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Alexander's book, based on his doctoral dissertation, is concerned with an aspect of Augustine's thought during the period between his conversion and his entry into the ministry of the Catholic Church. This is the period which was subject in the first decades of the last century to debate over the question whether Augustine's conversion had really been to Christianity, or to a form of Neoplatonism. That debate has mercifully been laid to rest; but it has left a backwash of questions over his intellectual and spiritual development down to 395-6, but especially during the years before he assumed ecclesiastical office. It is now generally agreed that in these years Augustine's Christianity was strongly coloured by a form of Platonism current in the circle around Ambrose of Milan.
To any reader of those of his works produced in the five or six years after his conversion it is obvious that ecclesiology played no part, or, eventually, only a very modest part in Augustine's thinking. Nevertheless, if the account he gave later, in his Confessions, of the example given him by the conversion of Marius Victorinus is to be trusted, it is equally obvious...