The writings of St Augustine (ad354–430) exercised a massive influence not only on the Western literary imagination but also on the development of medieval scholastic philosophy and theology,and the emergence of the Western mystical tradition. His doctrines also became central to the Renaissance and the Reformation. As the product of the Roman education system of the fourth century, he was one of a generation that absorbed in a highly eclectic fashion the themes that had been on the philosophical and theological agenda of pagan and Christian thinkers for more than four centuries and which stretched back to pre-Christian Stoicism and Hellenistic Judaism. During this period a kind of Platonism continued to be developed roughly contemporaneously with the rise and development of Christianity. Indeed, the early history of Christianity and the evolution of Christian asceticism can be described as the story of a selective incorporation of a range of Platonic insights into a Christian doctrine that explained the relationship between man and the created world and man and God. But we must be aware of the eclectic nature of both Christianity and Platonism in this period. Just as what scholars now call Neoplatonism was not a fixed quantity, neither was Christianity from its inception to c.ad600. Indeed, the term ‘Christian Platonism’ for the first 1000 years ad covers so wide a variety of differences that it is difficult to define it accurately as a single thing. By focusing on Augustine's Platonism, which was only one kind of Platonically influenced Christian thought, we intend to highlight what, arguably, became the most influential rendering of the Platonic tradition for the Christian Latin West.