ARISTOTLE TO AUGUSTINE Augustine did not see himself, in his maturity, as a philosophical innovator He saw his task as the expounding of a divine message that had come to him from Plato and Paul, men much greater than himself, and from Jesus, who was more than man But the way in which succeeding generations have conceived and understood the teaching of Augustine’s masters has been in great part the fruit of Augustine’s own work Of all the philosophers in the ancient world, only Aristotle had a greater inXuence on human thought 115