It also spoke powerfully to the transformation of
Roman civic life, for Christians decided that they were unwilling to pay the cultural price of admission into the global economy at the time.
Over the course of his writing
life, Augustine combined a number of elements from his fragmented culture — Neoplatonic philosophy,
Roman civic morality, the heritage of the great
Roman poets, Manichaeism — with his dominant but open - ended Christian faith, into a new synthesis.