Antonia Armstrong

The third volume of Augustinus Magister, continuing the Acts of the International Augustinian Congress held in Paris in September 1954, completes a work which is both the most comprehensive account of and the most important contribution to Augustinian studies in our times. The first two volumes contained the individual papers contributed by members of the Congress. This volume contains the reports in which a number of distinguished scholars summed up these individual contributions and gave a general impression of the situation in the various subdivisions of the vast territory over which Augustinian scholarship and speculation ranges. These reports are often important original contributions in their own right, not mere summaries of other peoples’ conclusions; and their value is enhanced by the printing of accounts of the often lively discussions to which they gave rise. The volume also contains a number of additional communications by distinguished scholars which could not be included in the first two volumes, the opening and closing addresses, and a list of the participants in the Congress.

The two tractates forming the treatise of Plotinus, called rather misleadingly, to the modern mind, ‘On Providence’, have attracted attention mainly because of the remarkable stress laid in them on the doctrine of the Logos, which marks an interesting development of Plotinus' latest thought and brings the treatise into an apparently close relation to other systems with which the philosophy of Plotinus has little in common. I do not, however, in this article wish to discuss the Logos doctrine of these tractates, but rather to compare certain other aspects of the thought of the treatise with their probable sources in the work of earlier thinkers, and in particular to draw attention to a curious and unexpected parallelism of thought in one passage. I think that conclusions of some interest for the history of Greek thought in general can be drawn from such a comparison.