Pagina 617 van 1391

But if he is defective in form, much more is he inferior to the

Greek in matter; he nowhere in his philosophical writings leaves

upon our minds the impression of an original thinker.

Plato's Republic has been said to be a church and not a state;

and such an ideal of a city in the heavens has always hovered

over the Christian world, and is embodied in St. Augustine's 'De

Civitate Dei,' which is suggested by the decay and fall of the

Roman Empire, much in the same manner in which we may imagine the

Republic of Plato to have been influenced by the decline of Greek

politics in the writer's own age. The difference is that in the

time of Plato the degeneracy, though certain, was gradual and

insensible: whereas the taking of Rome by the Goths stirred like

an earthquake the age of St. Augustine. Men were inclined to

believe that the overthrow of the city was to be ascribed to the

anger felt by the old Roman deities at the neglect of their

worship. St. Augustine maintains the opposite thesis; he argues

that the destruction of the Roman Empire is due, not to the rise

of Christianity, but to the vices of Paganism.