Augustine presents us with a complex phenomenon: a thinker in whose work the intellect is as central as it is to the Alexandrians and Cappadocians, but one whose approach is in the end decidedly different: the theme is pervasive and yet Augustine makes it his own. The complexity of his treatment is evident in the first instance simply because the intellect is the point at which many of his most cherished concerns intersect: wisdom and truth; illumination; the relation of body and soul and of this life and the next; the human person and the persons of the divine Trinity; beauty; virtue and vice; the hierarchy of being; contemplation and union with God. Augustine's treatment is conventional in the centrality of intellect to the overall scheme and the role accorded contemplation. Its distinctiveness subsists in its strong emphasis on love – and the consequent need to work out its precise relation to the mind – and the degree to which the theology as a whole is governed by the doctrine of the Trinity. The dominance of trinitarian theology in turn lends a markedly personalist flavour to the work that is less prominent in other writers in this period, and which is the distinctive note of Augustine's theology.

So strongly systematic is Augustine's theology that it becomes difficult to separate out any one strand from any other, so we begin at the centre of the knot, which is arguably the notion of order.