Augustine on pagan knowledge of God and the Trinity

Abstract

Augustine narrates in Confessions, VII, ix, 13-15 his encounter with the Platonist books, which permitted him to grasp the immateriality of God and surprisingly the Christian Trinity too, a thesis that seems confirmed in the psychological arguments he puts forward in The Trinity, among other texts. However, a more fine-grained analysis shows that Augustine sets strict limits to the pagan, non-revealed knowledge of God, meaning that he doesn´t think the Neoplatonics professed the Trinity in the sense of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.