4. Saint Augustine. In Saint Augustine the Platonic
ideas became ideas in the mind of God, ideas in ac-
cordance with which He had created the world. In
the Wisdom of Solomon (11:20) one reads, “... Thou
hast ordered all things by measure and number and
weight,” a verse which during the Middle Ages was
understood to be the basis of all physical science. But
measure and number and weight were mathematical
ideas and since Neo-Platonism was highly colored with
Pythagoreanism, it became almost a rule to identify
the ideas in the mind of God with the mathematical
ideas. The identification was the easier in that numbers
were often associated with geometrical figures, being
at times squares and at other times cubes; the former
symbolizing surfaces, the latter solids. The ideas now
took on qualities that were almost magical: number
symbolism was dilated upon with the greatest enthusi-
asm and it is next to impossible to differentiate the
Neo-Platonic from the Neo-Pythagorean. In Augustine
the symbolism of numbers is dwelt upon at great length
and the numbers which he discusses stand for ideas.
Hence the ideas in the mind of God are really those
mathematical ideas in terms of which He ordered all
things.
This version of what might be called Christian Neo-
Platonism is the foundation of much that we know of
medieval aesthetic theory. It appears in the musical
theories of Boethius (A.D. 480-524) and even, as Otto
von Simson has shown (1956), in the shapes and pro-
portions of Gothic cathedrals. Wisdom 11:20 was to
be illustrated whenever Wisdom (Sapientia) herself was
pictured. And the notion that God created the world
after His archetypal ideas could be used to prove its
perfection and rationality. In short, if science was
possible, that was because Nature was an embodiment
of the divine wisdom.
