The dramatic life-history and exuberant self-revelations of St. Augustine have obscured the debt which Christian philosophy owes to that less assertive convert and theologian, Victorinus. Yet since Augustinian Neoplatonism is derived from his writings and translations, he is the real link between Plotinus and the mystics of the Latin Church. A celebrated man of letters and a professor of rhetoric, he had been formed by Neoplatonic philosophy; and is said to have been the author of that Latin translation of the Enneads, which was chief among those “books of the Platonists” that provided St. Augustine’s stepping-stones to faith. The stir, not to say scandal, caused by his conversion—so vividly described in the “Confessions”—was justified: for the event was crucial in the history of western Christianity. After his conversion, which took the form of a re-interpretation, not an abandonment, of his old beliefs, he set himself to the creation of a Neoplatonic theology; in which the Plotinian triad, and doctrine of the soul’s precession and return to the One, appear almost undisguised. The One he tries to identify with the transcendent and immutable Father. “Son” and “Spirit” are to him two aspects of _Nous_; the fount of all substantial existence, and containing from eternity all things in their archetypal reality. The Son or Logos is “the Logos of all that is,” ever gushing forth from the “living fountain” of the Father. It was from Victorinus that Catholicism obtained the characteristic Plotinian notions of Deity as “ever active and ever at rest,” and of the life of reality as consisting in immanence, progress, and return, which meet us again and again in the writings of the mystics.