind toward an incorporeal God and prepared his conversion, even as he came to find in them what he thought they lacked.

From that encounter he built a Christian Platonism that would govern Western thought for a thousand years: the eternal Forms reconceived as ideas in the mind of God, the soul's restless ascent toward the Good now toward the Christian God ('our heart is restless until it rests in Thee'), evil understood as the mere privation of good, and time and memory explored as no one had before. His City of God framed all history as the story of two loves.

Augustine stands, with Boethius, as the great channel by which the wisdom of the closing pagan schools passed, transformed, into the Christian Middle Ages — even as that same age, in his own lifetime, saw the suppression of the old religion.