PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH arguments Secondly, the narrative Augustine constructed out of biblical and classical elements provided the framework for philosophical discussion in the Latin world up to and beyond the Renaissance and the Reformation Augustine was one of the most interesting human beings ever to have written philosophy He had a keen and lively analytic mind and at his best he wrote vividly, wittily, and movingly Unlike the philosophers of the high Middle Ages, he takes pains to illustrate his philosophical points with concrete imagery, and the examples he gives are never stale and ossiWed as they too often are in the texts of the great scholastics In the service of philosophy he can employ anecdote, epigram, and paradox, and he can detect deep philosophical problems beneath the smooth surface of language He falls short of the very greatest rank in philosophy because he remains too much a rhetorician: to the end of his life he could never really tell the diVerence between genuine logical analysis and mere linguistic pirouette But then once he was a bishop his aims were never purely philosophical: both rhetoric and logic were merely instruments for the spreading of Christ’s gospel The Consolations of Boethius In the Wfth century the Roman Empire experienced an age of foreign invasion (principally in the West) and of theological disputation (principally in the East) Augustine’s City of God had been occasioned by the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410; in 430, when he died in Hippo, the Vandals were at the gates of the city Augustine’s death prevented him from accepting an invitation to attend a Church council in Ephesus The Council had been called by the emperor Theodosius II because the patriarchates of Constantinople and Alexandria disagreed violently about how to formulate the doctrine of the divine sonship of the man Jesus Christ In the course of the century the Goths and the Vandals were succeeded by an even more fearsome group of invaders, the Huns, under their king Attila Attila conquered vast areas from China to the Rhine before being fought to a standstill in Gaul in 451 by a Roman general in alliance with a Gothic king In the following year he invaded Italy, and Rome was saved from occupation only by the eVorts of Pope Leo the Great, using a mixture of eloquence and bribery 16