This piece attempts to locate the posthumously published study of natural theology in the Augustinian tradition which follows it within the life work of the American historian of philosophy Louis H. Mackey. It places the study within Mackey’s lifelong attraction to the Augustinian tradition both in its theological and philosophical expressions. It accounts for his attraction in terms of the light that tradition shines on the intersection of philosophy and literature in and through the self-consciously literary way it works with the relationship between language, meaning and reality. It is in this way that the tradition participates in the perennial dialectic of faith and reason. The study shows how Mackey uses the medieval chapters of the Augustinian tradition to identify an “anatomy” of the as yet unbroken tradition within Western philosophy, an anatomy that one finds again in his other philosophical interests: Kierkegaard and Derrida.
