late 4th – early 5th century

Augustine: The Theory of Divine Illumination and His Major Works

According to Augustine, the human mind cannot know eternal truths either by its own powers or through the senses, but receives this knowledge by illumination from God: God the Word places in the mind the knowledge of the ideas that exist eternally in God. González points to the difficulty of the theory's Neoplatonic origin: in Plotinus the soul is itself divine, while in Augustine it is a creature. The Confessions (397–400) became a theological reflection on the self and the Creator, The City of God, a reply to pagans after the fall of Rome, developed a philosophy of history, and the Retractations reviewed all his earlier writings. Pelikan sees in The City of God and in the works of Eusebius the victory of apologetics in the language of history.