Augustine's The Confessions Of St.

Christianity is what it is today because of the philosophical ideas of Plato and Aristotle. The ideas that they have presented a way of thinking that was different from what most of the world was accustomed to and therefore it shed light upon the viewpoint of many people. While their beliefs were not directly tied into religion, but they had followers who did so with their own views; Augustine shared views with Plato and Aquinas shared views with Aristotle.
Plato was the first philosopher out of the ones mentioned beforehand, and therefore it is safe to assume that all of their ideas tie in with his as he was the one who mentored Aristotle. Plato was a believer in the idea of metaphysical dualism, and as such his main philosophy can be summed
Platonism was the ideology the Plato had and a branch of this was known as Neoplatonism, which was what Augustine had taken to. (TeSelle) Neoplatonism was not as concrete in having one main idea, so it is important to pinpoint what Augustine’s take on it was. In an autobiographical work, The Confessions of St. Augustine, he writes on how Logos is the divine eternal world. In this writing he talks about the idea that the things being perceived are only a shadow of the intelligible world, “But having then read those books of the Platonists, and thence been taught to search for incorporeal truth, I saw Thy invisible things, understood by those things which are made.”(Confessions 68) In the search for the truth, he claims to find God in this method, as God is not material and therefore cannot be seen besides through the “shadow” he casts upon this world. Augustine has pointed out that God is not composed of matter, with this in mind, he must still be composed of something. This something that Augustine defined him as is “Good” and he notes that, “Those who accept this can live the good life even under earthly conditions, provided they look for blessedness to God alone, the supreme Good.”(Burleigh, 223) This idea was adopted by Christianity as a whole and can also be seen in the Bible when Jesus says, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.” (Matthew 22:37) Essentially loving God, is loving goodness, and this is the ideology of the Christian