Note 417 — Chapter VIII · PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE (B) THE MAGIAN SOUL

“He is in truth the conclusion and completion of the Christian Classical, its last and greatest thinker, its intellectual practitioner and tribune. This is the starting-point from which he must be understood. What later ages have made of him is another affair. His own real mind, the synthesizer of Classical Culture, ecclesiastical and episcopal authority, and intimate mysticism, could not possibly have been handed on by those who, environed by different conditions, have to deal with different tasks” (E. Troeltsch, Augustin, die christliche Antike und das Mittelalter, 1915, p. 7). His power, like Tertullian’s, rested also on the fact that his writings were not translated into Latin, but thought in this language, the sacred language of the Western Church; it was precisely this that excluded both from the field of Aramæan thought. Cf. p. 224 above.