The question of Descartes and Augustine is an old one, but it has never been answered satisfactorily, and it seems not to have been studied seriously for more than half a century. My work picks up from studies of Gilson and Gouhier dating mostly from the 1920s; and while I disagree with many of their conclusions, I do so with deep respect for their pioneering work, and I will be happy if this book has the effect of directing scholars' attention back to a line of inquiry that was too soon abandoned.

It may help to explain two things that this book is not. First, although I have already seen my title misstated in print as “Descartes and Augustinianism,” the book is not a study of Descartes and seventeenth-century Augustinians, or an attempt to relate Descartes to the Augustinian tradition. I am not sure there was an Augustinian tradition: this phrase suggests a series of thinkers reading Augustine through their predecessors, and distinguished by some common doctrine from thinkers outside the school. There was, in that sense, an Aristotelian tradition. But the history of Augustinianism is the history of the many revivals of Augustine by different thinkers, who have each discovered some new aspect of Augustine's thought, and seen in it a way to answer the philosophical or theological challenges of their own times.