St Augustine 9781472541529, 9780826426611

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I lovingly dedicate this work to my wife, Anna Domini Topping, and to our children.

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Series Editor’s Preface

Education is sometimes presented as an essentially practical activity. It is, it seems, about teaching and learning, curriculum, and what goes on in schools. It is about achieving certain ends, using certain methods, and these ends and methods are often prescribed for teachers, whose duty it is to deliver them with vigor and fidelity. With such a clear purpose, what is the value of theory? Recent years have seen politicians and policy-makers in different countries explicitly denying any value or need for educational theory. A clue to why this might be is offered by a remarkable comment by a British Secretary of State for Education in the 1990s: ‘having any ideas about how children learn, or develop, or feel, should be seen as subversive activity.’ This pithy phrase captures the problem with theory: it subverts, challenges, and undermines the very assumptions on which the practice of education is based. Educational theorists, then, are trouble-makers in the realm of ideas. They pose a threat to the status quo and lead us to question the common-sense presumptions of educational practices. But this is precisely what they should do because the seemingly simple language of schools and schooling hides numerous contestable concepts that in their different usages reflect fundamental disagreements about the aims, values, and activities of education. Implicit within the Continuum Library of Educational Thought is an assertion that theories and theorizing are vitally important for education. By gathering together the ideas of some of the most influential, important, and interesting educational thinkers, from the Ancient Greeks to contemporary scholars, the series has the ambitious task of providing an accessible yet authoritative resource for a generation of

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students and practitioners. Volumes within the series are written by acknowledged leaders in the field, who were selected for both their scholarship and their ability to make often complex ideas accessible to a diverse audience. It will always be possible to question the list of key thinkers that are represented in this series. Some may question the inclusion of certain thinkers; some may disagree with the exclusion of others. That is inevitably going to be the case. There is no suggestion that the list of thinkers represented with the Continuum Library of Educational Thought is in any way definitive. What is incontestable is that these thinkers have fascinating ideas about education, and that taken together, the Library can act as a powerful source of information and inspiration for those committed to the study of education. Richard Bailey Birmingham University

Foreword

Questions of education are prominent within the politics of both developed and developing worlds. For the most part these are motivated by instrumental and, usually, utilitarian concerns. Whether the saying is genuinely ancient, there is proverbial good sense in the idea that if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, whereas if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime; and this thought is prominent in appeals for support of educational initiatives in the third world. Even in affluent societies, however, the instrumental idea is prominent. Education is to be promoted, invested in, designed, regulated, and assessed, with a view to providing young people with relevant skill sets, or equipping them for the knowledge economy, or with the aim of offering life-long learning to accommodate career change, or so as to enable older people to get the most out of retirement. Here the primary goals are clear enough: employment and enjoyment enabled and sustained by the effective management of time and talent. Of course, it will also be said that education is valuable on its own account, but even in universities this thought has to compete with the utilitarian justifications, and is itself often instrumentalized as if the point of education for-its-own-sake, is a kind of satisfaction or pleasure often associated with the process of learning but not essentially connected with it. Set against this are the reflections of the nineteenth-century thinkers about education John Henry Newman, John Stuart Mill, and Matthew Arnold, to cite just three from the society of Victorian Britain, who emphasized the character of education as a process of self-actualization in which various powers are awakened and developed toward the achievement of their proper objects, just as sight and hearing in the

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infant are developed and directed toward visual and auditory discriminations. These powers are broadly cognitive, affective and volitional, shaped and conditioned by the structure of the human body and by the character of the surrounding society. It is tempting to say that for Newman, Mill, and Arnold the main point of education is knowledge, but that is at best unhelpful, and at worst misleading. First, knowledge itself distributes analogically across a range of areas: theoretical-knowledge, practical-knowledge, emotional-knowledge, etc., themselves variously subdivided, so that to speak of knowledge simply is not to say very much. Second, the acquisition of knowledge per se, like the development of skill, may be trivial and even dangerous. What these classically trained thinkers were keen to distinguish was knowledge in the sense of the acquisition of new information, and understanding in the sense of the comprehension of the relations between things and the significance of these and of the totalities formed. To understand this alternative, ‘intrinsicalist’ account of the nature and value of education, one can do no better than go back to the writings of the great thinkers in whom it was developed. Alfred North Whitehead wrote that the development of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, and to the large extent that this is true it is true in general and especially true of the main tradition in the philosophy of education. Yet there is a very obvious, even if overlooked, factor that shaped the way in which the Platonic influence expressed itself in the late Hellenic, medieval, and early modern worlds, namely Christianity, and in particular its idea of human beings as in some way conflicted in mind, heart, and will. What we need, then, is an account of how these theological ideas engaged with and modified the Platonic account of the human psyche and of the activities through which it is awakened and in which it may be directed toward some kind of fulfillment. There is no better point of focus in seeking such an account than the thought of Augustine who in his own person combined the idealism of Plato and the realism of St. Paul. Ryan Topping writes that ‘Behind every discussion of pedagogy, texts and educational outcomes lies a conception of the human person’ and he continues, ‘For Augustine the primary subject of philosophy is

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man in his origin, nature and destiny. Other questions matter only in relation to this one: What is our purpose?’ The truth, precision, and economy of these remarks are symptomatic of the character of his study as a whole. He addresses himself to three tasks: to introduce us to Augustine, the man and the thinker; to provide an exposition, analysis, and assessment of relevant parts of Augustine’s writings; and to put Augustine into relation to other thinkers on education, so as to form a view of what he has to offer to us today. In all respects, Topping’s work is of real interest and value and it provides both a resource and a challenge for those thinking about what we need and can hope for in the development of liberal education. John Haldane University of St. Andrews

Acknowledgments

I should like to thank a number of friends and colleagues who kindly offered criticism on the following, among them: Peter Burnell, Raymond Canning, Darlene Kelly, Alan Reese, Matthew Siebert, Michael Siebert, and Carl Still. My thanks are due also to Vivian Boland OP and James Muir for commenting on the manuscript and to John Haldane for offering the Foreword. Over the duration of my work on this book I benefited from the generous institutional and financial support given by St. Thomas Moore College, Saskatoon, Canada. Finally, permission to reprint ‘Augustine on Liberal Education: Defender and Defensive’ The Heythrop Journal 51 (2010): 377–387 and ‘St. Augustine, Liberalism, and the Defence of Liberal Education’ New Blackfriars 89 (November 2008): 647–690 is here gratefully acknowledged.

Abbreviations

Works by St. Augustine 83 Quest. bapt. b. vita c. Acad. c. ep. Man. c. ep. Pel. c. Faust. c. Jul. c. mend. civ. Dei. conf. doc. Christ. ench. en. Ps. ep. f. et op. Gn. adv. Man Gn. litt.

De diversis quaestionibus octoginta tribus (Eighty-Three Diverse Questions) De baptismo (On Baptism) De beata vita (On the Happy Life) Contra Academicos (Against the Academicians) Contra epistolam Manichaei quam vocant fundamenti (Against the Letter of Mani Called Fundamental) Contra duas epístolas Pelagianorum (Against two Letters of the Pelagians) Contra Faustum Manicheum (Contra Faustus the Manichean) Contra Julianum (Against Julian) Contra medacium (Against Lying) De civitate Dei (The City of God) Confessiones (Confessions) De doctrina Christiana (On Christian Teaching) Enchiridion (The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Love) Ennarationes in Psalmos (Ennarations on the Psalms) Epistula (Letters) De fide et operibus (On Faith and Works) De Genesi adversus Manicheos (On Genesis Against the Manichees) De Genesi ad litteram (On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis)

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lib. arb. mag. mend. mor.

mus. ord. perf. just. quant. retr. rud. s. s. Dom. mon. sol. tract. trin. util. cred. vera rel.

Abbreviations

De libero arbitrio (On the Freedom of the Will) De magistro (On the Teacher) De mendacio (On Lying) De moribus ecclesiae catholicae et de moribus Manichaeorum (On the Morals of the Catholic Church and the Manichees) De musica (On Music) De ordine (On Order) De perfectione iustitiae (On the Perfection of Justice) De animae quantitae (On the Greatness of the Soul) Retractiones (Reconsiderations) De Catechizandis rudibus (Instructing Beginners in the Faith) sermones (Sermons) De sermo Domini in monte (On the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount) Soliliquia (Soliloquies) In Johannis evangelium tractatus (Tractates on the Gospel of John) De Trinitate (On the Trinity) De utilitate credendi (On the Usefulness of Belief) De vera religione (On True Religion)

Titles of classical and patristic works are, in almost all cases, abbreviated according to the conventions of the Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd edition, ed. Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth (1996), Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 1

Approaching Augustine

Introduction With over 300 scholarly books and articles dedicated to his life and thought each year, Augustine is one of the few ancient thinkers who continue to excite. In every age he has exercised an influence in the West on Catholics and Protestants, as well as scholars otherwise alienated from Augustine’s religion, who regularly look to him for insight. While Augustine’s reputation is secure, familiarity with the basic suppositions of his thought is far less common among those with no professional obligation to be better informed. Indeed, and not just among those unacquainted with his works, many associate Augustine primarily with his reputation for capricious conclusions about women, about hell, and about sex. However one appraises Augustine on such topics, the disproportionate attention that they receive in conversations over coffee and in classrooms (whenever his name comes up) surely tells us far more about the preoccupations of our own time than about Augustine. A neophyte approaching Augustine without the benefit of years of study is bound to wonder what past ages found attractive. Must you share Augustine’s religion to find his philosophy persuasive? What from among his reflections on education remains relevant for own time? The laudable aim of this series, and hence of this book, is to initiate readers into the tradition of philosophical thinking about education in the West. Part of the task of the interpreter who aims to reach more than a specialized audience is to build bridges, where possible, as well as to identify sign posts and themes that provide a basic orientation to Augustine’s thought. That is the purpose of this introductory chapter. Only in the midst of describing something of Augustine’s biography, the circumstances of his writing, and his intellectual development will it then be possible to turn to his specifically

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educational ideas with profit and with pleasure. This encouragement is needed especially when we realize that, by some descriptions of philosophy, Augustine has no educational philosophy at all.

Augustine’s life and times Edward Gibbon’s Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire (1788) consigned the period of the Late Roman Empire to virtual historical oblivion for many generations of European scholars (O’Donnell, 2001, 8). That trend has now passed. Recent years have witnessed an awakened interest in ‘late antique studies.’ No longer do historians view the end of the ancient world as a simple narrative of decline and fall, of the advance of barbarism over civility, and as an age without intellectual contributions. With the mid-twentieth-century work of scholars such as Peter Brown and Henri Marrou, interest in Augustine’s life and times has dramatically increased, and so with it our understanding of the period of the close of Roman rule and its transition to the successor empires. Subsequent chapters will give attention to Augustine’s development of educational concepts; here we begin by sketching only the barest outline of his life.1 By Augustine’s time, Roman North Africa had enjoyed the benefits of empire for several hundred years. United in prosperity and by culture, in a significant way in the fourth century Rome was Athens was Carthage. Educated people read the same books. They shared the same philosophical ideas. And they were awarded similar privileges. Augustine’s African birth did not separate him from Greco-Roman civilization. He was steeped in the common rhetorical and philosophical tradition of Latin late antiquity that looked back, among others, to Cicero, to Virgil, and to Varro. By the time of his birth, for instance, Augustine’s family had been Roman for a century and a half.2 He was as Roman as the children of fifth and sixth generation Irish immigrants to Boston today are American. In secular learning, Roman Africa looked back to Apuleius of the third century and would look forward to Martianus Capella in the fifth.3 Christianity in Africa, too, had a distinguished history. Augustine and his contemporaries built upon a

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theological tradition that was carried across the Mediterranean to their shores by Christian missionaries of the second century. From the third century, Africa could boast of Tertullian and the martyr bishop St. Cyprian among its sons (Daniélou, 1980; Merdinger, 1997). Immersed in the particular history and struggles of the African continent, Augustine nonetheless shared in the larger experience of the Catholic Church and of the Roman Empire in his time. Born of a Christian mother and a pagan father in A.D. 354, Augustine lived and died between two worlds and two ages, between pagan antiquity and the Christian Middle Ages. From his small town of Thagaste, now in modern Algeria, Augustine went on to study grammar in Madauros, then rhetoric in Carthage. As a young man he took up teaching posts in Rome and eventually in the Western Imperial capital of Milan. After his conversion, Augustine walked away from his official appointment as court rhetorician in Milan. Throwing aside what promised to be a brilliant career, Augustine spent the 9 months after leaving his post on retreat with friends in preparation for baptism at the hands of Ambrose at the Easter vigil of 387. Prior to his conversion, Augustine had been attached to a religious sect founded by a Persian prophet, Mani (A.D. 216–277). The Manichees taught that matter and spirit were controlled by competing gods. They also promoted a rational approach to religion that depended on reason, not on faith (util. cred. 3.7; Coyle, 2001). Unlike the Catholics, Mani and his disciples, adopting an early version of the historical-critical method of scriptural interpretation, appealed only to those portions of the Bible which appeared amenable to reason (util. cred. 3.7). What led, ultimately, to Augustine’s disenchantment with the sect was his philosophical examination of their cosmological claims. As a feature of their system Manichees claimed not only knowledge of religion but also of science, and in particular, that they could predict the motions of the heavens. As Augustine discovered, however, these predictions compared unfavorably with Greek scientific and philosophical models (conf. 5.3.3–4). Moreover, at about the same time Augustine discovered a Christian community in Milan whose members attracted him both by the sanctity of their lives and the sharpness of their intellects (conf. 5.12.22; 6.9.15). The Milanese circle was comprised of Christians

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who fused Platonic philosophy with the allegorical interpretation of the Bible. At the heart of this community presided Ambrose (ca. 340–397). It was Augustine’s contact with Ambrose, above all, that drew him at last out of his association with the Manichees into the community of the Catholic Church. Augustine saw this meeting as providential. ‘I was led to him by you, unaware that through him, in full awareness, I might be led to you’ (conf. 5.13.23). Adept in classical philosophy, Ambrose was a forceful preacher and a skilful diplomat. His preaching opened up to Augustine a new method of reading Scripture. Although the allegorical method was already well known in the East at least since Origen, Augustine had no experience of it, and, as is not uncommon among young people, despite having a devout mother, Augustine himself had no idea that Christianity included within itself a coherent philosophical outlook. Prior to meeting Ambrose, Augustine’s acquaintance with Catholic philosophy had been mediated to him through the lens of its Manichean opponents. Now, Catholic doctrine at least became credible. ‘More and more my conviction grew that all the knotty problems and clever calumnies which those deceivers of ours had devised against the divine books could be dissolved’ (conf. 6.3.4).4 In the months leading up to his baptism on 24 April 387 Augustine organized his first experiment in Christian community, at Cassiciacum.5 This is the name of the tiny Italian Villa, 21 miles North-East of Milan where for 9 months Augustine and a small group of family and friends enjoyed precious days of prayer mixed with lively conversation. During the day they read Virgil and discussed philosophy. At night Augustine wrote books. Important for the history of Western education and theories of knowledge, the four texts from this period are known as the Cassiciacum dialogues (which we shall return to in subsequent chapters). Augustine had given up a spectacular career as a teacher. After the long struggle that had brought him to faith, Augustine hoped that his new life would consist of quiet contemplation in the company of friends. This was, after all, the ancient philosophical ideal of otium, or philosophical leisure. Events did not unfold as he had planned. After baptism Augustine never returned to Cassiciacum, although he did form another community, this time nearer to home, in Thagaste. These servi Dei, servants of God, as they were called, were all laymen, dedicated to prayer

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and study, and it was among these that Augustine lived a semimonastic life for 2 years. But in 391, and quite against his will, Augustine had to abandon this too. He was ordained a priest, and 4 years after that, bishop of Hippo. In a homily some years later, Augustine candidly recounted before his people how it was that he came into the public ministry: I, whom by God’s grace you see before you as your bishop, came to this city as a young man; many of you know that. I was looking for a place to establish a monastery, and live there with my brothers. I had in fact left behind all worldly hopes, and I did not wish to be what I could have been; nor, however, was I seeking to be what I am now. I have chosen to be nobody in the house of my God, rather than to dwell in the tents of sinners (Ps. 84.10). I separated myself from those who love the world; but I did not put myself on an equal footing with those who preside over Churches. Nor did I choose a higher place at the banquet of our Lord, but a lower, insignificant one; and he was pleased to say to me, Go up higher (Lk 14.10). So much, though, did I dread the episcopate, that since I had already begun to acquire a reputation of some weight among the servants of God, I wouldn’t go near a place where I knew there was no bishop. I avoided this job, and I did everything I could to assure my salvation in a lowly position, and not to incur the grave risks of a high one. But, as I said, a servant ought not to oppose his Lord. I came to this city to see a friend, whom I thought I could gain for God, to join us in the monastery. It seemed safe enough, because the place had a bishop. I was caught, I was made a priest, and by this grade I eventually came to the episcopate. (s. 355.2)6 Once a bishop, Augustine’s days were spent preaching, writing, and administering an unwieldy diocese in a modest provincial town. In 430, as the Vandals laid siege to his city and to his people, Augustine lay dying, his last 10 days spent alone in his room, weeping and praying over the seven penitential psalms in preparation for his final departure. The city held out for at least 14 months. Shortly after the siege the Vandals destroyed the city by fire (v. Aug. 28). In bare form, the above describes Augustine’s life and times. If all we knew of Augustine came from what others said of him, he would

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remain an attractive figure among the great philosophers and saints in the Western tradition. But that of course is not all we know of him. What Augustine thought most important for others to know about himself he conveniently and beautifully set out in his Confessions. Of all Augustine’s writings, the Confessions exercise a unique attraction both because of its compelling argument and the attractive way that its story is told. But like a river from its current, in Augustine’s telling one cannot separate the two: narrative and argument combine into one form. From the opening lines, the reader finds himself swiftly caught up in a tale that is at once Augustine’s and the reader’s own. All that Augustine expects from us, his readers, is curiosity mixed with a natural interest in our own happiness. From there Augustine catches his readers by moving seamlessly between his particular life – the events, the feelings, the frustrations unique to Augustine of Hippo – and the universal aspirations that all people suffer and, since Christ, can hope to fulfill. The argument of the Confessions is announced in its opening lines. Magnus es domine, et laudabilis valde. ‘You are great Lord and worthy to be praised’ (conf. 1.1.1). The supreme good is also the one object most worthy of our affection. Into this scale, from Creator to creatures, has been inserted man, homo. Man is unique because he bears the capacity to know and to mirror in himself, through the structure of his own affections, the right ordering of creation. Et laudare te vult homo, aliqua portio creaturae tuae. ‘And man desires to praise you, a little portion of your creation’ (conf. 1.1.1). To discover this task is to know our greatest work; to complete it is to achieve our deepest satisfaction. Augustine believes this vocation to be common to all people. He believes it is one that also must be nurtured. The location of man between beasts and the divine is a common enough theme within ancient (as well as modern) literature.7 Being bodily, we share in the likeness of beasts and the rest of the material world; being rational, we are like the angels: in rendering praise to the creator, men and women lift themselves up first, then along with them everything else, back to God. As others have shown, philosophy in the ancient world was a way of life, a set of disciplines as much as a method of debate, a form of community practiced alongside and sometimes in competition with religion (Hadot, 1995; Dillon, 2004). In these opening lines of the Confessions, however, Augustine articulates how he thinks Christianity supersedes

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ancient philosophy in two respects: by offering a more complete description of the cause of human misery and by providing a more certain method of its remedy. First, the problem: homo circumferens testimonium peccati sui. ‘Man is carrying the testimony of his own sin’ (conf. 1.1.1). Centuries earlier the Apostle Paul had interpreted death as a consequence of sin. Augustine accepts this. The human mode of being is radically circumscribed. Neither scientific discovery, nor healthy living, nor psychological stability can revoke our slide into the grave. From the moment of our beginning we hurtle toward that destiny by an irresistible force. In Augustine’s view God’s punishment is severe; but it is also just. Moderns often have difficulty sympathizing with the Augustinian view of sin and divine punishment. We often find it difficult to comprehend why a benevolent Deity would wish us harm? Certainly there have been some renderings of Augustine that speak of reward and punishment as something extrinsic, almost as though these were imputed entirely from the outside. Without digressing too far, I here point out that in Augustine’s interpretation of sin, death is not an arbitrary punishment. Rather, as a consequence of sin, death is the logical, necessary, and indeed proportionate effect of human perversion. As the negation of goodness, sin is nothing other than a turning away from this supreme good toward lesser goods; to sin is simply to substitute some creature for God (doc. Christ. 1.22). Augustine’s claim is that when we refuse the joy of God’s presence even goodness itself becomes painful for us, similarly to the way that a sick man has no taste even for bread. In addition to death human beings also suffer from a distinct type of sadness that Augustine calls inquietus. Inquietus rendered literally is restlessness or agitation. It describes the mental state somewhere between anxiety and frustration, where the first is fear without knowledge of its object and the second is the known failure to achieve it. He calls the heart restless both because it knows that it wants happiness and knows not what happiness would be. The English metaphysical poet George Herbert (1593–1632) comes close to capturing this sensation, I think, in his poem, The Pulley. There we read that at the beginning of time God lavishes upon humankind every gift but one: rest. When God at first made man, Having a glasse of blessings standing by;

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Let us (said he) poure on him all we can: Let the worlds riches, which dispersed lie, Contract into a span . . . Yet let him keep the rest, But keep them with repining restlesnesse: Let him be rich and wearie, that at least, If goodnesse leade him not, yet wearinesse May tosse him to my breast. Let him be rich and weary: that at least if goodness lead him not, yet weariness may toss him to my breast. Rest in other words is the one gift even God cannot impart to us without our cooperation. Our perpetual longing to recover this peace is what Augustine means by inquietus. By starting his Confessions with this universal experience Augustine assumes in his readers no prior philosophical or religious commitment.8 And, one reason that Augustine’s Confessions maintains its universal appeal is, surely, because it is easy to insert oneself into. Augustine begins where everyman begins. So much for the problem. The solution, in Augustine’s autobiography at least, comes in the form of a mediator, or rather, of several mediators. Now, a mediator unites. Christ, being at once God and man, draws together two natures like none other (cf. civ. Dei. 9.17), and because Christ partakes in both, he is able to restore again the friendship that human willfulness ruined. But Augustine tells of us other mediators as well. Again from the opening lines, he writes of his discovery of faith through the humanity of God’s son (per humanitatem filii tui) as this knowledge was excited through the ministry of God’s preacher (per ministerum praedicatoris tui) (conf. 1.1.1). Augustine’s parallel use of the preposition per (through, by the agency of ) alerts us to this causal symmetry. We need God, yes; but we cannot come to faith without the aid of others. Our education from ignorance to knowledge, darkness to light, may be possible because of Christ, but it is only made actual through Christ’s ‘body,’ the Church. Augustine’s transformation came foremost through the preacher Ambrose. To be sure, the climax of book 7 of the Confessions retells the philosophical reasons – discovered with the help of the Platonists – that make necessary a divine mediator. But it was the preaching of Ambrose, bishop of Milan (374–397),

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which helped convince Augustine that it was this same Jesus Christ, attested to in the Scriptures, who actually fulfills this role. Augustine needed both argument and example: the philosophical proof for immaterial substance given by the Neoplatonists as well as the credible witness of the Church that Christ was the true mediator. From there Augustine could pass through Platonic philosophy to its Christianized and orthodox form. One implication we are meant to draw from the Confessions is that revelation takes an ecclesial form in that a particular community, the Church, carries the transmission of revelation through time. To illustrate this Augustine includes the exchange between a priest and a certain philosopher who wished to be a Christian without making his profession public. Victorinus’ claim was that, as a philosophical believer he did not need the external signs of religion. To this Simplicianus replied: ‘I shall not believe that or count you among the Christians unless I see you in the Church of Christ’ (conf. 8.2.5). Augustine’s argument is that one cannot experience the liberation of Christ unless one is grafted into the community he established, of whom Ambrose, as bishop, was a mediator and symbolic representative. As an earlier African theologian, St. Cyprian, famously wrote, ‘He can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother’ (De unit. 6). We of course also learn a great deal about Augustine’s life from his other writings. Particular mention here should be made of one of the last projects Augustine worked on, his Retractations. These writings provide another insight into Augustine’s view of his vocation as a public intellectual. Beyond the daily round of preaching, teaching, and administrative work, Augustine devoted an enormous effort to writing. His oeuvre comprises treatises, letters, sermons, Biblical commentaries, even a political song, and is the most extensive record of any writer in antiquity. Already in his life, Augustine’s works were in wide circulation, read across the Empire. Instead of updating his Confessions to include his life after baptism Augustine turned his gaze backward, and to his library. At age 73 Augustine began the task of rereading all 90 of his works on record in his library. Why did he do this? And what does it tell us about his understanding of himself as an author? Before answering this it is crucial to recognize the singularity of his project. Such a catalogue had no precedent, and has not on this scale been

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repeated. On Sunday of 26 September A.D. 426 Augustine gathered together his priests, two bishops, and a full congregation to present to them his successor. It was then and there settled that the priest Eraclius would, upon Augustine’s death, serve as their next bishop. Between then and Augustine’s death Eraclius would take on most of the old bishop’s duties. This left Augustine free to write, and to revise.9 Augustine’s friend and first biographer, Possidius, states plainly that Augustine wrote the Retractations to correct earlier mistakes: ‘In them he censured and corrected everything contrary to ecclesiastical usage, for he recognized them as compiled when he still knew and understood very little about such matters’ (v. Aug. 28). Evidently, such a project had been in Augustine’s mind for well over 14 years. In a letter to Marcellinus (ep. 143), for example, Augustine explained his desire to edit his past writings. Already in 412 he had envisioned a single text that marked the mistakes he had made throughout his lifetime as an exegete and apologist. With self-candor he reflected: ‘I admit that I strive to be among those who write as they progress and progress as they write’ (ep. 143.2). Over the next few years it is that progress which he would eventually scrutinize ‘with the severity of a judge, and make notes, as with a censor’s pen on whatever might offend him’ (retr. Prol.1). Most agree that Augustine has more to censure of his early works than his later, and that, apart from minor factual errors, the books written subsequent to his episcopal ordination are for the most part left intact (Lancel, 2002, 460). In answer to our question, then, Augustine appears to have taken on the project because of a double desire to engage in constructive self-criticism, as well as to ensure that he left a sound legacy for the future. Here is where a complicating motive enters. Augustine composed the Retractations with both friends and foes in mind. That anyone should acquire the necessary distance from oneself needed to critically assess all that one has said is remarkable; that anyone would do this without fault is perhaps unimaginable. As a result, in addition to finding errors in his own past, Augustine was at the same time on the defense. He wrote with an eye to his adversaries, who at that time were chiefly Pelagians. This means that at several places in the Retractations he is at pains to ensure that his writings not be used as ammunition for heretics. In view of this, some have accused Augustine of misrepresenting his earlier

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positions (e.g. on the relationship between grace and the freedom of the will in De libero arbitrio), and of not frankly admitting that as a young man he was as much a Pelagian as the real Pelagius would one day become. There seems to be truth to this.10 Occasionally, Augustine is not as reliable a guide as we might hope. But, regardless, with more humility than most, his main concern was plainly to ensure that errors – his included – were not perpetuated. And it is this desire not to be a stumbling block that tells us most, I think, about Augustine’s selfunderstanding of the intellectual apostolate. At the very least, what the Confessions and Retractations communicate, these two book-ends composed at the beginning and end of his episcopal ministry, is Augustine’s relentless search for transparency before the truth. He wished to be a teacher of truth; he desired to be faithful to the Church; he hoped his ideas would be improved upon where they could.11

Augustine’s intellectual development If knowledge of Augustine’s life and times is useful for the interpretation of his thought so also is an understanding of his development. We might explore, for instance, Augustine’s development with respect to religious coercion, his association with the Platonists, or his views of the unity of the Church. The two developments most pertinent to approaching his educational ideas, and which I single out for attention here, are Augustine’s conversion to Christianity and his discovery of ‘grace.’ All Augustine’s extant writings are Christian. Because Augustine’s early intellectual formation had immersed him in the texts of pagan antiquity, conversion required that he revaluate the classical tradition of his past. In his writings he makes constant reference to the ideas of past philosophers; it is in relation to these, as well as the writings of heretics, that Augustine typically articulates his own vision of Catholic truth. In particular, by entering the Church, Augustine believed that he had implicitly accepted a new method of philosophical reasoning. I mentioned above that the contemporary student must consider the possibility that Augustine has no philosophy of education to speak of. By this I meant not that Augustine failed to produce sophisticated ideas on pedagogy, but rather, that there is no obvious way of separating his

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philosophical arguments from his theological concepts, or his philosophical method from his theology. Here we stumble upon an important difference between Augustine and most contemporary philosophers. On the relationship between reason and faith, Augustine’s account differs in at least one remarkable way: he does not typically distinguish between the two orders of knowing. As Augustine set down early in his career, there ‘is not one thing called philosophy . . . and another called religion’ (vera rel. 5.8). Our habit of dividing philosophy from theology was not his. Ours, in fact, came as a consequence of two shifts in the history of Western philosophy, worth mentioning here so as to avoid misunderstanding Augustine elsewhere. The first shift came in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and at the birth of the scholastic method. With the introduction of Aristotle in the West, writers were forced to reflect on the ways that Christian doctrine related to secular knowledge. One lasting achievement of this encounter with Aristotle was the formulation of the scientific character of theology – a development that in crucial ways was an extension of Augustine’s own ideas (Wawrykow, 1995). Pertinent for us, the scholastics claimed that theology was a science at least in the sense of comprising a systematic body of learning (sacra doctrina) whose first principles could be expressed and reasonably defended.12 Of course Augustine also thought faith was rational, but his reflections on what makes a science are piecemeal, and often fail to specify, so it is sometimes asserted, precisely the ways in which sacred doctrine and philosophy differ. Scholastics conducted debates over the scientific character of theology, it should not be forgotten, at the moment of the university’s creation, and imparted to the West a set of analytical tools that made possible the systematic organization of knowledge and the disciplines.13 But if the scholastics developed the distinction between philosophy and theology, it was the early modern philosophers that called for their separation. From Immanuel Kant onward, faith was no longer understood to correspond to a set of true propositions about the world. It was redefined as an intuition or a feeling by despisers and by romantic defenders of religion alike in a common effort to make room for a scientific conception of the universe. In the twentieth century, this division was given perhaps its most crass expression in the position taken by

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A.J. Ayer. For logical positivists, statements were meaningful if and only if they asserted propositions that were either analytically true or empirically verifiable. In other words, statements must either be true by definition or point to something you can see, taste, smell, hear, or touch.14 This test purported, of course, to establish that metaphysical statements were, out of hand, nonsense. Thankfully, it is Ayer’s principle that has universally been acknowledged as nonsense; but the case illustrates well enough how relations between philosophy and theology in the modern era have fared. Though recent years have witnessed a revival of interest in religion within both analytic and continental traditions of philosophy, it will take some time before anyone will expect philosophers and theologians interested in questions of natural theology to arrive at the same conclusions (such as on the existence of God, or the immortality of the soul), let alone employ similar methods. Augustine recognized neither the medieval distinction nor the early modern separation. For him reason and revelation were equally gifts of God and equally sources of knowledge. Faith is more like a stage in one’s reasoned understanding than something alien to it. As Augustine claimed, ‘I believe in order to understand; and I understand in order to believe’ (s. 43.7). On the relation between faith and our knowledge of the natural world, he had little difficulty drawing the two together. There is one creator and one source of wisdom. The books of Scripture and creation are both works of the divine mind. Following from this – and here is the crucial step – Scripture and the Church’s tradition are as relevant to our philosophical reflection as is human nature and the cosmos. This Christian and Augustinian concept of the unity of all truth had a revolutionary impact on Western educational thought. For one thing, it helped establish a context favorable to the growth of natural philosophy.15 We may illustrate how this Augustinian conception of the unity of natural and supernatural sources of truth encouraged progress with reference to one episode in the history of astronomy. In his own debate with theologians and scientists, Galileo Galilei appealed to Augustine’s famous doctrine of the two books in defense of his own experimental theories in astronomy. In Galileo’s famous Letter to Christina the Grand Duchess of Tuscany (1615), for instance, he underscores the harmony of

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the truths of nature and Scripture by appealing to Augustine’s Literal Commentary on Genesis, from which Galileo takes this citation: It is to be held as an unquestionable truth that whatever the sages of this world have demonstrated concerning physical matters is in no way contrary to our Bibles; hence whatever the sages teach in their books that is contrary to the holy Scriptures may be concluded without any hesitation to be quite false. And according to our ability let us make this evident, and let us keep the faith of our Lord, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom, so that we neither become seduced by the verbiage of false philosophy nor frightened by the superstition of counterfeit religion.16 As Galileo correctly said, for Augustine Scripture cannot lie. Neither, in Augustine’s view, can the Bible contradict a known truth of natural philosophy. In other words, there cannot be contradictory truths: simply, all truth belongs to the treasury of Christian wisdom. Indeed, the Christian welcomes truth wherever it may be found: ‘Any statements by those who are called philosophers, especially the Platonists, which happen to be true and consistent with our faith should not cause alarm, but be claimed for our own use, as it were from owners who have no right to use them’ (doc. Christ. 2.144). If both the ancient philosopher and Augustine seek the truth, why then do they arrive at different conclusions? Augustine’s claim is that ancient philosophers arbitrarily limited themselves to nontemporal sources of truth. To understand this claim it is worth reflecting for a moment on what it means to give an argument at all. Obviously training the mind requires the ability to reason, and thus, to argue well. How does one do that? Christianity brought to Augustine a new understanding of method in philosophy, and in return, Augustine adopted a novel approach to education that diverged in important ways from views commonly held in the classical world. Aristotle had pointed out that every argument could be divided into three parts: its premises, conclusion, and the inferences in between. Mathematical and some types of philosophical arguments are deductive in nature; they begin from general principles and move to particular conclusions. Argument in the natural sciences proceeds in the opposite

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direction. There, when someone wishes to prove a physical ‘law’ or establish the nature of some pattern of interaction, the scientist first posits a hypothesis. Data pertinent to the hypothesis are gathered. Conclusions are then inferred. Such conclusions will stand until either someone provides a more elegant explanation of the phenomena, or points to additional phenomena that the theory cannot take into account, and so on. In principle, the philosopher proceeds in just this way. He too remains attentive to the facts of our experience; he too searches for the best explanation. One difference, however, is that the philosopher is interested in more than merely physical interactions and causes. The philosopher also studies the operations of correct reasoning (logic), the patterns of human conduct (ethics), and the nature of being in general (metaphysics). Since his objects are not only material, methods in addition to empirical observation are needed. The point is that for the philosopher as for the natural scientist, nature is the norm from which you begin your study. Augustine accepts this. In his view, the Christian search for understanding is like the philosopher’s in that it also utilizes dialectic, but it shares in the natural scientist’s interest in observable phenomena. The world of becoming can teach us too. In particular, and against the ancient Platonists, Augustine argued that miracles, prophecies, law, and history each need to be taken into account in one’s philosophical appraisal of being. ‘Such miracles are small things for God, but important for mortals, to inspire in them a salutary fear and to give them instruction’ (civ. Dei 10.17). The true lover of wisdom cannot rule out revelation. ‘So, then, we must repudiate all those who neither philosophize about sacred matters nor attach sacred rites to philosophy’ (vera rel. 7.12). He cannot ignore the works and deeds of prophets, and above all, the life of Christ. In short, historical revelation supplies a set of premises from which and to which the philosopher can and should argue in his search for understanding. The Augustinian philosopher can reason in both directions. Setting out from Christ’s incarnation, he may argue to the conclusion that I ought to lay my life down for my neighbor; starting from the fact that we fail to meet our moral obligations, he may reason (as St. Anselm later would in his Cur Deus Homo?) that a good God would have to send to earth a divine-human mediator.

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We can illustrate this Christian approach to philosophical argument with reference to Augustine’s treatment of the problem of evil. Augustine knows that Scripture unequivocally teaches that God is both all-powerful and all-good. However, it appears that many innocents suffer. How are we to reconcile these truths? It would seem that either God is not all good (for if he was he should not wish the innocent to suffer) or that he is not, in fact, all powerful (for if he was he would not allow the innocent to suffer). It is the concomitant affirmation of God’s goodness and power along with the objective reality of suffering that produces this dilemma. For Augustine, the Christian intellectual must indeed search for a solution. What he cannot do, however, is let go either of the phenomena or of the teaching of the Church. (Augustine’s solution was not to ascribe the cause of evil to God, as the Manichees did, but to the human will; evil is not a substance, but the negation of some good, whose origins rest in the will.) The methodological point is this: a Christian intellectual – as the modern day scientist – must find a theory which takes into account all sources of knowledge, all the ‘givens’ of the world. In terms of Augustine’s own development, after conversion he unequivocally regarded revelation as one more given, one more legitimate source of information about the nature of reality. Faith enlightens reason. It does so by pointing the mind to realities that reason then works to understand. This new conception of philosophical method shaped the way in which he approached all intellectual questions, including questions about education. A second feature of Augustine’s development relevant to his educational ideas is his discovery of grace. After his conversion Augustine spent a number of years as a layperson, reading, writing, and speaking on philosophical and religious questions, mostly in the close company of friends. After his ordination to the priesthood Augustine was faced with a new set of obligations. Chief among these was the duty to preach from the Bible. Augustine’s classical education had not adequately prepared him for this task and so, after ordination, he asked permission of his bishop to take a leave of absence, to study. It was during this early period of intense reading that Augustine came to understand St. Paul anew and made his ‘discovery of God’s grace.’ Augustine speaks of this as akin to a revelation. One result of his discovery, explored in his lengthy letter Ad Simplicianum, is that this led Augustine wholly to reconsider

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the power of the human will, or power of decision (voluntas) (cf. Wetzel, 1992b). Accounting for persistent intransigence had always been a problem among ancient philosophers. Platonists identified the good as the primary motivating reason for action. Since humans are rational, we act always for some end perceived as desirable, and thus, to know the good is to do the good. So at least went the argument. But if human nature is fundamentally rational what causes us so often to act otherwise? Every age has condemned murder and theft and yet every age has produced murderers and thieves. Why is this? One classical response was that in fact people who are obstinately wicked do not actually perceive what their true good is. In taking money from the till the thief invariably pursues a legitimate good (wealth), though he does so by illicit means. To correct vicious habits, the classical tradition recommended better education to those who could benefit. Augustine did not altogether disagree with this claim. Education, understood to include moral as well as intellectual formation, invariably shapes character. But after his discovery of grace Augustine gained an urgent sense of the captivity of the will, of the mind’s enslavement to the passions. Men and women cannot simply be habituated to virtue. They are not even free to follow the good as they choose. As St. Paul had written in his Epistle to the Romans: ‘I do not do the good I want’ (Rom. 7:15). By the time a child is subjected to the disciplines of education he is already wounded by evil. As Augustine argued, the primary cause of this condition is not lack of education, not even a poor environment; it is a psycho-spiritual malady, sin. Sin, not lack of education, is more fundamentally what damages our desire for the good. Accordingly, in addition to education, in addition to education and good habituation, what is needed is a power strong enough to heal the interior division of the will and disordering of the passions that is caused by sin. That power is grace.17 How does understanding these two developments in Augustine’s intellectual biography aid our interpretation of his fine educational writings? Concerning the first development, the reader must be attentive to the philosophical insights that are often scattered throughout a theological discussion. For example, when Augustine begins one of his educational manuals by asserting that ‘for human beings, wisdom is the same as piety’ (ench. 1, 2) the reader should not hastily conclude that the

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ensuing text is devoid of philosophical ideas. Rather Augustine is merely assuming a certain kind of readership. In that late work (written ca. 422 at the request of a friend named Laurence) Augustine launches into a summary of Christian teaching. It is the reader’s responsibility to recall that Augustine writes for someone who already accepts the first principles of Catholic faith. Defense of those principles, such as the certainty of God’s existence, can be found elsewhere (as in his Confessions, book 7). Augustine the Christian intellectual argues from faith and to faith. When turning to his educational ideas the modern reader should recognize that for Augustine arguments whose premises are drawn from Scripture are no less rational than those with premises drawn from common experience. It is simply that arguing in this way allows the Christian philosopher to assume principles that the unbeliever might not yet have discovered, and in this respect, to trace a line of reasoning further than it might otherwise be followed. When theological premises or conclusions are invoked then we must ask: how do these function within Augustine’s argument? Concerning the second development, knowing where in Augustine’s career a given text falls helps us to appreciate why he can say things at one time which seem to contradict what he says at another. Thus, Augustine’s earliest writings on liberal education (between 386 and 391) come in the period before his discovery of grace. Later writings, on catechesis, monastic formation, the education of children, and the educative force of law and social institutions nearly all come after this insight. This chronological difference goes some way in helping us understand the different emphases Augustine will bring to his treatments of teaching and learning – a topic we shall address when we take up Augustine’s writings on liberal education in Chapter 4.

Reading Augustine From the Confessions and other works, we discover what Augustine wished us to know about him. Equally important for us to consider is what we wish to know of Augustine. As we explore Augustine’s insights on education, it is helpful to reflect on what we hope to learn from reading his texts. In one sense there are as many answers to this as there are readers, though three basic approaches dominate. Two of these

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approaches can, I believe, present obstacles to a sympathetic appreciation of Augustine. The first is to read Augustine merely as a manualist. The focus of this reader is not particularly on the context of Augustine’s works or on reconstructing the polemical setting out of which they arose, but rather, on the conclusions and principles at which his arguments arrive. This method aims to discover in Augustine one or another opinion usually in the service of some preexisting doctrinal pattern. Often the manualist, or the analytic philosopher, looks to Augustine as a witness whose teaching either confirms or denies propositions that, for other reasons, have been placed under review. You would expect books of this genre to be titled ‘Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge’ or ‘Augustine’s Early Trinitarian Doctrine.’ Reading Augustine this way was in the past as likely to be motivated by Thomistic adulation as it is today by feminist depreciation. The second approach is the way of the social-historian. This method boasts Peter Brown as its finest representative, and has many imitators. Here the scholar’s primary work is to situate Augustine against the backdrop of his time. By making connections between Augustine and his contemporaries, Augustine and his sources, even Augustine and his own biography, the ablest among these draw the saint closer to our experience. The title of Brown’s famous biography, Augustine of Hippo, tells much. Brown’s subject is identified not according to ecclesiastical title but simply by the name of the city where he served as Bishop. Lively, intelligent, imaginative, this leading narrative of Augustine’s life and work has been called by one adroit reviewer, ‘biography without theology.’18 And so it is. But is it possible to write the story of the soul of a saint without recourse to metaphysics? Some think so. As Brown has recently reflected, when he sat down to write Augustine’s biography he wished to portray Augustine without refracting that image through the distorting influence of a theological lens. Indeed, he was ‘irritated by confessional claims, whether Protestant or Catholic, to privileged familiarity with Augustine’s thought and motivations’ (Brown, 2000, 494). The trouble is, the interpretation of human thought and motivations necessarily entails theories about good and evil, sin and redemption, or their denial. As in Brown’s case, casting theology aside will not render your approach religiously neutral. It simply means that you will

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rely upon some other set of terms, such as those supplied by social psychology. The third approach, and the one to which we shall aspire (in all but the final chapter), is that of the expositor. Ideally, this approach would mediate between the first two, adopting their virtues while avoiding their particular vices. The expositor too must know something of the contexts of texts, and he needs to have, to be sure, some sense of the author’s thought as a whole. But his focus lies elsewhere. More elementary than either of the first two methodologies, exposition is yet antecedent to them both. For to use or abuse Augustine in support of a doctrine, or to demonstrate how his thought reflects this or that feature of a given age, already presumes mastery of the primary evidence that one is looking at: namely, Augustine’s texts. The Marxist cannot read Marx through the lens of his dialectical materialism. The Freudian must set aside psychoanalysis if he wishes to learn Freud’s method of interpretation. Whatever theory of reading you might eventually adopt, you must first start-off simply and as a servant of the text. You must take the time to learn what it says and intends to communicate. All sound reading begins from here. It is important not to mistake my point: to say that exposition is more basic is not to disparage either the work of the manualist or of the social-historian. Each method has its place and either can become degenerate. Relating these hermeneutical observations to the field of education, the error that we need most to avoid, because it is most common, is to assume that Augustine’s comments on education are relevant only to his time and place. How could you know this in advance? Even if you were able to demonstrate that some of the conclusions that an ancient author arrives at are limited to their own time, it would not follow that everything they say is. Once you account for the material circumstances of Augustine’s writings – the causes, or sources that influenced him – you still would not have sufficiently explained why he said what he did.19 If we believed that all thought was conditioned by time or place then this idea also (i.e. the idea ‘all thoughts are materially caused’) would be just one more product of blind causation. It would be one more effect of impersonal forces. In sum, to commit oneself to a strictly materialist doctrine would be the suicide of all thought. It also makes us poor readers.

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Coming back to the interpretation of Augustine, one consequence of this modern mental habit of reducing an author’s thought to a product of his environment is that we tend, predictably enough, not to treat older philosophers and poets seriously. The habitual mistake of the young reader, newly initiated into the modern academy, is to view the writings of Augustine – or Plato or Shakespeare for that matter – merely as artifacts in the vast museum called ‘Western culture.’ This is a habit to be avoided. Whatever else this achieves, it drains great works of their vitality. It trivializes the thoughts of others and so locks us into that tiny box which is the present. Far more exciting it would be to suppose that Augustine may indeed be right that happiness is the striving of all action, or that God is the true fulfillment of our desire, or that the teacher is only the occasion of learning (and, perhaps, only later to discover that this is not true, and for what reasons), than not to have joined the conversation at all.20

The method of this book As I hope has become plain, there is much to discover in Augustine besides his views on sex, on women, and on hell (immensely interesting as these are). During his life, contemporaries recognized Augustine’s greatness and anticipated his future influence. St. Jerome, for one, called him ‘the second founder of the faith’ (cf. Jerome’s ep. 149). Thanks to the diligence of his friends, Augustine’s entire library was rescued from the Vandals before they ravaged Hippo-Regius. From there his works were copied and circulated throughout the West, enjoying an unmatched authority well into the thirteenth century. But even Augustine’s authority can be overstated. Since at least the Council of Orange (A.D. 529) believers have both acknowledged Augustine’s greatness at the same time as they have mitigated his philosophy; on the relationship between nature and grace, on predestination, and on the freedom of the will, the Catholic Church has judged that some Augustinian theses are overstated by him and others remain underdeveloped.21 For all his self-confidence Augustine presents a model of intellectual humility. As he famously wrote: ‘I should not believe the gospel except as moved by the authority of the Catholic Church’ (c. ep. Man. 5, 6). A fighter till

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the last, he himself never ascribed to his own opinions the primacy which some would afterward attribute to them. The reader who first confronts Augustine’s work can benefit immensely from acquainting himself with something of the biography, circumstances, and development of Augustine’s thought. Understanding Augustine’s turn to Christianity, his own reflections upon his classical education, and his discovery of grace, helps to illumine for the reader features of Augustine’s educational ideas. This background establishes a context out of which we can approach these texts. None of this, it goes without saying, substitutes for the hard work of reading. As per the purpose of this series, this study aims to be an authoritative introduction to the philosophy of one figure central to the history of Western educational thought, and my focus is on Augustine’s writings on liberal education in particular.22 This of course leaves much to the side. For instance, I say little of Augustine’s role as a public debater or an administrator;23 as regards law, I merely touch on his views concerning its pedagogical function;24 I speak not at all of Augustine’s practice of preaching, or of his role as a tutor.25 Subsequent chapters look at Augustine’s views of happiness, pedagogy, liberal education, and the relation between education and politics. Described differently, my exposition is of the aims of education (Chapter 2), the means of education (Chapter 3), its subject matter (Chapter 4), and its limits (Chapter 5). Because Augustine establishes his own theory of liberal education in conversation with ancient sources, a secondary aim of these chapters is to illustrate those ways in which Augustine both transmits and transforms the classical liberal arts tradition. Chapter 6 surveys Augustine’s contemporary and historical reception and, in particular, focuses on how his thought was adapted by Hugh of St. Victor, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Erasmus. The final chapter considers how Augustine’s thought could be marshaled in the defense of liberal education in our time.

Notes

Chapter 1 1

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The details of Augustine’s life have ably been described many times, beginning with his friend Possidius’ Vita Augustini and most recently by Peter Brown (2000), Serge Lancel (2002), and James O’Donnell (2005). Against those who would overemphasize the particularity of Augustine’s African identity see Lancel’s excellent discussion on the second century Romanization of North Africa in Saint Augustine (2002, p. 5). For an introduction to his life and writing see S.J. Harrison (2000); for Martianus Capella see William Stahl Harris’ introduction (1971) in Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts. From Ambrose, Augustine discovered the tools that he needed to overcome charges that the Manichees brought against the Bible, such as, that the precepts of the Old Testament were immoral (conf. 6.3.4–6.4.6). Augustine never forgot this lesson. As bishop he later worked out his own theory of Biblical hermeneutics. In so doing he expended great energy to ensure that others would not be deceived by the accusations of detractors as he was. He did not conclude that the literal meaning is to be ignored. If the message of a text of Scripture is clear, ‘it should not be treated as figurative and relating to something else.’ However, where the meaning contradicted a known precept of the faith, that text should be understood allegorically. ‘Any harsh and even cruel word or deed attributed to God or his saints that is found in the holy scriptures applies to the destruction of the realm of lust’ (doc. Christ. 3.39). c. Acad. 1. 1.4; conf. 9.3.5 and see the discussion by Serge Lancel (2002, p. 100). See Brown’s discussion of this text (2000, p. 131). The classic study of the history of this idea, amply illustrated, is Arthur O. Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being: The Study of an Idea, where, for instance, he recalls such lovely lines as these by Alexander Pope (1688–1744): ‘Superior beings when of late they saw/ A mortal man unfold all Nature’s law,/ Admir’d such wisdom in an earthly shape/ And shew’d a Newton as we shew an Ape.’ The theme of the soul’s journeying is by no means limited to Christian writers (though arguably, among all the literatures of the world, it is in Christian literature that this theme of the soul’s journey toward happiness

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Notes to Part 1

has been perfected – notably by Augustine and Dante). This impulse lay behind all epic literature, from Aeneas’ quest for a new country to Ibn Tufayl’s (d. 1185) search for a perfect Island (as in his philosophical novel Hayy Ibn Yaqzan). Details of the appointment of Eraclius are presented in Lancel (2002, pp. 457–58). A review of the evidence is given by Robert Dodaro (2004) in his Christ and the Just Society, pp. 80–94. It is perhaps unfortunate that many who interpreted Augustine in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Empire, and with it the widespread decline of liberal learning, didn’t take this lesson to heart, and so were unwilling to apply this very principle of correction to Augustine’s writings themselves. A sympathetic engagement with Augustine on topics where one author believes his ideas would need to be updated is found in the final chapter, ‘Augustinus redivivus,’ in Rist (1997). Thus, near the opening of the Summa Theologiae Aquinas asks utrum sacra doctrina sit scientia (whether sacred doctrine is a science?) and affirms that it is. His reply draws upon the authority of St. Augustine: ‘As Augustine says (trin. 14.1) “to this science alone belongs that whereby saving faith is begotten, nourished, protected and strengthened.” But this can be said of no science except sacred doctrine. Therefore sacred doctrine is a science’ (Summa Theologiae I q.1 a.2). Of particular note is St. Thomas’ commentary on the De Trinitate of Boethius whose fifth and sixth questions are conveniently published under the title The Divisions and Methods of the Sciences, translated and edited by A. Maurer (1986). Although the terms of the precise relation between philosophy and theology have been a matter for debate within the twentieth century, official Roman Catholic teaching continues to affirm the scientific character of theology. See, for instance, John Paul II on the lasting achievement of the scholastic formulation of theology as a science and the legitimate distinction between the two orders of knowledge Fides et Ratio (On Faith and Reason),§43–45, and the doctrinal instruction, Donum Veritatis (On the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian), § 9. Ayer published Language, Truth, and Logic in 1936 where the first definitive statement of his famous verification principle is found. To the specifically doctrinal patrimony of Christian monotheism must of course be added social and institutional factors. In his work Edward Grant (1996) helpfully explores the ‘social environment in the Middle Ages that eventually enabled a scientific revolution to develop in the seventeenth century’ (p. 171). There Grant points to three features which helped make possible the rise of science in Western Europe as nowhere else: (1) the translation of Greco-Arabic works of science into Latin; (2) the formation of the medieval university; and (3) the emergence

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of theologians who were at the same time natural philosophers (cf. pp. 171–91). De Genesi ad literam 1.21; text taken from Stillman Drake’s (1957) translation of Galileo’s Letter to Christina, in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, p. 194. On this see further Richard J. Blackwell (1991). In later life Augustine will acknowledge that Plato and Porphyry had some kind of doctrine of grace (see civ. Dei. 10.29). In his own development, however, it was reading St. Paul that supplied for him a notion that was absent, or at least incomplete, in the pagan philosophers. See Henry Chadwick (1986, p. 120), cited with comment by Brown (2000, p. 495). You would have merely confused causes for reasons. A cause explains a sequence of events; a reason is a motive for belief. No doubt some of our ideas arise precisely because of what might be considered material or efficient causes (we are affected by the beliefs of our parents, by the laws of our country, etc.); but the temporal beginning of our opinions speaks neither for nor against their veracity. C.S. Lewis (1970) applied a name to this fallacy of confusing causes for reasons, ‘Bulverism,’ in an essay bearing the same title and found in his collection, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. By adopting this now popular way of reading texts, contemporary students of education too frequently place themselves at a disadvantage. Apart from a training in the history of philosophy, and her cousin dialectic, the young teacher has few resources for adjudicating between conflicting claims about education that govern schools and the systems of modern education. For a brief survey of the Church’s judgments on these Augustinian theses see the concluding pages of E. Portalié’s (1960) magisterial A Guide to the Thought of Saint Augustine, pp. 321–29. One discovers common themes and distinctive theses, but there is little by way of a system to be found in Augustine. Mostly Augustine addressed problems as they arose; instead of finding a treatise on ‘love’ what you discover are treatises on how to do good in your family (De bono conguali), to your neighbor (De sermo Domini in monte) and to your enemy (epistla 188 to Marcelinus). Augustine’s treatments of education follow this same pattern. The danger of a systematic presentation of Augustine is of imposing a uniformity that Augustine himself wouldn’t acknowledge. And yet, that risk has to be run and I have tried, where possible, to embed within my exegesis a minimal amount of background to Augustine’s educational texts which I have relied upon. One might begin here with William Harmless’ (1995), Augustine and the Catechumenate.

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An excellent introduction is offered in J. Koterski (1980), ‘St. Augustine and the Moral Law,’ Augustinian Studies 11: 65–77. 25 P. Cary (1998), ‘What Licentius Learned: A Narrative Reading of the Cassiciacum Dialogues.’ Augustinian Studies (21.1): 141–63 and Laura Holt (1998), ‘Wisdom’s Teacher: Augustine the Teacher at Cassiciacum.’ Augustinian Studies (29.2): 47–61.

Chapter 2

The Aims of Education

Introduction Behind every discussion of pedagogy, texts, and educational outcomes lies a conception of the human person. For Augustine the primary subject of philosophy is man in his origin, nature, and destiny. Other questions matter only in relation to this one: What is our purpose? Indeed, not only for Augustine, every educational philosophy defines its ends according to some criterion of the good for human beings. As G.K. Chesterton once quipped, ‘Every education teaches a philosophy; if not by dogma then by suggestion, by implication, by atmosphere.’1 Therefore, to ask ‘What does it mean to be educated?’ is to consider what constitutes human flourishing. Opinions abound. We might define the human good according to economic indicators, such as wealth; or political goals, such as power; or the good of the body, health. Augustine considered and rejected each of these, for reasons we will examine below. In his view the proper aim of education is simply the happy life (beatitudo). Augustine’s educational philosophy begins from here, and so must we. We need to understand, in other words, Augustine’s vision of human flourishing and how this view determines the aims of education. As I hope to show, with the classical tradition Augustine accepts that human happiness is the result of virtue and, further, that what constitutes the nature of our happiness can be understood by rational argument. Happiness, in other words, is not a private affair. But unlike the ancients, Augustine posits love, not wisdom, as the highest virtue. He argues that although we must will to love according to an objective order of goods, we are incapable of properly ordering our loves without the help of God. We begin first with the concept of an end in education and after that explore its relation to happiness and virtue.

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Critical Exposition

The ends of education In what sense might happiness function as an end of education? Consider a father who, upon discovering that his 15-year-old son has been skipping class, tells him that he must stay at home for the next 3 weekends to study. Why does the father punish? One answer is, clearly, so that his son can make up for lost work. But we (or the recalcitrant son) might equally ask why he should demand that? One reply is so that his son can go on to university. Another is so that he will become virtuous. And these counters are legitimate. They separately answer the immediate and more proximate end or reasons for the father’s discipline. The concept of an ‘end,’ in other words, has multiple senses because we undertake actions for more or less remote reasons. In the example above at least two ends are sought, one immediate, another remote. The immediate end of the act is to cause the son to recover his lost lessons, to gain knowledge. The remote end is, let us say, to instill discipline, or virtue. But we could press further. The son might ask why good character is important. And after exhausting all the possible reasons why character is valuable (e.g. it will make you a better student, which will land you in a good university, which will increase your prospects for employment, allowing you to support your family, etc.), eventually your explanation must arrive at its limit. Unless you admit an infinite regress, there must be some good that you will for its own sake. That end is happiness. The ultimate ‘end’ of the father’s correction is so that his son may become happy. In the ancient world it was nearly a universal assumption that happiness is the product of virtue. Since virtue is the excellence of the soul, so the reasoning went, without virtue the soul cannot achieve whatever its perfection might be. Aristotle, for instance, defined virtues as settled dispositions that enable the person to produce some good. As he will write in the Nichomachean Ethics: every virtue ‘has the effect of producing a good condition . . . and of enabling it to perform its function well’ (Ethic. Nic. 1106a). Virtue is thus related to function, and function to natural ends. The natural end of an object depends, naturally enough, on the type of object under discussion. A horse, for example, may be called virtuous insofar as it has a strong gallop; an orange tree is virtuous which produces sweet fruit. As rational and highly complex

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animals, human beings require a wide range of virtues. To perform our natural functions well we need such habits as friendliness, self-control, and generosity. On this view, proficiency at joke-telling might also count as a virtue, since laughing is a distinctively human excellence (conf. 1.6.8).2 To speak of human virtue, in sum, is to name those perfections proper to our species. For Augustine this end of happiness (beatitudo) logically and practically governs the relationships between particular actions and their immediate and remote purposes. Similarly to the way Aristotle begins the Nichomachean Ethics,3 Augustine starts his philosophical reflections on the nature of the good life by appeal to the widest possible aim. He asks: ‘We wish to be happy, do we not?’ (b. vita 10). Of course we do. Happiness is the end unlike others because it is sought for its own sake. From his earliest writings he will appeal to the distinction between means and ends (a notion that becomes the direct object of scrutiny only later in his De doctrina Christiana, where he applies to this difference the terms uti and frui). Created things are to be used (uti); only God can be enjoyed (frui) (doc. Christ. 1.7). As Augustine is aware, we sometimes act as though happiness could be invested in material things. An automobile, for one, is very useful in Calgary, Alberta. But if your family has to move to London, England, you might consider selling your Ford truck in order to buy a pass on the Tube. Automobiles are merely instrumental or conditional goods. All material things such as houses, cars, and even healthy limbs, are limited in this sense. We want them for some other purpose. Accordingly, so Augustine claims, they could never serve as the ultimate end of education. On this, ancient philosophers and Christians agree, as Augustine observes in a sermon: In common, all philosophers strove by dedication, investigation, discussion, by their way of life, to lay hold of the blessed life. This was their one reason for philosophizing; but I rather think the philosophers have this in common with us. I mean, if I were to ask you why you believe in Christ, why you became Christians, every single one of you answers me truthfully: ‘For the sake of the blessed life.’ Therefore the urge for the blessed life is common to philosophers and Christians alike. (s. 150, 4)

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Augustine understood correctly that his own reflections on happiness as the final end of action stand in the midst of a long tradition of ancient philosophizing (a point I shall return to). Even today there remains common ground between nonreligious and religious accounts of the end of education, at least formally. As the twentieth-century British educational philosopher R.S. Peters (1966, 25) once wrote: ‘It would be a logical contradiction to say that a man had been educated but that he had in no way changed for the better.’ In Peters’s view the most basic end of education is to promote the human good. (It is not clear that the denial of such entails a logical contradiction, although it would undoubtedly offend common sense.) More recently, commenting on Peters’ observation, Robin Barrow and Ronald Woods (2006) in their standard Introduction to Philosophy of Education, 4th edn. concur that the formal definition of the end of learning must be to promote some vision of flourishing.4 In modern Catholic thought, too, this ancient insight has been preserved. In his encyclical Divini Illius Magistri (Education of the Redeemed Man) (1929), for instance, Pope Pius XI makes explicit the connection between happiness and learning. The pope noted that in the early part of the twentieth century there had been an explosion of novel approaches to education all seeking the traditional end, happiness. Catholic education shares this aspiration, the pope argued, provided that happiness is not reduced to material terms: The reason is that men, created by God in His image and likeness and destined for Him Who is infinite perfection realize today more than ever, amid the most exuberant and material progress, the insufficiency of earthly goods to produce true happiness either for the individual or for nations . . . . In fact, since education consists essentially in preparing man for what he must be and for what he must do here below, in order to attain the sublime goal for which he was created, it is clear that there can be no true education which is not wholly directed to man’s last end . . . 5 And that is where disagreements begin. To say that happiness is the proper end of learning is not to instigate a quarrel but to identify a common agenda: the work of philosophy is precisely to discover what

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constitutes this end. As Augustine continues in the homily cited above: ‘the question and the difference of opinion relate to where this prize, about which there is no dispute, can be found.’ So where lies the prize?

Happiness and learning We may say first what happiness is not. Happiness, in Augustine’s view, cannot be reduced to a pleasurable state of the body or of the mind. Consider first the goods of the body. From his earliest writings Augustine accepts as an ethical axiom that unchanging goods are preferable to material and changing goods. ‘Therefore, we do not have the slightest doubt that anyone setting out to be happy must obtain for himself that which always endures and cannot be snatched away through any severe misfortune’ (b. vita 2.11). Possessions that can be lost invariably disappoint. Material things suffer decay, and so could never qualify as the supreme good, an observation which Augustine regards not as an article of faith but of common experience. The pleasure that we derive from material things is always mixed with fear of their loss, is always covered over with a lengthening shadow. Remembering his state of mind prior to conversion, Augustine recollected his implicit trust in the superiority of the unchanging. It was unthinkable to him that God could be mutable: ‘With all my heart I believed you to be incorruptible, immune from injury, and unchangeable. Although I did not know why and how, it was clear to me and certain that what is corruptible is inferior to that which cannot be corrupted . . . ’ (conf. 7.1.1). Homes burn; cities are bombed; not even Assisi’s breathtaking Basilica di San Francesco (1228–1253) is immune from disaster.6 If Augustine is correct that secure enjoyment is necessary for happiness, it will not be discovered in the matter of any of these good things. But what of goods that are in the mind? Surely these are immune from damage? We could imagine someone who had attached himself, let us say, to this particular house or to that particular woman, respond that it is neither the wooden doors nor his comely wife that intoxicates but the idea of a home and the idea of love. Lovers die, but need love? Augustine came up to Carthage as a young student of rhetoric, and not unlike freshmen today, experienced at university his first taste of

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genuine freedom. At Carthage a delicious prospect opened up before Augustine: his desires were legion and the great university and port city did not disappoint. Veni Carthaginem et circumstrepebat me undique sartago flagitiosorum amorum. ‘I came to Carthage and all around me hissed a cauldron of illicit loves’ (conf. 3.1.1). Friendships certainly mattered to Augustine; and the death of one of his early companions left him moribund (conf. 4.3.8). But looking back he came to perceive a hollow quality in the tone of his sighs. During his university days what enamored Augustine was neither lovely things nor lovely persons but the idea of love. ‘I sought an object for my love; I was in love with love (amans amare), and I hated safety and a path free of snares’ (conf. 3.1.1). That little phrase amans amare is pregnant. Through his discussion of the psychology of the theatre (conf. 3.1.1–2.4), Augustine goes on to explore the problem with unhinging our desires from objects in the world, the error in loving the emotion which ideas and objects evoke rather than the realities themselves. His claim is that this way of loving sets our affections against the natural order of things. Our love becomes misdirected, turned in upon itself. It seeks, at any rate, to achieve the impossible: to rank objects according to our will, not their worth. It seeks to love according to our own ‘values.’ Our question to Augustine, then, is this: How can we pursue goods according to a correct estimation of their worth? How do we know which are the greater and which the lesser? In our language, values now substitute for good and evil. Since we have grown accustomed to thinking in categories alien to Augustine’s own, some explanation of the difference between him and us on this point is perhaps in order if we are to understand him at all. For one thing, there is no obvious equivalent to ‘values’ in either Latin or Greek. The nearest candidates in Augustine are bona (goods), mores (habits, morals), and perhaps even vota (prayers, wishes). Furthermore, the idea of there being such a thing as moral values (in the plural) entered our lexicon only recently. I note that the OED lists as their earliest example of values (in the plural) a passage taken from a 1918 sociological text. The Polish Peasant in America analyzes the emigration of Continental Europeans to America during the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.7 The editors’ selection of this work is a charming coincidence. It is so because the nineteenth-century European emigration mirrors the transatlantic

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migration of ideas that was carried to the new world by the then emerging disciplines of sociology and psychology. ‘Values’ entered our common usage not through the classical or Romance languages but through the German Werte, as in sittliche Werte, ‘moral values.’8 This shift from value to values (in the plural) was the product of German genius. Its clearest expression is found in Nietzsche’s little work Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, published in 1886. It is worth remembering that Nietzsche was a cultural relativist. To him values were expressions of will. They are created, not discovered. Values are beyond good and evil in the sense that they stand prior to and are the source of the particular moralities that define ‘cultures.’ Values are the created horizons against which lesser men chart their courses. True creators are few. Among them Nietzsche named Moses, Jesus, Mohammed. But by an act of supreme irony, once Nietzsche was transplanted into the soil of American egalitarianism, his teaching, like Proteus, assumed an altogether different form. Values in the Englishspeaking nations are no longer the currency that only the rarest and most aristocratic of souls trade in: to us they are not the products of supermen, but of everyman. Even high-school students can create them, if they choose. Individual or group ‘life-styles’ are based upon values that you may or may not have already discovered by the time you were 16 years old. Since finding your own values is seen by many educators as a normal feature of maturation, public schools have now for a generation encouraged growth by offering such courses as ‘Values-Clarification’ and ‘Lifestyles.’9 As if barring anyone from their share in the selection would be antidemocratic or discriminatory, it is seen as a virtue of our politics that each citizen, by the exercise of their own autonomy, is free to discover his or her own values.10 So habitual has Nietzsche’s manner of speaking become that even a translator as sophisticated as the late Henry Chadwick stumbles in his attempt to find equivalents. For example, in book 3 of the Confessions Augustine recounts the steps that led him to abandon metaphysical materialism. One of those was the discovery of Cicero. In his 19th year, and as he remarks, ‘in the normal order of the curriculum,’ he came upon Cicero’s Hortensius. This remarkable book, no longer extant, is the great statesmen’s call to the philosophic life. And it worked. The promise

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of happiness at the end of wisdom’s search blew into Augustine’s sensitive soul like a warm wind into a great sail. His heart leapt, and his imagination sparkled into life. It is worth setting out Augustine’s text here to mark what is lost to us in translation: Ille vero liber mutavit affectum meum et ad te ipsum, domine, mutavit preces meas et vota ac desideria me fecit alia . . . The standard English version renders the above as follows: ‘The book changed my feelings. It altered my prayers, Lord, to be towards you yourself. It gave me different values and priorities . . . ’ (conf. 3.4.7). All is well until we come to the second half of the sentence: ‘et vota ac desideria me fecit alia.’ ‘Vota ac desideria’ does not mean ‘values and priorities’ – even though it is understandable that the translator would reach for this term. A votum is a particular kind of prayer; it is ‘a vow made to a god to do something in return for the granting of a favour,’ as the Oxford Latin Dictionary has it. (From this meaning we get the expression ‘a votive offering.’) More importantly, both the particular context of this passage and Augustine’s larger purpose is to convince the reader that what he experienced was not merely a change in values but a discovery of the true order of goods. It is freedom from the tyranny of self that Augustine celebrates, not its definitive assertion: our true good is discovered, not willed. This difference marks the distance in moral outlook between Augustine and us. He and the classical philosophical tradition may be wrong. But it is worthwhile, at the very least, to note the difference. For this reason, in Augustine’s view, it is not possible to be truly happy unless you learn to love the correct things and to do so in the right order. Further on in the homily cited earlier Augustine continues: Being happy, of course, is good for everybody. So where does [the bad man] go wrong? By seeking something good and doing something bad. What’s he looking for, then? Why does the greed of the bad aspire to the reward of the good? The happy life is the reward of the good; goodness is the work, happiness is the reward. God orders the work, offers the reward. He says, ‘Do this, and you will get that.’ This bad man, though, answers us, ‘Unless I do something bad, I won’t

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be happy.’ As if someone were to say, ‘I won’t arrive at the good unless I’m bad.’ (s. 150, 4) There is an ordo amoris, an order to our loves which, if disregarded, leads to moral self-destruction. In the City of God Augustine offers his most concise definition: virtus est ordo amoris, virtue is the order of love (civ. Dei. 15.22). 11 Citing the Song of Songs, Augustine identifies the citizens of God with those who make their own this prayer: ‘Set love in order within me’ (Ordinate in me caritatem) (civ. Dei. 15.22). Neither in the ancient Greek nor in the ancient Latin traditions, pagan or Christian, is happiness wholly dependent upon our mental states. It can be judged according to objective criteria. Goods merely of the mind are not good enough.

Happiness and virtue I suggested above that Augustine was correct to consider his own work as extending the classical tradition of moral philosophy. In order to place us against the horizon of this older outlook I offer two illustrations from antiquity, and then show how, in Augustine’s attempt to make more explicit the connection between happiness and virtue, he transforms the tradition. We shall see that, by drawing together classical texts with Christian sources, Augustine reinterprets the four cardinal virtues as four forms of love. My first illustration is taken from a famous passage in Herodotus. In his book 1 in The Histories (ca. 440 B.C.) Herodotus includes a meeting between Solon, the Athenian legislator (seventh–sixth century B.C.), and Croesus, king of Lydia. Their conversation centers upon the question of happiness. Croesus wishes to have Solon agree that he, a fabulously wealthy king, must be among the happiest of all. The king leads Solon through a tour of his treasury. Then Croesus asks: whom do you regard as the happiest man? Solon answers, first, Tellus king of Athens. Tellus saw his city and his children flourish, and he died gloriously in battle. This does not satisfy the king. Croesus presses the question once more, and Solon replies that second in happiness are Cleobis and Biton – two brothers who perished in a temple after carrying their mother to

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a religious festival. Finally, exasperated, Croesus asks Solon directly whether he regards his host as blessed, to which Solon replies: Thus then, Croesus, the whole of man is but chance. Now if I am to speak of you, I say that I see you are very rich and the king of many men. But I cannot yet answer your question, before I hear that you have ended your life well. For he who is very rich is not more blest than he who has but enough for the day, unless fortune so attend him that he ends his life well, having all good things about him . . . . We must look to the conclusion of every matter, and see how it shall end, for there are many to whom heaven has given a vision of blessedness, and yet afterwards brought them to utter ruin. (Hist. 1.32) Happiness is what may be conferred upon a man only after he is dead, that is, only after all his deeds might be weighed. Which criteria are most relevant to one’s judgment was a matter of debate, but that the merit of a person’s mode of life can be adjudicated by public standards (even if only God can perfectly apply these), was agreed. Not only are the virtues open to public scrutiny, they have a discernible order. My second witness from the classical tradition is Plato’s Republic. In that book Plato defends the claim that Justice is worth pursuing irrespective of the material and social benefits that just actions may or may not garner. To prove what justice is, as against the many conflicting opinions of justice, within the dialogue Socrates proposes to search for the form of justice as it is writ large in the polis, that is, in the parts of the city. The city is thus taken as an image of the individual soul. After lengthy discussion, what they discover is that soul has three parts: reason, will, and desire (Rep. 435e). There is an order among them, and reason, that most excellent among all the virtues, is to guide by wisdom. Moreover, of all the possible virtues that a human being might possess, Socrates selects four that are capital. What wisdom is to reason, courage is to will, and temperance to appetite. The fourth cardinal virtue, justice, comes to light not by analysis of any one aspect of the soul but in the sum of their relation to each other (Rep. 441d).12 The right ordering of the soul is when each part fulfills their particular function as this is discerned by wisdom.

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Writing within this classical tradition, broadly speaking, Augustine likewise assumes that the nature of happiness is something that can be known through reason, and that happiness depends in some way upon virtue. Augustine’s approach to the order among the virtues, however, takes into account more than these classical sources. In particular, in his hands it is love, not wisdom, which structures the relationship among the virtues. As in the moral life moral, so also in education, for Augustine, love is supreme. Thinking back to our earlier classification of the three types of ends, if we are to say that happiness functions as the final end of education, and knowledge as the immediate end, then it would appear that, for Augustine, love serves as the remote purpose of learning. While the next chapter will explore how Augustine’s focus on love transforms his view of Christian pedagogy, here I wish to reflect on how it clarifies what he means by happiness. To illustrate how Augustine reconstitutes the classical ordering of the virtues, we take up a passage taken from an early work, De moribus ecclesiae catholicae, written in the midst of his polemic against the Manichees.13 Because the Manichees subscribed to a doctrine of Biblical interpolation – much the way Muslims do to this day – Augustine begins his discussion with them on the nature of the good life without appeal to authority (mor. 1.2.3). In this work, Augustine aims to lead readers to accept the superiority of Catholic moral philosophy and so begins, predictably enough, with an account of beatitude. Happiness is the enjoyment of the summum bonum. Whatever would qualify as this prize must satisfy two conditions: (1) that there can be nothing better (nihil melius) than this good; and (2) that this good must be something that cannot be lost against one’s will (non amittat invitus) (mor. 1.3.4–5). Augustine presumes his readers accept that virtue perfects the soul (mor. 1.6.9), but what he must convince them of is that virtues are, properly speaking, various forms of the love of God. Having so far avoided recourse to authority, Augustine turns to Scripture and to reconciling how the classical concept of the unity of the virtues might be harmonized with the Old and New Testament emphasis on love. Like Plato and Aristotle, Augustine thinks that only God, as the being than which nothing greater can be thought, can satisfy the above prescribed conditions. (To equate the highest good with something less than God would violate the first condition;

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to consider this good subject to fortune or caprice would violate the second.) In his mature reflection, however, Augustine differs from his predecessors on the question of precisely who achieves this height. Where the Greeks placed wisdom as the highest virtue, and correspondingly the philosopher as the highest human type, Christians revered the saint. For them, the agios or sanctus, the holy man or woman, is the ideal human being – not the sage. In the fourth century, St. Anthony, unlettered monk from Egypt, was the most outstanding living example of this new ideal. Without education, without the liberal arts, Anthony had achieved a nearness to the divine that surpassed anything the learned pagans could produce. Anthony’s example made a remarkable impression on the ambitious young Augustine (conf. 8.6.14).14 One lesson that Augustine would eventually draw from this and other Christian examples is this: that a person with little or no formal education can surpass someone who is steeped in the liberal arts. The unlettered saint can achieve happiness while supervening the liberal arts because love, not wisdom, has the greatest capacity to unite us to God. Is this not implied in Christ’s summary of the Torah? (Matt. 22.34–40) Augustine understood well this difference between Scripture and the classical pagan tradition, and he unequivocally adopted the language of Scripture. ‘As to virtue leading us to a happy life, I hold virtue to be nothing else than the perfect love of God’ (mor. 1.15.25). Love is the highest virtue and the most direct road to God. Interestingly, this preference does lead Augustine to abandon the classical structure of the virtues. He simply transposes them. In his hands the classical cardinal virtues (temperance, fortitude, justice, prudence) become four forms of love. He writes: For the fourfold division of virtue I regard as taken from four forms of love . . . I should have no hesitation in defining them: that temperance is love giving itself entirely to that which is loved; fortitude is the lover readily bearing all things for the sake of the loved object; justice is love serving only the loved object, and therefore ruling rightly; prudence is love distinguishing with sagacity between what hinders it and what helps it. (mor. 1.15.25)

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God, the one of whom nothing greater can be thought, and whose affection cannot be lost except by our own abandoning of it, now serves to unify our loves. Every virtue, every excellence, and every desire of the soul, in Augustine’s reworking, becomes an expression of our longing for God. Thus, along with the classical tradition, Augustine believed there must be a structure and unity amid the diversity of virtues, but extending that tradition, he argued that it is love and not wisdom that serves this function.15

Education and the highest good So, wherein lies the prize? To find happiness is to find God: the immaterial, the unchanging, all-loving good. Like the main currents of the classical philosophical tradition, Augustine understood that human life has a given nature and a defined purpose. In his later writings he will make more explicit the connection between God and happiness, but most important to recognize here is that there exists a hierarchy among the truths which we are to seek. Wisdom is that virtue by which we distinguish between the essential and the nonessential, the helpful from the merely interesting. In this way, at the conclusion of Augustine’s first Christian dialogue, On the Happy Life, he writes: ‘This, then, is the full satisfaction of souls, this the happy life: to recognize piously and completely the One through whom you are led into truth, the nature of the truth you enjoy, and the bond that connects you with the supreme measure’ (b. vita 4.35). Men and women are here by the desire of a creator. Our very existence is a riddle waiting to be solved. Augustine asks: ‘Where can a living being such as an infant come from if not from you, God? Or, can anyone become the cause of his own making?’ (conf. 1.6.10). No, and the world is too complex to believe that it arose by chance. If God is our beginning, so Augustine argues, it should not surprise us that our longings find no earthly satisfaction. Temporal objects never reward what they seem to promise. ‘Who will enable me to find rest in you? Who will grant me that you come to my heart and intoxicate it, so that I forget my evils and embrace my one and only good, yourself?’ (conf. 1. 5.5).

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Though here I can offer nothing like a defense of this point of view, nonetheless it seems to me that there are good reasons to regard these fundamentals of Augustine’s moral philosophy as at least probable. For one thing, we continue to believe that some forms of living are honorable where others are not, and that some life projects are noble, while others, base. (Would you vote for a politician who still played video games at 40?) Where there are difficulties with Augustine’s view it is less often with the structure of his thinking as in his application of principles to particular cases. This difficulty, I think, reflects back to us more of the inconsistencies in our own moral reasoning than it does of the mistakes in Augustine’s. Although we all regularly make judgments about the character of particular people, we are much more reticent to defend the principles that stand behind these judgments. Justice surely requires a measure of tolerance. But the modern Augustinian might wonder whether it requires also that religion and philosophy be kept out of public life. Often, because of our commitment to the ideal of autonomy, we wish to determine for ourselves what constitutes the good life, and think that others should be free to do so, too. Modern moral theories, and the organs of popular culture that communicate them, tend to encourage the belief that happiness is a matter of private opinion. Indeed, many argue that respect for human dignity implies that no one doctrine of happiness should be elevated over any other. This belief even finds its way into courtrooms. In the United States, for instance, there is a famous legal case where the majority opinion for the Supreme Court based its legal reasoning, in part, upon precisely this notion of freedom. At a key point in their legal argument the judges claimed that ‘at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence.’16 A right to define one’s own concept of existence? Whatever the judges might have precisely meant, we can be sure that an Augustinian would take quite the opposite view. The claim that one is ‘free’ to define one’s own concept of existence would ring as hollow to an ancient philosopher as would to a modern scientist the supposition that we can arbitrarily define the laws of physics. You might discover Newton’s laws, if you are clever, you may disregard gravity, if you are rash, but what you cannot do is stop yourself from hitting the earth when you fall.

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Creating the rules by which nature abides belongs alone to God – or to the pagan mind, to the gods. Our interest is served in minding those rules. In Augustine’s view, the laws that govern our happiness are likewise waiting to be discovered. Happiness is not an empty glass that can be filled with just any nectar. What blessedness requires is knowledge of the purpose of our nature, and joined to this, insight into the means to bring that purpose about. To understand Augustine’s conception of the ultimate purpose of education, then, the modern reader need not bear within his own hands the flame of ancient faith that lighted up Augustine’s path, although he will require a basic sympathy with Augustine’s fundamental conclusions about morality which we surveyed above. These conclusions again, are as follows: that happiness is the goal of education, that what produces happiness is virtue, and that the virtues have a rationally defined order, with love as their head. On Augustine’s view, we are more like treasure hunters than expressionist painters. Our next chapter explores the methods of pedagogy that Augustine believed conducive to that end.

Chapter 3

The Art of the Teacher

Introduction Augustine was one of the great teachers of antiquity. His first biographer stresses the attention that Augustine’s parents gave to their boy’s education. ‘He was nourished and fostered by their care and diligence with special training in secular literature’ (v. Aug. 1). His was a natural talent that developed quickly, and was rewarded. As a young man he taught rhetoric in Carthage and Rome, and by age 30 had obtained an official appointment as professor of rhetoric in Milan.1 Prior to his conversion Augustine could have looked with anticipation to a fabulous public career. This he tossed aside. No longer would he offer the fruits of his own classical education, which had become so bitter in his own tasting, to others. Nearly a decade on from his baptism and writing as a bishop he recounted the earlier state of his mind as he now contemplated the future that awaited him. Of all the uncertainties that lay ahead, he was sure that he wished no longer to labor at his ‘post as a salesman of words in the markets of rhetoric’ (conf. 9.2.2). Augustine never lost this distaste. In his own manual on Christian teaching, written near the end of his life, he warned that those wishing to learn rhetoric should not look to him. And so, at the opening of book 4 of De doctrina Christiana, he writes: ‘At the outset I must curb the expectations of any readers who think that I am going to present the rhetorical rules which I learnt and taught in pagan schools, and warn them in this preamble not to expect that sort of thing from me’ (doc. Christ. 4.3). So, Augustine had forever turned his back. That he rejected the rhetorical culture of his past is true enough; but it would be false to suppose that leaving his career meant Augustine abandoned teaching. Indeed, in 386 on the eve of his baptism it was not clear what Augustine

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would do now that he had left ‘the world.’ At first, he hid himself in obscurity. For 3 years he lived among the servi dei, the so-called servants of God, a lay monastic community in Thagaste.2 Relative isolation, however, did not last. In 391 he was ordained a priest; by 395 Augustine would find himself once again in the role of a magister, this time as the teacher of Christian truth, as Bishop. One marvels at how often this pattern of discipleship has been repeated since. The saint renounces the world only to discover that he can then truly serve it. Time and again exceptional men and women have abandoned their gifts, legitimate gifts (of paint, of stone, of word), only to find them returned – now claimed in the service of another, and of all others. Among twentieth-century literary converts Thomas Merton is an example of this, as is Edith Stein. Though Augustine tried once to end his career, he too stumbled over it again. He would always be a teacher. Through treatises, private letters, public debates, and above all, from the pulpit, throughout his long years of ministry Augustine continued to exercise his gift and to broaden its application. So convincing was Augustine as a teacher that his words could move congregations to tears and bring whole cities to contrition. He tells, for instance, of one city, Caesarea of Mauretania (in the region of present-day Oran, North West Algeria), which for generations had been embroiled in a feud. Apparently, at a designated time each year for several days civil war would break out, setting friend against friend, father against son, and leaving many slaughtered. After the bloodlust of the caterva (free-for-all) was satisfied the town would resume its normal pace – until the next year. Augustine determined to put an end to this. He traveled to the city in the summer of 418 and, as he tells us, spoke ‘to the best of my ability, in the grand style’ (doc. Christ. 4.139).3 Exercising the full measure of his art he implored the citizens to stop their madness. And they did. The whole assembly that had gathered to hear the visiting bishop speak broke out first into cheers and then into tears of repentance. With modest pride Augustine could report at a distance that ‘through Christ’s mercy it is now some eight years, or more, since such violence has been attempted’ (doc. Christ. 4.140). How did he do it? Why did his words work? In this chapter, we turn to Augustine’s own reflections on his art. Before turning to Augustine’s texts, it is worth noting that there are a number of approaches we might follow. Augustine’s method of

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preaching, his early use of the dialogue form, or the role of friendship in education, could each be taken as separate studies. Since, however, I wish to focus on the fundamentals of Augustine’s theory, not these particular contexts, we take up below the aims of the teacher, his methods, and his dispositions. As we shall discover, Augustine certainly has much to say of his art: the De magistro, De doctrina Christiana, and De catechezandis rudibus, in particular, provide us with an ample supply of texts. But it is not obvious that he should have written so much. There is, in fact, a certain incongruity between what he claims about learning and what he says about teaching. By Augustine’s own descriptions of how we learn one is left to wonder why Augustine pays any attention to teaching at all. For, on the surface at least, his doctrine of divine illumination seemingly disavows any role for human teachers whatsoever. As he writes in an Easter homily of 416: ‘The sound of our words strikes the ear, but the teacher is within. Do not think that anyone learns from any man’ (tract. 3.13). If we cannot learn from others, in what sense can anybody be called a teacher? Our way of entry into Augustine’s philosophy of teaching, then, will be through his doctrine of illumination, on which it depends.

Illumination and the aim of the teacher Augustine’s doctrine of learning and divine illumination begins where Plato’s left off, with the Meno paradox. In his own writing on teaching Plato raised a dilemma that every philosophy of education has since had to address: How do you search for something that you do not already know? On the one hand, if you know what you are searching for, why do you need to search for it? On the other hand, if you should happen upon it, ‘how will you know that this is the thing you did not know?’ (Meno 80e). Plato’s answer was to snap one of the horns of the dilemma. We do know what we are searching for; we only need to be reminded. That is the work of the teacher. We already perceive the forms (and hence have access to all knowledge) since prior to our life in the body we had immediate vision of them. It is our attachment to the body (soma) and the pleasure of perception through it that dulls memory and darkens our intellectual vision. To remedy this, what is needed is a kind of midwifery,

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of the sort that Socrates exercised upon the hapless citizens of Athens. What is required, in other words, is that the soul be presented with the right kind of questions. Through reflection, the soul can be brought to remember once again, to recollect (anamnesis) what it formerly knew. Thus, learning is actually recollection. Even though Augustine does not wed himself to the notion of the soul’s preexistence in the way Plato did, his own answer shares features with his master’s. Notably, like Plato, for Augustine learning is primarily an interior recollection prompted by dialectical discussion. Augustine likewise holds that the teacher is not the instrument of knowledge but only its occasion. Where Augustine differs, however, is in his account of the mechanisms of recollection. His theory is more complex. Augustine emphasizes the mind’s dependence upon another mind for its own perspicacity inasmuch as it is by a divine confirmation and not by the soul’s own power of recollecting that objects are perceived truly. God shines the light of truth into the soul directly and immediately, at each act of cognition. By this light, the intellect can then see objects truly as what they are. Augustine’s doctrine of illumination unfolds in three steps.4 The essential point to recognize is that for Augustine, understanding is more like insight than clumsy deduction; this power of seeing depends more on God’s active presence in the mind than on our ingenuity. Focusing here on the De magistro, Augustine begins with the distinction between signs and things. A child sees a piece of fruit on the table and asks his mother if he can have it. He asks: ‘May I have an apple?’ The word ‘apple’ signifies the object of the child’s intention. And when this same boy visits his French grandmother, and once more is hungry, he will again and with the same intention use the word ‘pomme’ as he did ‘apple’ only the day before. As Augustine has his son Adeodatus conclude: ‘What comes out of the speaker’s mouth isn’t the thing signified but the sign by which it is signified’ (mag. 8.23). Signs are interchangeable; things remain the same. Already obvious from the above example there is a natural order between signs and things, as between means and ends. Which is to say that in Augustine’s second step ‘the things signified should be valued more than their signs’ (mag. 9.25). Things are more valuable than signs at least in the sense that we use the former for the sake of the latter. The boy asks for an apple so that he might eat one.

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With these two distinctions in mind, Augustine draws a conclusion. The third step clarifies the nature of the causal relationship that pertains between signs and things. Knowledge depends upon the object, not the sign. While it is possible to learn about things without the mediation of signs, apart from knowledge of the thing itself, a sign has no epistemic value for us. As he writes: when a sign is given it teaches nothing ‘if it finds me ignorant of the thing of which it is the sign’ (mag. 10.33). Augustine offers the following example. He presents the sentence: ‘et sarabarae eorum non sunt commutatae.’ The first, third, fourth, and final words of this sentence are common terms, at least among Augustine’s contemporaries. Translated into English they read: ‘and their sarabrae were unchanged.’ The second word presents the difficulty. Sarabrae is as unfamiliar to us English speakers as it was to Augustine’s Latin readers.5 And that is the point. For: ‘the word [sarabrae] doesn’t show me the thing it signifies.’ Augustine continues, ‘If certain head coverings are denominated by this name, have I learned upon hearing it what the head is or what coverings are?’ (mag. 10.34) The answer is, in Augustine’s view, no. The sign ‘sarabrae’ signifies nothing to you. You do not, in other words, learn from the word unless you first and already have an acquaintance with the object of its signification – in Augustine’s example, a type of garment that covers the head (sarabrae). For words to be useful you must know the thing to which they point before hand: realities come first in time and are first in priority of being. If signs, then, do not teach, how are we to learn? Having followed these three steps in Augustine’s argument (the distinction between things and signs, their semantic relation, the former’s causal priority), it is not difficult to see now how he derives the conclusion that human teachers have little to do. Within the process of learning, all that words accomplish, and at their best, is to remind us to direct our attention to the things themselves. He explains: To give them as much credit as possible, words have force only to the extent that they remind us to look for things; they don’t display them for us to know. Yet someone who presents what I want to know to my eyes, or to any of my bodily senses, or even to my mind itself, does teach me something (me autem aliquid docet). (mag. 11.36)

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So, teachers do have a function after all. Their aim is, like Socrates’ aim was, to present the right questions and the right objects before the mind and senses of the student. But clearly, presentation alone cannot account for the mind’s power of comprehension. Augustine wishes his theory to account also for this capacity. For, no matter how many times or how skillfully you present a page of arithmetic to your poodle, she simply will not learn how to add. After the teacher directs our attention to objects we must also see them, comprehend their nature and form, appreciate their relation to other objects, and grasp their value. In Augustine’s view, all this is made possible by the mind’s capacity to receive the light of Christ. In the same way that sight rushes into the eyes once morning floods into a darkened room, so also insight awakens when the light of Christ pours into the intellect. Thus, whenever we learn, it is Christ, the everlasting Word of God, who actively illumines our minds. In comparison to the activity of the divine teacher, human instruction hardly merits the same title. More properly the honor belongs to Christ, the true magister. As sources for his doctrine, Augustine could look both to Plato and to the Bible. As already mentioned, Plato appealed to the forms as a means to explain our capacity to know nonmaterial objects. Preeminent among the forms is the Form of the Good, which in the Republic was said to be both an object of knowledge and a cause of our ability to see (Rep. 508e). Early on in his De diversis quaestionibus octoginta tribus, at Question 46, Augustine had placed the Platonic forms in the mind of God.6 The forms exist, therefore, but only as archetypal ideas in the mind of the creator. In this way, Augustine’s doctrine of illumination should be understood as an extension of Plato’s ideas giving, specifying more precisely the nature of that good which renders intelligible and confirms our knowledge of things. Augustine also looked to the Bible. For authorization here, he could appeal to an incident from St. Matthew’s Gospel where Christ chastises the Pharisees for their attachment to human esteem. The Pharisees, of course, considered themselves as experts of the interpretation of Jewish law. It was not particularly the Pharisees’ claim to understanding that drew Christ’s censure, but their pretence to fulfilling its prescriptions. On one occasion, while Christ was within earshot of the Jews, and in response to

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their intransigence, Christ told his disciples that no human being should be called their teacher. ‘Do not call anyone on earth your teacher, for one is your teacher, Christ’ (Matt. 23.10). Not one is worthy. Further on, in the same Easter homily of 416, Augustine interprets Christ’s words to mean thus: ‘External instructions offer help and suggestions of a sort. But the one who instructs hearts exercises his teaching function in heaven’ (tract. 3.13). It appeared to Augustine that not only philosophy but revelation itself instructs that to call another human being a teacher would be a gross equivocation. We may summarize the movement of Augustine’s thinking as follows: knowledge of words depends on knowledge of things; knowledge of things is aided by the promptings of a teacher; but recognition of such prompts is confirmed only by the light of the inner teacher. As one commentator has put it, in Augustine’s doctrine of illumination truth is ascertained not finally through arguments moving laboriously from premises to conclusions but ‘through a process of initiation into immediate intuition’ (TeSelle, 2006, 19). Given Augustine’s theory of illumination and the limited aim that he affords to human teachers – namely, prompting by words – it is somewhat surprising to find that Augustine has a great deal of advice to give on teaching methodology, which we turn to next. (In Chapter 6 we will take up Aquinas’ reflections on illumination as a way of considering how Augustine’s theory might, perhaps, more plausibly be harmonized with his practice.)

The methods of the teacher Earlier we saw that we can divide the aims of education according to their immediate, remote and final objects (knowledge, virtue and happiness, respectively). These three aims establish the rationale for Augustine’s particular instructions on pedagogy. Method and technique, disposition and character, are all at the service of these larger aims. Augustine’s reflections on method in teaching proceed both from knowledge of human nature and the particular nature of one’s students. Where the first relies upon knowledge of the basic rules of rhetoric,

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the second requires attentiveness to the needs and dispositions of the particular students and circumstances before the teacher. From the point of view of sound pedagogy the first consideration of a teacher, then, is the condition of the particular students before him. What do they know? How well can they learn? Are they comfortable? Beginning with the end of the list, Augustine advises fellow teachers to take care for the physical environment of their classrooms. In De catechizandis rudibus Augustine considers the case in which a teacher is losing the interest of his students. You see yawns; limbs twitch; there is occasional chatter. It was the custom in African (but not Italian) churches of the fourth century for the congregation to stand while the priest gave his homily or some other instruction. Augustine suggests that if your lesson is long it will be better if you can find chairs (rud. 13, 19). ‘Another way to meet our listener in need is to offer him a seat, however much better it would no doubt be that, where it is possible to arrange this in a suitable manner, he listen seated from the beginning’ (rud. 13, 19). When attention wanes, you might tell a joke or report an amazing story that will bring their attention back to you (rud. 13, 19). The point is: if your students are cold or tired or bored, they will not listen well. Within reason the teacher should do whatever works to eliminate whatever distracts. A teacher must also find out how well his students learn. Augustine distinguishes between those who are ignorant through lack of education (or intelligence) and those who are ignorant through lack of good will, some of whom, Augustine counsels, even the good teacher will fail to move. If the student before you is unwilling to learn, Augustine suggests, first, friendly encouragement. If, after you have taken reasonable steps, and ‘should the hearer balk and refuse treatment,’ then the teacher should ‘be comforted by the example give to us by the Lord’ who also suffered rejection (rud. 11, 6). Teachers must accept that sometimes there is nothing that you can do to help a student. We note that Augustine’s realistic approach to the limits of formal learning is the practical consequence of the belief in human freedom. Even after all the conditions of the learning environment have been favorably established, and even once sound techniques have been employed, it remains possible that the student will simply refuse to learn.

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Those who learn slowly through no fault of their own, on the other hand, are to be treated with forbearance. Augustine considers the fatigue and discouragement which teachers can feel when instructing beginners. To the challenge of speaking to the uneducated (rudibus) he offers this advice: Thus, if our understanding finds its delight within, in the brightest of secret places, let us also delight in the following insight into the ways of love: the more love goes down in a spirit of service into the ranks of the lowliest people, the more surely it rediscovers the quiet that is within when its good conscience testifies that it seeks nothing of those to whom it goes down but their eternal salvation. (rud. 10, 15) The good teacher finds out what the student knows and leads him or her on to the next level of understanding. You might, for instance, punctuate your presentation with questions; you should, if possible, find out about their motives for learning even before they arrive (rud. 13, 19). For example, if you discover that someone has come to inquire about the faith out of either an exaggerated fear of God or out of the hope of gaining some social advantage, your task is set: you must help them to acquire a more noble motive for learning. Augustine suggests that one way to encourage the insincere is to expect the best from them. Students will often come to feel for themselves what you first had to expect: ‘But clearly the mercy of God is often near at hand through the agency of the person giving the instruction, that the newcomer, finding himself influenced by the address, now wishes to become the person that he had settled on pretending to be’ (rud. 5, 9). Beyond attention to the material environment the good teacher understands also the particular combination of desire, will, and intelligence of his students and adapts accordingly. But knowing how and when to apply these pedagogical insights has to be set within a larger theory of human nature and motivation. Augustine’s most sustained treatment of this, insofar as it relates to teaching, is found in his De doctrina Christiana. I mentioned that throughout Augustine’s career he adamantly refused to return to the role of the rhetorician. As he makes plain at the outset

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of De doctrina Christiana book 4: I am not about ‘to present the rhetorical rules which I learnt and taught in the pagan schools’ (4.3). This is what Augustine says. What he does is another matter. What Augustine actually produces is one of the finest summaries of the value, parts, and limits of rhetoric in the ancient world – complete with references and allusions to the Bible and classical authors, above all, to Cicero. Aptly praised as ‘one of the most original that Augustine ever wrote,’7 let the reader beware: Augustine’s tiny manual tells a great deal about classical rhetoric! The most charitable explanation for the discrepancy between what Augustine promises and what he delivers is either that his preface simply alerts readers that he will not elaborate on the rules of rhetoric already known (Quintilian’s De Oratore, after all, is 12 books long), or that his work does not treat familiar pagan texts (his examples are drawn from Scripture instead). In any case, what Augustine offers is a guide on the manner of presenting truths (de proferendo) once these have been discovered in the deposit of Christian faith (de inveniendo). Augustine’s treatment of rhetoric in book 4 of the De doctrina Christiana follows the same pattern as his earlier approach to the other liberal arts in book 2. We shall return to this in detail in Chapter 4, but his basic rule is this: the liberal arts are merely tools. As instruments for training the intellect they can be used for good or ill. Grammar allows you to communicate intelligibly, even though its rules dictate neither what you will say nor to what purpose your words will be applied. Good grammar will help you to express yourself, though knowing the difference between restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses will not dictate whether you will speak to your friends in a manner that is kind or caustic. The same is true of rhetoric. The principles of persuasive speech can be applied to any purpose, true or false, noble or mundane. The Christian teacher should not ignore these rules: for ‘who would dare maintain that truth, which depends on us for its defense, should stand unarmed in the fight against falsehood?’ (doc. Christ. 4.4). In Augustine’s view, since the principles of rhetoric are not merely conventions but the application of fundamental principles of psychology to the art of communication, they can and should serve usefully the teacher’s art. In harnessing the elements of rhetoric the speaker must first decide what formal end he hopes to accomplish. Of these there are two

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possibilities: either you will wish to convince your listeners of some truth or you will wish them to take up some action (doc. Christ. 4.78–80). Having determined this, the teacher then applies those rules congruent to that aim. In his own text on persuasive speech, Rhetorica, Aristotle established three considerations according to which the speaker will either succeed or fail. These three considerations or elements are logos, pathos, and ethos. The three means of effecting persuasion correspond in turn to the rational coherence of the speech, to its emotional content, and to the speaker’s perceived credibility (Rhet. 1356a).8 This Aristotelian division (transmitted to the Latins through Cicero) is helpful to keep in mind since Augustine’s own division of the aims of rhetoric corresponds approximately to these three means of persuasion. As Augustine writes, the speaker’s words function to teach, to give delight, or to move his audience: It has been said by a man of eloquence, and quite rightly, that the eloquent should speak in such a way as to instruct, delight, and move their listeners. He then added: ‘instructing is a matter of necessity, delighting a matter of charm, and moving them a matter of conquest.’ (doc. Christ. 4.74; quoting Cicero’s de Oratore 69) The speaker must teach (docere), delight (delectare), and move (flectere): the first of these requirements ‘relates to the subject-matter’ of the discourse, the other two, ‘to the style we use’ (doc. Christ. 4.74). Clearly, Augustine recognizes a hierarchy among these elements of style. Whether the speaker wishes to elicit action or merely assent, he must always teach. In Aristotle’s vocabulary, logos takes precedence. If what you say does not make sense, or is not understood, then your speech will fall on deaf ears. It is not as though Augustine thinks that the speaker whose objective is to teach can avoid having to please his listeners. It is only that his efforts will not focus there, and in this respect Augustine sets his face against what he perceived as the pagan tendency to use words merely for entertainment (cf. conf. 1.13.20–18.29). Christians should expect better from their preachers and teachers. The ‘serious congregation,’ he writes, will not endure a preaching style that indulges in enticing its listeners with ‘trivial and ephemeral goods’; they will not stand for the kind of ostentatious speaker whose verbal froth ‘could not

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even enhance important and lasting things’ (doc. Christ. 4.84). Even if on occasion you can find examples of this sort of Christian rhetoric in past models – it should be discouraged.9 A style that indulges in imagery and clever artifice is likely to offend serious minds by its lack of proportion. In everything, good taste with discretion is the rule. If this is what the Christian teacher should avoid, how should he please? Augustine’s recommendations on the emotional quality of speaking correspond to Aristotle’s third element of rhetoric, pathos. He says that the teacher will delight if he speaks in an agreeable tone (doc. Christ. 4.75), if he employs a variety of rhetorical devises (doc. Christ. 4.136), and if he moves his points forward at a brisk pace (doc. Christ. 4.69). All these are useful. And yet, more than any single technique ‘the best method is one by which the listener hears the truth and understands what he hears’ (doc. Christ. 4.71). The clarity of truth, in other words, also carries an emotional appeal. Truth produces ‘delight by virtue of being true’ (doc. Christ. 4.77). The mind is made to know, which is why truth is the best pleasure a speaker can deliver. Even so, if teachers aim not merely to convince but also to move, then truth will have to be adorned with beautiful phrases. Augustine treats these additional techniques under the heading of the ‘grand style.’ Methods corresponding to this style are derived directly from motivational psychology. He explains: A hearer must be delighted so that he can be gripped and made to listen, and moved so that he can be impelled to action. Your hearer is delighted if you speak agreeably, and moved if he values what you promise, fears what you threaten, hates what you condemn, embraces what you commend, and rues the thing which you insist that he must regret, and if he rejoices at what you set forth in your preaching as something joyful, pities those whom by your words you present to his mind’s eye as miserable, and shuns those whom with terrifying language you urge him to avoid. (doc. Christ. 4.75) Love and hate, pleasure and pain, hope and fear – these are the keys upon which the motivational speaker must perform with precision. Like modern advertisers, ancient rhetoricians too recognized that making the sale depends on identifying a need. The listener must feel that you have understood him, your words must appeal to what he

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already accepts as true, and when these conditions are fulfilled the speaker must, finally, make explicit the link between the listener’s desires and what your words promise to fulfill. In short, Augustine assures that the good teacher will move his students if he understands what they desire and offers what they hope to obtain.

Hilaritas and the dispositions of the teacher The final factor determining a speaker’s effectiveness is character, Aristotle’s ethos. As every student knows, the example of the teacher is his greatest lesson. Inasmuch as believers aim to mix wisdom with eloquence Augustine takes Christian rhetoric to differ substantively from the models of rhetoric taught in the pagan schools (doc. Christ. 4.22). But is there really a difference? And was not Augustine, after all, seeking results similar to those which classical rhetoricians hoped to achieve by means of comparable techniques? Certainly, the theory and practice of classical rhetoric varied, and even Isocrates wanted to mix eloquence with wisdom (cf. Ant. 271). On this question, I think it is fair to say that in most respects Augustine’s own observations on rhetoric do little more than retrieve familiar classical themes. One point of difference, however, is Augustine’s insistence upon truthfulness, his contention that a Christian teacher must never lie. He warns: ‘once break or but slightly diminish the authority of truth, and all things will remain doubtful,’ and so, for the Christian writer, apologist, or teacher, ‘to tell a lie is never lawful’ (mend. 17). Augustine’s own teachers, apparently, gave no thought to approving of the immoral examples sanctioned in Greek literature (conf. 1.16.25), and even Plato taught that there were occasions when the philosophical teacher should speak falsehood (as, for example, as when perpetuating the ‘noble lie’ among citizens within the polis, cf. Rep. 414b). In contrast, for Augustine the teacher cannot lie because he is to become an icon of God’s love for his students. ‘Christ came before all else so that people might learn how much God loves them, and might learn this so that they would catch fire with love for him who first loved them . . . ’ (rud. 4, 8). In his debate with the classical rhetorical tradition, then, Augustine’s own treatments of persuasive teaching move the focus of the discussion away from the psychology of the listener on to the psychology of the teacher.

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What is to be most highly esteemed in a teacher is his integrity: the embodied correspondence between word and deed. Character always comes before technique, for Augustine, and the teacher must ever remember that the probity of one’s life will amply supply that which is lacking in rhetorical virtuosity. ‘More important than any amount of grandeur of style to those of us who seek to be listened to with obedience is the life of the teacher’ (doc. Christ. 4.151). Classical teachers of rhetoric sometimes spoke as though the speaker’s primary concern was to ensure that he looked good to his audience, that he presented a credible ethos. To appear good was, from the point of view of the speaker – as Machiavelli would say later of the ruler10 – more important than being good. Even the upright Quintilian, who insisted that no man can be an orator unless he also is a good man, accepted that, with the correct intention and for the sake of a just cause, lying can be morally justifiable (Quintilian Inst. Orat. 12.1.37; Colish, 1985, 337–28). Augustine argues this is not so for the Christian. Words and deeds must correspond for the believer, and that means there can be no falsehood. Augustine remembered his own experience of delivering a panegyric before the emperor. As was expected of a rhetorician in such a circumstance Augustine followed the custom of the day: ‘In the course of it I would tell numerous lies and for my mendacity would win the good opinion of people who knew it to be untrue’ (conf. 6.6.9). Augustine wants none of this. Now he will emphasize that every discourse has not only a human but a divine judge. Furthermore, since the Christian teacher seeks to prompt within his listeners an inner conversion (and not merely an exterior conformity) one’s reputation matters (1 Tim. 3.7), though a good life counts for even more (doc. Christ. 4. 154). Augustine encourages in teachers a familiar list of virtues. The good teacher is motivated by love; he seeks to bring his students to the knowledge of God; his deeds correspond to his words (cf. 1 Tim. 3.2–7; Jn 8.31–32; 2 Pet. 2.1). One trait not commonly praised before Augustine, and so deserving of particular notice, is the virtue of hilaritas, cheerfulness. The occasion of Augustine’s composition of De catechizandis rudibus, as he informs us in the Prologue of the work, was a request of a certain Deogratias, a deacon in Carthage. Deogratias had asked that Augustine send to him something that ‘might be useful concerning the instruction of beginners’ (de catechizandis rudibus, quod tibi usui esset) (rud. 1, 1). Apparently, Deogratias was himself a popular teacher.

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Many students came to him to learn about the faith because of his learning and lively style (rud. 1, 1). Yet, in his letter to Augustine he also admits his struggle to know what is fitting to say to new comers to the faith; and more poignantly, that the inadequacy of his own words sometimes causes him self-loathing and disgust (fastidire) (rud. 1, 1). Deogratias is the good teacher who is never quite satisfied with his own performance. And, though such doubts are nearly universal, it would seem that Augustine perceives in his friend the danger that unchecked introspection could ruin his art and his ministry. Augustine’s reply is replete with psychological insight. The text explores in detail both the temptations and possibilities of the teacher, and in it Augustine offers his colleague detailed advice on how to avoid discouragement, fatigue, and so forth (rud. 10, 14–14, 22). But the psychological failure that Deogratias must most be on guard against is a failure in love. Deogratias must learn how to step outside of himself. He must learn to teach with joyful self-forgetfulness. The real difficulty lies not in questions of content, nor of technique, but in the teacher’s own heart. For when the teacher takes delight in what he says, that is, when he loves both his subject and his students, then students also will enjoy what he has to say. As Augustine writes: Hence, the difficult part of our task is not in giving rules about where to begin and where to end the historical exposition in which the content of the faith is communicated . . . No, our greatest concern is much more about how to make it possible for those who offer instruction in faith to do so with joy (gaudens). For the more they succeed in this, the more appealing they will be. And, indeed, in this regard there is a teaching ready to hand. For if God loves a cheerful giver (hilarem datorem diligit) (2 Cor. 9.7) in matters of material wealth, how much more is this true in matters of spiritual wealth? (rud. 2, 4) As a counter to one’s own discouragement, then, Augustine encourages hilaritas. This is what makes teaching attractive for both teachers and their students. Cheerfulness is Augustine’s term for the sum total of the dispositions that good teachers cultivate. Though we can take steps to approach our work with good cheer, it is not something, ultimately,

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which we can will into being. We must look to Christ’s example, seeking a supernatural source, for such joy ‘depends on the compassion of the one whose teaching this is’ (rud. 2, 4). In order to understand Augustine’s sense of the term we need to recognize how this notion of hilaritas finds its exemplar in the kenotic Christ. The kenosis of Christ is his self-emptying love for humanity; it is that compassion by which, in taking on flesh, Christ limited himself so that he could be known among us as our teacher. Augustine elaborates on this in a series of paradoxes: ‘He knew hunger, he who provides food for all. He knew thirst, he through whom all drink is created . . . He was exhausted by his travels on earth, he who made himself for us the way to heaven’ (rud. 22, 40). Because Christ allowed himself to be humbled, no human being has reason to exalt himself. Augustine’s argument is that the same abandon that Christ has for us should mark also the abandon that teachers have for their students. (There is another parallel we might draw here in Augustine’s thinking: just as the love of learning corresponds to the commandment to love God, so also does love of teaching correspond to the commandment to love our neighbor.11) It is only insofar as we have become humble, that is to say, that we have divested ourselves of self-love, that we can find joy in this service to the truth. This is no easy task. But the notion of hilaritas makes explicit why technique can never be the foundation of pedagogy for Augustine. Glancing back over the individual recommendations we named above in this chapter, and seen in this present light, cheerfulness takes on a distinctively theological character: it is gaiety, good humor, attention to detail, energy, and patient concern, all bound into one. In sum, hilaritas is short hand for Augustine’s unique synthesis of pagan rhetorical technique with Christian spirituality.12 As he once encouraged a fellow teacher: ‘How much more then should we be pleased when people now come to us to acquire knowledge of God himself, for to acquire knowledge of God is the object of all our learning’ (rud. 12, 17). But what if none of this is possible? Perhaps the very notion of teaching is predicated upon an unproven hypothesis, and the skeptics are right? As an addendum to our discussion of pedagogy, and before turning to the matter of the curriculum of the liberal arts, we note briefly that Augustine was not unaware of the skeptic’s critique of learning.

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The possibility of skepticism Although it would be valuable to trace in detail Augustine’s logical refutation of the skeptic’s position (cf. Mosher, 1981; Topping, 2009), since we have now explored something of Augustine’s views on the aim and methods of pedagogy, what I wish to highlight is both the confidence and the caution with which Augustine regarded our capacity for knowledge. It should be said plainly that although Augustine was aware of the skeptic’s claim that no knowledge is possible, he hardly took it seriously as an informed philosophical position. Indeed, he thought that the Academicians, the later heirs to Plato’s Academy, preached skepticism merely as a means to keep the uninitiated away from Plato’s esoteric doctrines (ep. 1.1).13 When Augustine addresses questions of the justification of belief his concern is seldom with proving that truth exists, more often it is with demonstrating how philosophy’s complete expression is articulated by Christianity. I begin with Augustine’s confidence. In an early apologetic work he was bold to declare among his contemporaries that they lived in a new epoch. With the incarnation of Christ, the conditions of knowledge had altered. No longer could philosophy remain separate from the law, nor the law from philosophy. The witness of Christ’s teaching (vera rel. 3.3), the universal spread of true religion (vera rel. 5.9), the Church’s capacity to transform whole nations (vera rel. 4.6), were all signs testifying to the new dispensation which, as Augustine argued, philosophers also were bound to acknowledge. For Augustine, as for most of the early apologists, Christianity was the fulfillment of both Greek philosophy and Jewish revelation. So confident was Augustine of the reasonableness of the faith, and of the possibility of religious knowledge, that he teased his philosophical adversaries that if their beloved master Plato were alive in these days, he too would become a Christian.14 Faith and reason are more like colors on a canvass that enliven each other when mixed than like parallel tracks that travel best when they do not cross. Christianity does not go against reason but serves as its fulfillment; faith seeks understanding, not reason’s undoing. These are traditional Augustinian themes well known and well appreciated within the later scholastic tradition. One consequence of publishing these claims was that they committed Augustine (and later Augustinians) to a high

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standard of intellectual honesty. Augustine’s openness to philosophy meant that reasoned objections could not be ignored, and that where arguments were levied against faith, these had to be answered not by blind appeal to authority but by reasons. One group of the opponents that Augustine addressed early on was the skeptics. In his Contra Academicos (391) and again in his Confessions (397–400), as elsewhere, Augustine considered whether knowledge of God (or, indeed, of anything else) is possible, and whether or not there are sound reasons to doubt the skeptic’s doubt. As a later form of Platonism, the Academic school surmised that every claim to knowledge was illusory, and, for a brief time, Augustine says that the skeptics held his loyalty also. In raising Augustine’s refutation of the skeptics we do not need to exaggerate the distance between him and them. It is not as though the ancient skeptics wished to free individuals from their duties. Rather, what was called for was a measure of reserve, as we might say, of intellectual humility, a via media between blind dogmatism and sheer inactivity. In the narrative of his Confessions it was by virtue of Augustine’s capacity to hold his own religious opinions in doubt that he was eventually freed from the erroneous doctrines about substance, evil, and human freedom which he had adopted from the Manichees (conf. 5.7.12). Indeed, in their approach to philosophy the skeptics were partly correct. (Here as elsewhere it is worth noting that great thinkers usually only confer the honor of refutation upon those whose ideas are worth contradicting.) It is true that many times our judgments are based upon inadequate representations; the senses often deceive; words fail. Even ordinary experiences are hard to circumscribe in language (cf. c. Acad. 2.5.11). As Augustine himself observed, those phenomena that we take for granted, like time, are upon reflection often the least transparent. ‘What is time? I know what it is until someone asks me, and then I find that I do not know’ (conf. 11.14.17). How, then, do we learn about God? ‘How then am I to seek for you, Lord? When I seek for you, my God, my quest is for the happy life’ (conf. 10.20.29). We begin to discover God’s nature, of course, by examining the evidence of his works. Like all ancient philosophers, Augustine averred that reason must guide. As rational creatures, our nature is fitted for truth, not simply any truth, but the source of

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truth, God. Hence, what we most need to understand is what God is like. Augustine defined God as that being which possesses all possible perfections: he is everlasting, unchanging, and all good; God is ‘that than which nothing greater can be thought’ (lib. arb. 2; doc. Christ. 1.57). Without knowledge of the source of truth, that is, its cause, he argued that indeed it would not even be possible to acquire a truly comprehensive understanding of the world.15 Creation, in his view, is an ordered whole. Its parts variously reflect the power and goodness of the creator: rocks, soil, and sun share in a likeness to God by virtue of their very existence. Moving up on the hierarchy of creation, plants are above inanimate objects because they have the additional power of reproduction, and animals – with life, movement, and sense-perception – are more exalted still. At the apex of the physical creation is man. Men and women are unique because in addition to the above attributes we also have the gift of reason, and so bear the imago dei (trin. 7.6.12; 12.4.4; 14.8.11).16 Unlike other parts of creation, however, though we have a given nature we are not simply passive with regard to its end. God grants to us a part in shaping our destiny. We can also choose to reject it (cf. trin. 8.8.12). Of all these things, Augustine was sure. But if Augustine was confident that we can and should use our reason to know God, he also cautions that this knowledge is limited. To affirm that human freedom ought to direct itself toward seeking God does not mean, for Augustine, that God can be known in the way that creatures can be known. Augustine repeatedly emphasizes the inadequacy of human language to divine realities and, in a certain sense, Augustine even admits that God’s nature is unspeakable. He ‘is not truly known by the sound of these two syllables deus’ (doc. Christ. 1.14). Near the end of his lengthy and most ambitious treatment of our knowledge of God, De trinitate, Augustine reflects on the great disparity between our knowledge and God’s knowledge. Whereas for God his wisdom is ‘itself His essence or substance’ (trin. 15.13.22), for us, realities are apprehended only as through a glass (trin. 15.23.43). Our knowledge, in other words, is far from complete. Yet, we cannot but use words. In the middle of the passage from De doctrina Christiana cited above Augustine affirms that even though our understanding of the divine is impoverished, nonetheless, we cannot

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refrain from attempting to speak about God in the limited ways open to us: Yet although nothing can be spoken in a way worthy of God, he has sanctioned the homage of the human voice, and chosen that we should derive pleasure from our words in praise of him. Hence the fact that he is called God: he himself is not truly known by the sound of these two syllables, yet when the sound strikes the ear it leads all users of the Latin language to think of a supremely excellent and immortal being. (doc. Christ. 1.14) Language may be imperfect but it is adequate for our purposes. Though we may not be able to speak comprehensively about God, Time, or even ourselves, still we can speak truly about these things. We should not miss that the proper context for our speech about God is, as Augustine argued above, liturgical. God wills that we speak of him, and wills that his praise should be our delight. Enough certainty, enough content, can be conveyed through our words even if these never measure to the full stature of the reality they represent. Accordingly, to the skeptic Augustine concedes that our doubts can fruitfully serve the philosophical quest, but not that these should undermine our confidence in education. In Augustine’s view, refusal to use the gift of words would only frustrate that end for which we are intended. Woe to those who will not speak praises of God! (conf. 1.4.4)17

Conclusion In addition to knowing that God is good and that all things are ordered in relation to him, the student must also discover how this knowledge can be put into practice. In other words, we need to find ‘the bond that connects’ (b. vita 4.35), the method that will draw us near to our end. The short answer is the entirety of the Christian life. Through prayer, good works, and the sacraments, the Christian draws nearer to union with his creator. ‘The happy life is the reward of good men. Goodness is their work, their happiness, their reward. God commands the work; it is

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He who puts down the reward’ (s.150.3). Despite the limited role of the teacher implied in Augustine’s doctrine of illumination, we find in his texts a rich supply of theoretical and practical advice on the teacher’s art. As an expression of his love for neighbor, the teacher desires above all for his student to attain happiness in God. That end guides Augustine’s practical and theoretical reflections on his art; it shapes his methods; it provides the rationale for his dispositions. Though Augustine draws upon the divisions of ancient rhetoric, he joins them, as we have seen, to the purposes of Christian doctrine. Confident of the possibility of learning, the Christian teacher should arm himself with the knowledge of human motives; he should understand the methods required to teach, to please, and to move an audience; but the pursuit of these skills remains always subordinate to the aim of holiness. Augustine’s ideal teacher is motivated and inspired by the example of the kenotic love of Christ who emptied himself for others. As a concrete expression of this love, Augustine’s singular contribution is to recommend hilaritas as the antidote to discouragement, and to fatigue. Our next task will be to focus on the matter of the curriculum, or the substance of a liberal arts education.

Chapter 4

The Matter of Liberal Education

Introduction My aim in this chapter is to sketch something of the variety of postures that Augustine took toward liberal education in particular – the form of learning which shaped the culture of his time. I hope to show how Augustine’s earliest writings at Cassiciacum, his Confessions, and then his De doctrina Christiana, each provide distinct vantage points through which to view his teaching on the liberal arts. One interpretation which I hope to contradict is that Augustine passed through two distinct phases with regard to his opinion of this literary past: that at Cassiciacum he stood first as its defender, and then later – distancing himself – as defensive because of the potential of the liberal arts to corrupt the young. While at times Augustine acted both as a defendant for and on the defense against the classical liberal arts tradition, I wish to suggest that he settled on a third view, somewhere between these extremes; that his latter years witness to an appreciation for the arts that is guardedly optimistic; and, that while age and Christian imagination had won for him a new vision of learning, he remained alive to the possibilities of the old. Secondarily, and along the way, I hope to illustrate how these oscillating judgments on the value of reason in education mirror opinions that appear in history both before and after Augustine. Lastly, briefly, within my closing remarks, and drawing upon the above, I suggest two ways that Augustine’s discussions of liberal learning might aid our own thinking about the tasks of Catholic education today. But, before we come to that, we need to say something, first, of the classical liberal arts tradition that Augustine inherited.

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Cassiciacum and the liberal arts tradition Ancient writers customarily distinguish between three stages of education: instruction given by the ludi magister, the grammaticus, and the rhetor – the school teacher, grammarian, and rhetorician in turn.1 Liberal education, or training in the so-called encyclical studies (‘γος ί’ in Greek, ‘artes liberales’ in Latin), comprise stages one and two and spill over into stage three. Quintilian relates that if children went to school, they typically began at age 7 (Quint. Inst. 1.1.15–24). Here they learned, as Augustine tells us he did, to read, write and count (legere, scribere, numerare) (Conf. 1.13.20). Leaping ahead, the third stage began around age 15; and if we take records from the fourth-century school of Libanius as our measure, a typical course in rhetoric would last between 2 years and 4.2 That leaves 5 to the grammarian.3 According to Quintilian, before moving to rhetoric or philosophy, the student should pass through the liberal arts (Quint. Inst. 1.10.1). In the main, it was the grammarian’s task to teach them. In antiquity he was responsible for much more than the rules of correct speech. Then as now (though maybe less now than then) students had to learn declensions and conjugations; though most importantly, the grammarian initiated the young into a literary culture. As Plutarch (and pseudoPlutarch) relates: a grammaticus would elucidate vocabulary, construct etymologies, and deliver background to those persons, places, and events discussed in a classic text.4 Thus, the grammarian was an historian, literary critic, and philosopher all wrapped up in one. Through him the young gained entry into a vast culture that had been nourished for nearly 1000 years on Homer, and by Augustine’s time, four centuries on Virgil. If that sounds like high ambition for what 10–15 year olds could imbibe, it was. However, bear in mind two differences that separate Augustine’s time from ours. The first is that men and women in antiquity assumed adulthood early. The eighteenth-century notion of childhood and the twenty-first-century ideal of deferred adulthood were not yet popular. To take just three examples, Pliny, Origen, and St. Augustine all finished their formal education by 19 years, whereas some of us have had to suffer Ph.D. Programs that, on average, require

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8 years or more to complete. If the first difference concerns what universities expect from us, the second concerns what we expect from universities. Most strikingly, the specialization that we praise, the ancients eschewed. Modern universities were invented to meet the needs of an industrial economy, at the same time that modern armies were invented to meet the needs of a secular and absolute state. And this is a case of the Germans doing better what the French thought of first.5 With its origins in nineteenth-century Prussia, the institutional framework of the modern research university is relatively new to the scene.6 It established itself in the Anglo-American world first at John’s Hopkins and then at Harvard, and now in Canada threatens to be the only model of a university that government will protect.7 Admittedly, the justification for the research university has several sources; but most decisive in the defeat of the ancients over the moderns in this case, as elsewhere, is the work of Immanuel Kant, and particularly through his book Der Streit der Facultäten (The Conflict of the Faculties, 1798): an application of his theory of the separation of reason from faith to the university.8 For all the jargon of postmodernism, we still live and move and have our being within the university designed by a dead white man with a wig. Wherever academic specialization serves the ends of the production, dissemination, and application of useful knowledge, we can be sure Kant is to blame (or perhaps to praise?). In any case, unlike Augustine and the ancients, the academy today seeks not contemplation but useful knowledge. As the eminent German sociologist Abraham Flexner once observed, with the rise of the University of Berlin in 1810 science and research displaced teaching and the arts at the centre of university life.9 Not contemplation but useful knowledge: to linger over this difference just a moment longer, above health, prosperity, or even war craft (which correspond to the three modern high-profile disciplines, medicine, economics, and engineering) the ancient ambition was paideia – the ideal of a liberally educated human being. Everyone wanted part of it. Emperor, priest, and slave (as Seneca was) all worshiped at the altar of education ( Jaeger, 1962). What they sought was a cultivation of humanity more fundamental than any one task that fate had assigned to them. Being liberally educated meant being, as we might say, well rounded. It was an education in the ‘whole’ person – though not in the

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queasy sense of needing to talk about one another’s feelings in a class. Rather, it required the disciplining of the affections; the mastery of a literature; and the exercise of the intellect upon problems that left the mind supple, refined, agile.10 So, what were these arts? What did Quintilian expect the grammarian would teach? Of the various lists we find in the ancient world (we will come to Augustine’s in a moment), one of the earliest is in Plato. Moving from arithmetic, to geometry, astronomy, music, and then dialectic (Rep. 521c–531c) Plato outlined how the student could rise from the contemplation of material form and regularity to grasp the elementary principles of causation and order (528b) – all this terminating in the apprehension of the idea of the Good. The arts, then, stand not at the end of wisdom but at its beginning. They are propaedeutic, that is to say, preliminary to philosophy. Moving to the other side of the tradition, Isocrates, that eminently more successful teacher, put more emphasis on grammar (i.e. literature): and, although the ideal they aspire to is different (Plato to philosophy, Isocrates toward rhetoric and politics), they agree that the liberal arts are the means to get there.11 Moving forward in time, among Hellenistic Jews, Philo (ca. 20 B.C.– A.D. 50) knows a list of five subjects (grammar, music, geometry, rhetoric, and dialectic).12 Also from the early Roman Empire, Vitruvius mentions seven in his catalogue of what an architect needs to know before he should dare touch a building (de arch. 1.1). The point is this: whether you esteem the philosopher, the statesmen, or the architect as your cultural ideal, all recognized that the liberal arts were the best way to get you there.

Cassiciacum and the disciplines At Cassiciacum the young Augustine accepts all this. He could hardly do otherwise (Harrison, 2006, 41). The epitome of a liberally educated human being, as I have so rudely described it, was as permanent to them as the Rockies are to us. Although in practice by Augustine’s time liberal education focused primarily on language, in theory at least there remained a desire to encircle within one’s mastery mathematical and empirical disciplines as well. What, then, were the liberal arts for

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Augustine? And what purpose did he think they should serve within a Christian education? At five places Augustine lists the disciplines belonging to the liberal curriculum (ord. 2.12.35–47, 2.4.13–14; quant. 23.72; retr. 1.6; conf. 4.16.30), which comprise: grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy (Shanzer, 2005, 78–88). That list echoes Plato and anticipates the medieval quadrivium and trivium. In this sequence the student moves through linguistic study (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric) to mathematical and scientific study (music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy), in other words, from grammatical to quantitative induction (Marrou, 1958, 187–93). In Augustine’s most important discussion on the order of the arts (ord. 2.12.35–47) he imaginatively narrates how ratio (reason) uncovers the structure of this curriculum. Moving between the disciplines ratio excavates the sequence of inductions proper to each that will enable the mind to ascend through the levels of rational organization immanent within creation. Each discipline is tersely described. Then, at the end of the sequence (ord. 2.15.43), having ploughed through the field of the disciplines, digging up, as it were, treasures unique in each one, he climbs up to survey what draws them together. Like Genesis’ creation story, Augustine’s narrative closes with praise. Each branch of learning has its place. And in their combined subject matter the disciplines implicitly represent the entirety of the good cosmos, the good order of the world – thus linking the ordo disciplinarum to the ordo of creation (Foley, 1999, 146–46). In short, to study the arts is to follow the mind of God. And, in principle at least, Augustine’s project is animated by the same impulse that has moved physicists from Newton, to Heisenberg, to Hawking. If these are the disciplines, what purpose did they serve? We have already seen that they serve the end of knowledge; and that they aim at comprehensiveness similarly to the way that scientific enquiry today aspires to a unified knowledge of the so-named natural laws. But totality of explanation is not and never has been the only value of science. The source of the moral imperative that drives scientific research today can (beyond looking of course to the market) be located not in Kant but in the late medieval and early modern debates surrounding Aristotle’s fourth (i.e. final) cause. Of particular importance here is the work of Francis Bacon.13 Not wishing to distract ourselves any further, it is

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sufficient to say that Augustine does not share our modern faith, either in the absolute autonomy of science (and her cousin academic freedom)14 or in its unfettered progress. His belief was that scientia is always guided by some criterion of sapientia; that science is by necessity guided by some criterion of wisdom, the sake for which this or that item of knowledge has value. With regard to the autonomy of science, of course intellectual freedom has its place. Augustine delivers harsh words for those who ridicule genuine speculation. But not all things are equally worth knowing (conf. 10.35.55). And, in his view, the intellect that tries to wrench itself free from every norm of nature and of tradition is not really free at all. To the second and related question, progress in science, like progress in anything, it is relative to a particular currency. What that currency should be, in other words how you are to measure progress in science, science cannot say.15 Whether we build bombs or bridges, the atom in isolation does not tell you. Microscope, flask, and computer say nothing about which parts of nature are valuable to study, or to what ends knowledge should be applied. So, who is to say? And what method (besides voting on it) could we use to resolve such questions? Happily, this vexed question of the value of knowledge swiftly returns us into Augustine’s arms and into the circle of his friends at Cassiciacum. During this period of writing, certain facts underlying the conditions of man’s unhappiness became clear. If the goal sought was common, so too were the causes of its frustration. Augustine will echo a familiar ancient trope that all people desire happiness, beatitudo (b. vita 10). No one lacking what he wants can be happy; but even more, not everyone who has what he wants is happy either (b. vita 10–11). Hence the problem of the moral life, as he then saw it, takes on two forms: first, we need to discover what good we should want so as to become happy; second, we need to know how that good can be obtained in practice. What is required, said the young Augustine, is a training in the knowledge of the proper end of human life, and the knowledge of the right method, which could bring that end into being. What was needed was an outline of Christian education. Augustine’s first effort was to perform this task. Beginning but not ending at Cassiciacum Augustine reworked the classical ideal of the liberal arts16 such that the believer could, as he put it, ‘advance from

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corporeal realities to incorporeal ones’ (a quo corporalibus ad incorporalia potest profici) (retr. 1.3).17 His proposal: a Christianized liberal arts curriculum. So enthusiastic was Augustine about the potential of the arts that at Cassiciacum he even wondered whether happiness was possible apart from them: ‘As to those who . . . make no account of the liberal and fine arts, or are incapable of being instructed in them – I know not how I could call them happy as long as they live among men’ (ord. 2.9.26).18 By an ordered sequence of contemplation, moving from linguistic to mathematically based studies, he hoped that the mind would learn to recognize the elementary principles of theology, and so be made open to revelation and the life of virtue. This, in rough outline, is the vision behind Augustine’s transformation of the classical arts. Of this program, drafts were made, a few treatises completed, but the project never came to flower. While we do have volumes on grammar, dialectic, and music, it is likely that by 395 Augustine discarded his plan in favor of what appeared as a decidedly Biblical course of study, to which, along with the Confessions, we turn our attention next.

Liberal learning and the Confessions Less than 10 years later Augustine would look back and look ahead. In his Confessions (397–400) he would ridicule his past liberal education; then, in his De doctrina Christiana (395–427) he would devise a new course for others. We’ll begin with his past. The Confessions tell how after reading the books of the Platonists, listening to the deeds of brother Anthony, and hearing the child’s voice in his garden chime tolle lege, tolle lege, Augustine resolved to put on the Lord Jesus Christ. Needless to say, as many of us know, that is easier said than done. As he saw it at least, conversion entailed renunciation: specifically, renunciation of sex (he had kept a concubine for many years) and his career. Late antique society had more mobility than people sometimes like to imagine. Birth bought power to be sure; but so did education. And mastery of the liberal arts was the long corridor that Augustine had to travel from obscurity to distinction (Brown, 2000, 65–72). Professional orators, like Augustine, were in high demand; and he was one of the best. Appointed by the Prefect of Milan, Symmachus,

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to serve as official Rhetor of this court city (conf. 5.13.23) – encountering Christ meant, for Augustine, stepping off the long ladder he had worked hard to climb. Also in the Confessions, Augustine has nothing good to say of his teachers. Caught with a solecism they would turn blue with shame; but to retell last night’s sexual adventures with style would be a mark of honor (conf. 1.18.28). Everything focused on words. In the ancient world, rhetoric naturally led to law and to a career in public life. So, when judged by your peers at least, the better you were at getting your way, the more highly you were praised. The problem was: these honestae disciplinae (cf. conf. 3.3.5), noble studies, could not crack the heart. One feels that Augustine’s use of autobiography to prove the point works rather well. From age 19 to 29 he devoted himself to the advancement of his career, to the escape from his religious mother, and to the pursuit of a marriage for money. Eventually, ideas, like people, became distinct only against the background of his ambition. The liberal arts might make you clever; but they certainly had no power to discipline lust. Augustine would turn his back too on the old books. ‘What is more pitiable than a wretch with pity for himself who weeps over the death of Dido dying for love of Aeneas, but not weeping over himself for his love for you’ (conf. 1.13.21).19 He knew, like every other educated person of the time knew (conf. 1.16.25), that the old gods were myth. In an age of decay, there is a very peculiar type of sophistication that some clever people acquire, which is to expend their best intellectual energies mocking things they believe do not exist. Augustine’s observation was that in such a time, sooner or later, all that you are left with is technique. And Augustine was good at it. While a teenager he won a prize for delivering a speech by the goddess Juno from Virgil’s Aeneid (conf. 1.17.27). Better than anyone else, as he later recounts it, he had with heightened effect expressed feelings of anger and sorrow (conf. 1.17.27) – dramatizing, that is, the sorrow the goddess felt at failing to keep Aeneas from Italy. In this instance, it is not the exercise that he objects to, particularly, but that its content is so banal. Augustine accepted the conventional wisdom that the soul is imitative. As Plato had argued and Aristotle agreed, the young will copy what they see and conform themselves to the images they are presented with.20 So, he asks: ‘Was there nothing

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else upon which my talent and tongue might be exercised?’ (conf. 1.17.27). These are the confessions of a former prostitute of words. Lastly, from the Confessions, Augustine is critical of contemporary teaching methods. Ancient school teachers were particularly good at ‘motivational speaking.’ Never himself fluent in Greek, Augustine was appalled by the heavy-handed use of ‘fierce terrors and punishments’ of his teachers (conf. 1.14.23). Though this is not the only word on Augustine’s pedagogy, from his own experience, he was convinced of what would later become exaggerated in Rousseau:21 namely, that ‘free curiosity has more power to encourage learning than does terrifying compulsion’ (conf. 1.14.23).

De doctrina Christiana and the turn to the Bible If Augustine abjures the aims, content, and method of his own liberal education, with what, then, would he replace this? He would with the Bible, of course. Moving from the Confessions we turn now to Augustine’s positive response. His second set of mature reflections on the liberal arts comes in the form of an educational manual like none other in the ancient world, the De doctrina Christiana, begun around 395 completed around 427. The aims of Augustine’s new curriculum would be entirely at the service of truth. Truth, not virtuosity, and that with a view to happiness, beatitudo, was his aim. Truth, of course, was the aim at Cassiciacum as well, but in De doctrina Christiana the encyclical studies are given a new master: hermeneutics. In terms of content: not philosophy, not rhetoric, but study of the Bible becomes the new classic text. (In passing we note how close Augustine’s mature view comes to that of the Greek Fathers Origen and St. Basil the Great: in his Philocalia Origen argued that the liberal arts and philosophy should serve as preparation to the interpretation of the Bible;22 likewise, drawing on a traditional image, in his letter Ad Adulescentes St. Basil said that the Christian takes from pagan literature only what is useful, the way the bee for his honey selects but a few from the many flowers of the field.)23 Insofar as the old arts can serve the end of interpretation, their place is secure. Apart from that, they are forgotten. In terms of method, in Book 4 of De Doctrina

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Christiana Augustine encourages something close to what our literary tradition came to call the ‘plain style.’ Rather than elaborate exercises, the Christian preacher is to master a few simple rules and then let the Spirit through the text do the rest. It is obvious enough that Augustine places a gap between himself and his past, but does this new outline differ in substance from the earlier one he espoused at Cassiciacum? This is still a matter for debate. Broadly, there are three scholarly opinions.24 The first, which was made popular by the French historian Henri Marrou, is that Augustine believed the Bible could rather seamlessly be woven into the fabric of the old garment. In this view, not rupture but development marks the progress of Augustine’s thinking on education; at its summit De doctrina Christiana heralded the new foundation for a Christian culture at once classical and Biblical.25 The second view, by contrast, places emphasis on the change of Augustine’s direction. By 395 Augustine had lost interest in the future of the arts. Rather than provide a charter for the Christian intellectual, Augustine’s later thoughts on the arts turned mainly to their dissolution. Along this line, one recent interpreter has written: Augustine ‘in no way attempts to preserve – for its own sake – the pagan educational system, not even within narrow limits.’26 So, which is it: Augustine a defender or defensive? In an earlier chapter we signaled some of the dangers that subsuming argument under the tide of history poses, namely, in that it presumes without justification that material or other causes are sufficient for accounting for developments in thought. Having sounded that warning, I wish nevertheless to indicate by illustration here how the knowledge of Augustine’s time and place can be invaluable in weighing the sense of a text. A basic knowledge of North Africa in the late Roman Empire is, indeed, essential for a proper weighing of the judgments, developments, and emphases that we find in Augustine’s thought. Thus, when evaluating Augustine’s view of liberal education in the De doctrina Christiana we need to remember that for the Church the fourth century was a period punctuated by a series of triumphs and reversals. The century began with Christians as a persecuted minority; it ended with the Church as Rome’s official religion. It is of consequence, too, that over the course of a single generation the Empire slid from relative prosperity to internal collapse and the breakup of its borders. The battle between

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Christians and pagans, and then between empire and her enemies went on over the years of Augustine’s life. These threats to Rome’s traditional pagan culture and political identity caused a series of reactions that form the backdrop to Augustine’s own discussion of liberal education in the De doctrina Christiana. One episode will illustrate. Among the reversals the Church suffered after Constantine’s conversion was the exclusion, for a time, from the educational profession by the will of Julian the Apostate (A.D. 361–363) as expressed through his famous decree on education. Julian was raised a Christian but early in life defected to a philosophical movement that mixed pagan religion with a sophisticated theory of theurgy then being promoted by Neoplatonists like Porphyry. What Julian sought, as did many other pagans of the fourth century, was to renew the empire through the revival of Hellenic culture. And Hellenic culture lived, above all, in books – Plato’s Republic, Virgil’s Aeneid, Cicero’s Hortensius. What Julian attempted was to dictate, through law, how these would be read. He decreed that no Christian could teach the classics.27 Christians, it should be remembered, never developed an alternative system of education to the ones existing in Greek and Roman schools. But, with the slow turn of demographics and gradual emergence of a Catholic intelligentsia, by the fourth century the character of the old education had altered. Roman schools continued to teach the familiar curriculum of classical texts; however, they now did so in ways that were amenable, or at least inoffensive, to monotheism. Julian sought to reverse this. All grammarians professing Christian faith would be expelled. Since ‘classical texts’ formed the backbone of traditional education, this meant, in practice, that Christians would be barred from virtually all teaching positions. As he argued, Christians should not teach such texts because they did so without sincerity. By both their teaching and the example of their lives Christian teachers could not possibly educate students in the ancient myths they were studying; it was inevitable that a Christian teaching a pagan text would only inoculate a student from believing that the old myths had relevance. Fortunately, the confrontation did not last long. Julian died on the battlefield and the teachers returned to their classrooms. But the symbolic value of the gesture was clear. What Julian had attempted was a reversal of the triumph of one culture over another. What Julian rightly perceived, but was unable to counter,

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was the Christian redefinition of ancient paideia through its appropriation of texts. Julian’s edict was too little too late. How does this background help us to interpret Augustine’s treatment of the liberal arts in De doctrina Christiana? It allows us to recognize how successfully Christians had been at separating what is useful in pagan learning (the analytical skills, rhetorical techniques, etc.) from what is not (belief in polytheism, images of immorality, etc.). Additionally, understanding the pervasiveness of the old system of liberal arts education enables us also to see how durable that system would have appeared to Augustine at the time of his writing. In the De doctrina Christiana Augustine sets the old arts aside for a course in Biblical hermeneutics. In 427 it is doubtful that Augustine could have foreseen the near total collapse of the classical pagan school system that followed shortly after his death. In light of this historical context, the third view, and also my own (though not original to me) is somewhere in between the positions I highlighted above. As with other historical study, categorical judgments often do not stretch perfectly over the box of evidence we are left to sort through. And, disappointing as it is, Augustine does not directly answer this question. Indeed, there is evidence for both views: Augustine at times the great defender of the liberal arts tradition; Augustine, at other moments, keenly on the defense against their corrupting effects, which I will name in a moment. Nevertheless, of the first two evaluations I have caricatured, I think the second is the feebler. It is more accurate to say, at least from the point of view of his later texts, that Augustine cultivated a guardedly optimistic view of the relative value of the arts to a Christian; in other words, he is both defensive and a defender. He remains optimistic because the arts can indeed advance the knowledge of God; he is guarded because he has become aware of the temptations that a liberal education brings. First, on Augustine’s optimism, he is a defender of the tradition inasmuch as he believes the arts should continue to serve, albeit in a subordinate role. Whatever else Augustine hoped to accomplish for future ages it seems to me, it was not their total destruction. He surveys the rough meadow of the classical past like a mercantile landowner: unsentimental, all-knowing, ruthless, nursing here, digging up there,

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every stroke done with an end to bearing fruit. Thus, on music: ‘we ought not to flee music on account of the superstition of the pagans’ (doc. Chirst. 2.71); on grammar: ‘just because they say Mercury is the patron god of letters does not make it wrong to learn the alphabet’ (doc. Chirst. 2.72); on rhetoric: many of the old rules ‘are valid even though they can be used to commend falsehood’ (doc. Christ. 2.132); lastly, on dialectic: ‘the study of definition, division, and classification, even though often applied to false things, is not in itself false’ (doc. Christ. 2.129). In short, whatever was true in the arts before Christ remains true after Christ. Recalling his famous image, the gold of the Egyptians is still gold. The difference is that the treasures of secular and pagan culture are now to serve a new master and a new end: Christ, his Church, and her Scriptures. Though – note this: you will not find similar approbation for astronomy, mathematics, or practical arts like our economics. Second, on Augustine’s guardedness, he is defensive inasmuch as his later works repeatedly warn against two temptations of knowledge: pride and vain curiosity. And I take this next bit of advice to young scholars in the De doctrina Christiana as representative. In Book 2 he writes: Christian scholars ought not venture without due care into any branches of learning which are cultivated outside the Church of Christ – and this is the key – ‘as if they were a means to obtaining the happy life but should discriminate sensibly and diligently between them (sed eas sobrie diligenterque diiudicent)’ (doc. Christ. 2.139).28 Discriminate. Why? Because if you don’t, having become clever with logic, your pride will tempt you to believe yourself better than your neighbor (doc. Christ. 2.128); because if you don’t, having become clever with literature, your curiosity will drown you in a sea of intellectual distraction (doc. Christ. 2.151) – similarly to the way the internet dulls intelligence today, not by withholding knowledge but by flooding us with it, washing away our ability to discriminate between the beautiful and the mundane. In the introduction to this chapter, I claimed that Augustine’s oscillating views are writ large in our tradition. We already saw how Augustine’s mature reflection on liberal education is close to Origen and to St. Basil. There I suggested likeness, not dependence. For the next 1000 years of the Latin Middle-Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation, however, Augustine’s writings on the function and value of reason,

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which we have seen leave a mixed legacy, are decisive. We here only mention the irony that as the West coped with the introduction of Aristotle, the rise of Humanism, and the collapse of a unified Christendom, Augustine was appealed to on both sides of debate. Thus, at the origin of the scholastic method is Peter Abelard’s appeal to the De doctrina Christiana. In order to justify his elevation of dialectic over authority in theology and philosophy, Abelard feels he must first appeal to the authority of St. Augustine, much to the displeasure of St. Bernard.29 (Medievalists will appreciate too how symbolic it is that Peter Lombard’s first line of the Sentences begins with a quotation from the De doctrina Christiana.) Thus, artists of the fourteenth century30 and humanists like Petrarch, Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) of the fifteenth century looked to St. Augustine as a patron of ancient liberal learning.31 But how differently would Augustine be used only a generation later, in the North. Here one need only think back to the inflated rhetoric of the beginnings of the German Reformation, and to Luther, who in his early Disputatio Contra Scholasticam of 1517 derided reason, and in his last sermon in Wittenberg in 1546 called her a whore. All this was done in defense of what he believed to be an Augustinian elevation of grace over nature.32 In any case, insofar as Augustine himself relates to his early project of rewriting a Christianized liberal arts program, it is mostly with silence. He moved on. Except for a few short reminiscences, the projected disciplinarum libri simply drops from his view. 33 Where Augustine directly criticizes his past writing on education it is for its false confidence. At the end of his life he writes: ‘In these books I am displeased . . . because I attributed a great deal to the liberal arts (quod multum tribui liberalibus disciplines), of which many saintly men are much in ignorance, and of which many who are learned are not saintly’ (retr. 1.3.2 on ord. 1.11.31). Like other Platonists, and some of the Greek fathers, the young Augustine too had held that perfection in this life was possible, at least for some. In this regard, it is useful to recall too that between A.D. 386–395 the arts were merely one of the ladders of ascent that he had anticipated. Besides them, there was ascent through the levels of the soul (quant. 70–76), the levels of being (lib. arb. 2.3.7–2.15.39), and the stages of virtue (s. Dom. mon. 1.3.10).34 As a consequence of his evolving views on grace, volition, and soteriology, it was inevitable, so it appears,

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that this early hope would disappear – and with it the religious devotion to the liberal arts that characterized his Cassiciacum period. Reason is ever a treasure from God in Augustine. But as he aged he became acutely aware of the temptations to curiosity and to pride that it could enflame. Learning is a dangerous gift; it is a gift that can both heal and destroy.

Conclusion In summary, we have seen that there is reason to view Augustine both as a great defender of the classical liberal arts tradition, and as defensive against its corrupting effects: Augustine’s early idealism at Cassiciacum, his sober reflection in the Confessions, and his reconstruction in De doctrina Christiana each provide distinct vantage points through which to view the arts. I have argued that, in his most considered treatment, he warns the young scholar to approach them with a guarded optimism. With the Bible and the Church’s tradition, at least some of the arts can serve the cause of saving truth. Apart from these, liberal education can all too often lead to pride and vain curiosity. In passing, I have noted how in debates over the organization of knowledge this plurality within Augustine’s treatments has been overlooked by some and exploited by others. But, lastly, how might Augustine’s experiences relate to today? This is a subject we will broach more directly in our final chapter. For now, however, if the young Augustine was tempted to adopt an idealistic view of what a liberal education could achieve, our fault, so it seems, tends in just the opposite direction. We hope for too little. As everyone can see, our universities are becoming little more than institutional umbrellas for the business schools and high-tech industries that find shade on our campuses. Student expectations too have changed. Most come to get a job: the musical tastes, sexual habits, and professional ambitions of all but a few come out relatively untouched after 4 years of undergraduate study. There are both historical and philosophical reasons for this change of climate. Keeping in mind the origins of the modern research university, as well as the Kantian separation of reason from faith can, I think, provide some context to our own thinking about the nature of liberal education. Even more, this background may help

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explain why the distinctive mission of a Christian liberal arts university or college appears so enticing to some and, well, so antiquated to others. Our concern has been with Augustine’s thought. But should we care to draw on him for our own thinking in defense of a liberal education (a task we take on in the final chapter), we could do worse than begin with where we have left off here: with Augustine’s distinction between scientia and sapientia, science and wisdom; and with Augustine’s emphasis on happiness, beatitudo, over merely useful study as the proper aim of a liberal education.

Chapter 5

The Limits to Education

Introduction In what ways can education advance social progress? Since Kant, this has been, arguably, the leading question among social philosophers and philosophers of education. What the revolutionary traditions of the European Enlightenment attempted to achieve was, in effect, the inversion of Plato’s allegory of the cave. They hoped to pull down the benefits of science into the city, to shine the light of the good into the cave, that is, into society. Augustine gives little indication of entertaining this possibility. Ideas of elaborate state-sponsored institutions are foreign to Augustine, as they were to the ancient and medieval worlds generally. This is not because Augustine was unaware of the social contexts in which most of our intellectual and moral development occurs. Whether through imitation and example, or by punishment and reward, Augustine recognized that individuals learn from others and this within the spheres of the family, of religion, and of society. And yet, unlike most modern educational philosophers, Augustine had no corresponding theory of the development of society as such. Education, it would seem, can improve individuals but not societies. Up to this point, we have focused on the aims, methods, and materials of the education of the individual. This chapter extends our reflections of the previous chapter and discusses education’s limits particularly in relation to the progress of society. In Augustine’s view, progress is limited because both our knowledge and our virtue are limited. As we shall see, what social utility Augustine ascribes to education is enlisted primarily in the service of an eschatological goal. This otherworldly orientation of education is for Augustine both what defines its value and, should we wish to contrast Augustine with modern philosophers, sets limits on the application it could have to a purely secular social theory.

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Progress and history Contrary to what one might expect, Augustine’s lack of interest in theories of social progress stems not from an absence of a philosophy of history but from a highly nuanced taxonomy of world development. In his view, there can be no substantive progress in history because history has already achieved its penultimate end. We await only the second return of Christ and his judgment. Between then and now, citizens of the City of God have nothing further to expect. Of Augustine’s several divisions of time (cf. civ. Dei. 16.24), his most comprehensive separates history into seven stages. The first five belong to Israel’s history and move from the creation to the time of Noah, then to Abraham, to David, to the Babylonian captivity, and to Christ. The sixth age began at the birth of Jesus; the last, which is everlasting, will commence at the moment of his return (rud. 18, 29–24, 45). Augustine does have a doctrine of social progress, but it is important to consider the unit of measurement that he employs. In the early modern tradition, classical liberals like John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), for instance, argued that the extension of liberty would strengthen the economy and increase the general happiness of mankind. Karl Marx (1818–1883) placed more emphasis on the principle of equality. But both accepted that social progress included moral advance and material increase. Liberalism and socialism both looked to education as a mechanism for reform. Augustine by contrast defines social progress primarily in intellectual terms, secondarily in moral terms, and not at all in material terms. For him the stages of world history are defined according to the manifestation of God’s plan of salvation. This is the one measure that encompasses the true development or decline of nations, which is to say, as they will be judged from the point of view of humanity’s ultimate end. As we discover in his City of God, and other works, what the logic of these stages unfolds is a gradual unveiling before us of God’s justice and mercy. Above all, the epochs within the Old Covenant prefigure the definitive revelation to be made known in Jesus Christ. The stages of history prior to Christ each reveal particular aspects of God’s nature. What God is like is known, first of all, through the creation of the world; he is known also through the pattern of his judgments given within the law, in the words of his prophets, and by the

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miracles performed in his name. Augustine’s Biblical exegesis typically interprets God’s dealing with the Jews as holding a lesson for the Church of the future. This approach is illustrated by Augustine’s interpretation of two Old Testament texts, one more and one less familiar. First, we take the story of the flood. Augustine understands the Bible’s account of a world flood to be literally accurate. There was a man named Noah; the Lord did indeed destroy the world by water as a sign of judgment (civ. Dei. 20.18). Yet beyond these historical facts, the event also bears a figurative meaning; besides an act of particular judgment on the men of Noah’s time, the flood points forward to our time, the age of the Church. Scripture’s account of a deluge is literally true but its most important message is that Christ’s body serves as the universal ‘ark’ of salvation (civ. Dei. 15.26). Even the tiniest details of the story confirm this message. The hundred-year delay between the command to build a ship and the first rain, for example, sets a model for us who live in the sixth age. As Augustine explains: ‘Now if God gives time to repent even to these people whom he knows will remain obstinate in their wickedness, he does this in order to exercise our patience and mould it by his example’ (rud. 19, 32). To take a less familiar text, in the City of God Augustine interprets a puzzling episode in Genesis chapter 15 where God had asked Abraham to make a sacrifice before him. Abraham prepared animals for sacrifice, divided their meat on a rough altar, and waited. Not surprisingly, the flesh attracted birds. Instead of scaring these birds, Abraham looked on while they devoured, and the question Augustine raises is this: Why would Abraham sit by while the birds ate his sacrifice? With reference to the final tribulation at the end of this age, Augustine explains: ‘the fact that Abraham sat by them symbolizes that even amidst those divisions of carnal creatures [i.e. the sacrificed animals] the truly faithful will persevere to the end’ (civ. Dei. 16.24). In similar fashion, the deeds of all the patriarchs point to the future. Thus, humanity’s knowledge of God does increase. And Augustine will cast this increase in educational terms. Since with Christ’s coming symbol passes into reality, those living in the age of the Church can look back through the epochs of sacred history with the advantage of a more complete revelation. In this sense, the simple believer of today can know more about God than did Moses. Over centuries the Lord gradually

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trained his chosen people not to trust in material and political rewards. In place of these his people were taught to hope for spiritual goods, and ultimately, for heaven. As the Gospel narratives make clear, many of the Jews rejected Christ specifically because he would not deliver a material (and political) kingdom. But of those that welcomed Christ with joy, Augustine writes: These were no longer people who yearned for God to give them temporal benefits and an earthly kingdom, or people whose hope for the promised king, the Christ, was based on considerations of the flesh. It was, rather, that they understood and loved Christ in his immortal nature – Christ who in his mortal body suffered so much hardship for them and because of them, and who forgave them their sins, even the sin of shedding his blood, and through the example of resurrection showed them that it is immortality that they should hope and desire to receive from him. (rud. 23, 42) The fruits of this instruction which began with a single people have been extended now to the whole of humanity. It is in this sense that Augustine describes humanity’s march through time in educational terms. At another place, Augustine compares the progress of sacred and secular world history to the growth of an individual man: The true education (recta eruditio) of the human race, at least as far as God’s people were concerned, was like that of an individual. It advanced by steps in time, as the individual’s does when a new stage of life is reached. Thus it mounted from the level of temporal things to a level where it could grasp the eternal, and from visible things to a grasp of invisibles. (civ. Dei. 10.14)1 Christianity both spiritualizes and universalizes the experience of the Jews. Beginning with promises of material reward, the Jews were led gradually to a spiritual understanding of happiness, and with the coming of Christ, God’s desire to draw all nations to himself is made explicit. Race and place no longer matter. The Church now enjoys the fullness of saving knowledge. And, from this point of view at least, history came to an end 2000 years ago. In terms of humanity’s potential for

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enlightenment, there remains, qualitatively speaking, nothing more to achieve. Evangelization can spread this enlightenment abroad; individuals can lose or deepen their knowledge of Christ; but the nativity was the last true event. But note what Augustine does not suggest. Decay is still possible, as is progress (by other measures). Augustine’s claim is simply that the relevant criterion by which history should be divided is not material advance but intellectual and moral progress. On Augustine’s view, then, our knowledge as it pertains to salvation is complete, but what about humanity’s moral improvement? Might the preaching of this Gospel not have a cleansing effect as it washes over peoples and nations?

The moral possibilities of society Some interpreters have thought so. Indeed there is a long tradition, going back at least to the tenth century in Pope Galasius’ (492–96) two swords doctrine,2 which takes Augustine as a champion of the moral progress of society, a judgment not without foundation. In the twentieth century this progressive interpretation of Augustine claimed both Protestant and Catholic exegetes. The American Protestant theologian H. Richard Niebuhr, for one, in the midst of narrating his famous typology of the ways that Christians have understood Christ’s relation to culture, placed Augustine firmly within the ‘transformation’ camp. Niebuhr appealed to Augustine’s authority to support his own conviction that social structures can be humanized through their interaction with the faith.3 Particularly in relation to formal education, French historian H. Marrou put forward the attractive thesis that Augustine’s pedagogical project was at the basis of an effort to found a new type of civilization, a ‘culture chrétienne.’ For Marrou and many after him, Augustine’s educational writings, above all the De doctrina Christiana, supported a new type of culture, based now on the Bible, not on Homer, which incorporated even as it surpassed the achievements of classical antiquity.4 Certain of Augustine’s reflections on history do seem to suggest such a progressive view. After a January summit in Milan in A.D. 313 the two Roman emperors Constantine and Licinius officially granted to the

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Church toleration for the first time. The provisions ordered by the emperors for the restoration of confiscated Church and private property foreshadowed the toleration and increasing preferential treatment the Church would enjoy through (most of ) the fourth century. Moreover, once emperor Theodosius (379–395) in 380 promulgated the edict Cunctos populos (‘All Peoples’) the Catholic Church became not merely tolerated but the legally prescribed religion of the empire.5 Augustine’s early comments about the future of social reform need to be seen against this backdrop. Particularly in the 390s Augustine was optimistic about the possibilities for a united politico-religious order that the conversion of the Catholic emperors had made imaginable. For instance, in an early apologetic work, De vera religione (390), Augustine marshals a list of achievements ushered in by the Christian dispensation. It is an impressive inventory: the morality that was once timorously defended by philosophers is now openly proclaimed; false worship is everywhere being abandoned; celibacy is embraced; the rich have begun to spurn wealth to devote themselves to contemplation (vera rel. 3.3–3.5); and worldwide, there are ‘now more Christians than even pagans and Jews combined’ (util. cred. 7, 19). Indeed, Augustine was always convinced that the global reach of the Church was a sign of its veracity. It may be an ad populum appeal, but God understands that men need such external signs to assure them of the ultimate conquest of good in the world.6 In his debates with the Donatists in particular, Augustine eventually recognized the enforcement of orthodoxy by imperial legislation as a gift of providence. The reasons for Augustine’s acceptance of the limited application of force in religious matters are complex; but one is simply that the force of the law worked.7 By rendering the Donatists outlaws, the emperor’s public judgment in favor of Catholic orthodoxy made it possible for many to give an assent that otherwise they could not have registered without recrimination. For this reason, Augustine allows that, in a limited sense, the preaching of the Gospel can serve as an instrument for moral reform. Augustine retains a limited notion of moral progress even within the age of the Church. Having observed this it is useful to note, nonetheless, that these were not Augustine’s last or most decisive words on the matter. Even with the conversion of the empire the Church had not yet passed over to safety. Indeed, in later works Augustine is much less sure of the possibility of

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moral progress. The Church has not entered into its glory merely because kings now serve it; the emperor’s support of the Church, in fact, ‘only produces a more perilous and a sorer temptation’ (perf. just. 15.35; written about A.D. 415). Augustine’s mature reflections see, rather, many of the structures of society as monuments to sin and, at best, as haunted by a lack of true communication. The locus classicus of Augustine’s mature political doctrine is his celebrated book 19 within the City of God. Book 19 stands as the preface to the fifth part of the City of God, which treats the last things: judgment, hell, and heaven. Set within this structure, book 19 clarifies the ends that generate the motive for action of each of the two cities. The cities are defined each according to their respective loves (love of self or love of God) and their eternal destinies (hell or heaven): I classify the human race into two branches: the one consists of those who live by human standards, the other of those who live according to God’s will. I also call these two classes the two cities, speaking allegorically. By two cities I mean two societies of human beings, one of which is predestined to reign with God for all eternity, the other doomed to undergo eternal punishment with the Devil. (civ. Dei. 15.1) What has fascinated commentators about book 19 is Augustine’s nuanced handling of the relationship between these two communities as they hurtle through time, that is, through the saeculum, or present age, where Augustine’s original readers found themselves and where we find ourselves still. We have already mentioned that Augustine himself was aware that the diffusion of Christianity had some leavening effect on late Roman society.8 But beyond the toleration and spread of true religion is there a sense by which there can be moral progress within the saeculum? Between now and the second coming the limited way by which Christians can transform society is, chiefly, in their capacity as judges and rulers. In these offices a Christian can introduce a measure of justice and mercy into structures which, however necessary, remain, in their temporal condition, monuments to the tragedy of sin. In other words,

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citizens of the City of God affect but do not abolish imperfect social structures already in place. Perhaps the most problematic example of this for modern readers is slavery. Augustine is clear that one man’s dominion over another does not belong to God’s original design. Slavery as an institution is a punishment for original sin.9 Augustine conceives the task of the Christian not as eradicating the institution but mitigating its harsh effects. The Christian emperor will march with his armies just like his pagan predecessors; yet his passion is no longer for his own glory but the good of his people. In a similar way, within the government of the home the Christian father works tirelessly for the good of the household; his concern is for their provision, carrying a burden even heavier than his own slaves (civ. Dei. 19.16). But note this caveat: what advances might be gained are never secure. Reversals are always possible; indeed, they are to be expected. At the very least, in the last days much will be lost as the Devil is given reign over the earth when ‘Christ will not come to judge the living and the dead without the prior coming of his adversary, Antichrist, to seduce those who are dead in soul . . . ’ (civ. Dei. 20.19). Political life is wrought with intractable difficulties that no system of government will be capable to overcome.

The limits of virtue The first reason why education cannot advance society, which we have already seen, is that with the birth of Christ there is in principle no further revelation that humanity awaits. The second reason for this limit is, more directly, because of our lack of moral virtue, which is manifest in both private and public life. I take up virtue in individuals first. Virtue is knowledge, Socrates had famously suggested. Those who achieve knowledge of the good will invariably conform themselves to it. Plato provides the psychological rationale for this conclusion in the Symposium where Diotima says that once lovers see true beauty they will produce beautiful ideas and become beautiful themselves (Symp. 207a). Eros is the drive that compels us to act, that propels us out of ourselves to seek union with beautiful objects and beautiful souls. For Plato the philosopher is the most erotic soul of all because, driven by a kind of madness (one sign of divine inspiration), his entire life is devoted

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to union with the Good (Rep. 495bc). Plato’s ethics, thus, posits a close connection between beauty, desire, and virtue: to be virtuous is to know the good; to know the good is to see that it is beautiful; those who recognize that the good is beautiful also desire to conform themselves to it through virtuous deeds. This approach has been called an ‘ethics of inspiration’ (Rist, 1997, 148–59). In his own ethics Augustine retains much of this. We wish to become good because we long to be united with perfection. A difficulty that arises with this account, however, which Augustine faced early on, is its failure to explain the persistence of human evil. Too often knowledge of the good fails to secure conformity to its demands. Augustine began with a similar confidence in the attractive power of the good and the sufficiency of virtue to secure happiness. But on this topic Augustine traveled a vast distance in only a few short years. Of this, I mention one aspect of his development. A helpful point of entry into the question of the limits of virtue is to compare Augustine’s account of the freedom of the will in De libero arbitrio (391–95) with his account 10 years hence in the Confessions (397–400). It is not coincidental that this shift between his early and later works is concurrent with Augustine’s loss of confidence in the salvific capacity of the liberal arts (as we saw in the previous chapter). In De libero arbitrio Augustine sets out to defend divine justice by proving that God is not the cause of evil (lib. arb. 1.1). Human (and angelic) beings are its source. Moreover, contrary to the Manichaean teaching, evil is not a substance but rather the turning away from the supreme good to a lesser good (lib. arb. 1.16). Augustine’s next step is to locate the site of defection precisely in the will; evil originates in the liberum arbitrium voluntatis, ‘the free choice of the will’ (lib. arb. 1.16). Augustine observes that once the mind consents to love improperly, several consequences follow for the agent. Temporal objects, when importunely admired, become unnatural ‘limbs of the soul’ (membra animi) (i.e. artificial attachments which hinder the soul’s freedom of action); we subject ourselves to the reign of the irrational; our will is consumed above all by lust, libido dominandi. Libido dominandi is Augustine’s term for the will to power. It is that lust for self-assertion that drives us to build empires (lib. arb. 1.9), and which Augustine names as the source for the untold suffering common among the victors and

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the vanquished in the struggle for power in this world (lib. arb. 1.11). The tragedy is that by our own effort we submit ourselves to its irrational control. For it is ‘only its own will and free choice that can make the mind a companion of cupidity’ (lib. arb. 1.11; 1.16). How differently will Augustine frame matters in his old age.10 By the time he wrote the Confessions, Augustine’s imagination of the moral landscape had altered. Lost was the early confidence in the will’s inviolability. Discovered was a sober appraisal of our helplessness. The sequence of consequences appeared to him now to flow in the opposite direction. Where formerly Augustine had held that the will was free until we consent to passion, now he held that we start out suffering the ill effects of someone else’s decision. ‘The enemy had a grip on my will and so made a chain for me to hold me prisoner. The consequence of a distorted will is passion’ (conf. 8.5.10). Evil has no need to wait for the door to be opened. We discover that we are already locked inside of its prison. Some measure of freedom remains, but as Augustine describes it, this quality of ‘freedom’ is only enough to account for the varying degrees of our bondage. We are locked under a common ceiling, but we can choose the door to our prison.11 Augustine’s distinctive contribution to the classical and Christian discussions of the will, and of obvious relevance for educational theory and practice, is his detailed account of the mechanism by which will is rendered impotent for the good.12 In the Confessions what unites the will’s original impairment and present condition is memory and through memory, habit (consuetudo). As he remarks: ‘By servitude to passion, habit is formed, and habit to which there is no resistance becomes necessity’ (conf. 8.5.10). Habits become the link that forms a chain in our mind, binding us to patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting often contrary to our better intentions. What gives these vicious deeds a compounding effect upon the mind is our continual recollection of them. Memory entraps us. Through the imagination past error and present possibility are joined together. The pleasure that accompanied an earlier act of disordered passion clouds our judgment and weakens our capacity to form new patterns of behavior. In Augustine’s autobiography consuetudo accounts for the way by which evil delights, once enjoyed, continually water our passions. Augustine’s reflections on memory are rooted in both Scripture and his own experience. St. Paul

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had earlier written of the two laws at war in a man: the law of God and the law of sin which wars against God (Rom. 7.22). This second law Augustine names ‘the violence of habit’ (violentia consuetudinis) (conf. 8.5.12). By it even the unwilling mind (invitus animus) (conf. 8.5.12) is dragged down and held ‘since by its own choice (librum arbitrium) it slipped into habit’ (conf. 8.5.10). Damaged from the outset, all that remains of choice is its freedom to form enslaving habits. In the Confessions Augustine appeals to the freedom of the will just as he did a decade earlier, but to a markedly different effect.13 If that is our condition how can the will be liberated? Augustine’s answer is grace. Grace elevates nature. Grace is the power of God that causes man to delight in the good, and to cling to it (cf. c. ep. Pel. 4.4.4; 4.6.13).14 Virtue and vice mix in the most unexpected of places and Augustine was always struck by our unpredictable nature. The sheer caprice of human decision is unfathomable. Augustine will wonder, for instance, why it is that some people turn to God while others do not. His answer is that God gives to some and not to others this secret delight in the good. In recollecting his own turn from the world to God he wrote: ‘The nub of the problem was to reject my will and to desire yours’ (conf. 9.1.1.). ‘But where through so many years was my freedom of the will? From what deep and hidden recess was it called out in a moment?’ (conf. 8.1.1.). How, precisely, he came to accept another’s will, Augustine does not say. He tells only that after years of wandering ambition, of seeking peace, ‘suddenly’ it had become ‘sweet to me to be without the sweets of folly’ (conf. 9.1.1). God grants the virtue of love to those whom he chooses. Through the narrative of his conversion Augustine traces how he traveled from bondage to freedom, from his satisfaction in his own self-will to his joy at being mastered by the truth. As it turns out, Augustine retains much of the Platonist approach to ethics. It is still virtue that secures happiness; but it is infused virtue, from above (Wetzel, 1992a, 74–78). Now in addition to the cardinal virtues there is another set of powers given to the soul (ep. 181a). First among these is the power to love God above every created thing. Another way to say this is that Augustine discovers a delight from whence he can trace no necessary sequence of causes. To love God, to delight in the good, is a sheer gift. In terms of the application of these ideas to education,

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one implication is that the teacher must recognize that no student comes to him as a clean canvass. By the time the teacher meets a student their soul already bears the marks of the battle between good and evil. The teacher can lead by example, he can make explicit the benefits that virtue brings to our souls but, ultimately, there remains an element of free decision on the part of the student whose outcome cannot be known. That freedom, though real, has been damaged. Another implication of Augustine’s view is that the teacher cannot transmit virtue to their student in the same way that one can ‘transmit’ certain technical skills. Education is a moral enterprise and as such, even when the setting of one’s education is perfectly conducive to genuine progress, each individual student as each generation must take up for himself the life of virtue. Gains of the fathers can be lost by the sons. This first limit points us to another. Just as individuals are damaged in their capacity to exercise virtue so also is society hindered in the progress that it can make. Education cannot bring about lasting progress because society is comprised of incorrigible sinners whose negative effect is greater when joined together. In Augustine’s view, it is a political fact that the wells of trust will always and continually be poisoned. Social communication prior to Christ’s return will always deliberately be tainted by deception. Since the early days of the Donatist controversy Augustine was clear that the Lord allows the just and unjust to grow up together within the Church. The corresponding political consequence of this doctrine is that, even within an ostensibly Christian society, you have no way to distinguish, finally, the true believer from the wolf who lies in wait hidden under a sheep’s garment. This uncertainty, this epistemological gap between our perceptions of our neighbors and their reality, forces people to retain an element of suspicion which, in turn, renders any true peace within society in this age, impossible. How does this relate to education? My claim is that reflection on the methods of a teacher, and indeed on Augustine’s pedagogy in general, is best understood against the horizon of his evolution on the possibilities of human perfectibility, and in particular the limits of virtue. Virtue can be encouraged but not guaranteed. Both human free will and the individual and collective effects of sin militate against the teachability of virtue. It is worth considering why this is something of an unexpected conclusion. Given the way that Augustine makes society necessary to the

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wise man’s happiness one might have expected Christianity’s influence to be felt precisely here, in the social sphere. We do well not to read back onto Augustine a sociology that he would not recognize. ‘Society,’ need not refer to anything other than ‘other people.’ And yet, as Augustine recognized, our social life does seem to constitute a reality that is greater than the mere sum of its parts. We recall, further, that situating society at the centre of moral philosophy was not a conventional way of organizing the question of the nature of the supreme good for humans. Augustine structures book 19 of the City of God around a series of questions about the supreme good loosely taken from the Roman philosopher Varro. After playfully recollecting the ideal classification of 288 possible sects in philosophy (based on the finite number of possible responses to the question of the human good), Augustine agrees to the proposition that every school can be defined according to its teaching on the nature of the good. Augustine’s purpose in book 19, then, is to explain what Christians take this to be. He argues that peace or peace in eternal life is the supreme good; and more, that this good is realized not in the midst of a solitary pilgrimage but through one inextricably bound to others. The happy life, in other words, is the social life. Varro too had considered this possibility when he asked, ‘whether the wise man makes it a point of principle to desire and promote the supreme good . . . not only for himself but for a friend’ (civ. Dei. 19.3), and gave no credence to this view. Augustine, on the other hand, embraces it. Though Augustine acknowledges that many of the poets and philosophers also highly value friendship, he argues that for Christians it is paramount. He writes: ‘How much more fully do we approve (nos multos amplius adprobamus) what these philosophers believe – that the wise man is social’ (civ. Dei. 19.5). In answering this way, Augustine produces a distinctive approach to the classical understanding of virtue. 15 In short, by placing friendship and society at the centre of the moral life Augustine challenged the classical account of the supreme good ‘over its asocial way of organizing the question.’16 Augustine finds it difficult to affirm a doctrine of moral progress, in the way that we do not find difficult, because there is no generic referent to which ‘society,’ as a neutral description, corresponds. Society, for Augustine, is a moral communion of persons. A famous thesis, put forth by R.A. Markus, is that Augustine was the first theorist of the secular sphere and that book 19 in particular outlines a proto-modern account

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of a religiously neutral political community. As Markus (1988, 173) put it, society ‘is the sphere in which different individuals with different beliefs and loyalties pursue their common objectives insofar as they coincide.’ The idea here is that, like the modern state, Augustine envisioned individuals with different ends sharing in the acquisition and defense of common means. While Markus’ book certainly merits careful attention, it seems clear that this manner of putting the matter goes quite beyond what Augustine intended. For one thing, Augustine nowhere posits a neutral meeting ground where the two cities (two peoples) might gather on equal terms (O’Donovan, 2005, 58). What he does say is that the citizens of the City of God can make use of the limited form of peace that the citizens of the Earthly City promote, although the two groups will defend this peace for different reasons. The limited peace imposed by the citizens of the earthly city is for the sake of material goods that these citizens regard as a matter of ultimate gain. Those who belong to the heavenly city, on the other hand, equally make use of this peace. But citizens of this city ‘use the earthly and temporal goods derived like a pilgrim in a foreign land’ (terrenisque rebus ac temporalibus tamquam peregrina utitur) (civ. Dei. 19.17). They treat the fruits of this peace as ‘supports’ that help them to bear the burdens of mortal life. So Augustine writes: ‘Thus both kinds of men and both kinds of households [of the earthly and of the heavenly cities] alike make use of the things essential for this mortal life; but each has its very different end in making use of them’ (civ. Dei. 19.26). There is therefore a common peace which is shared, ‘that temporal peace of the meantime which is shared by good and wicked alike’ (civ. Dei. 19.26); but there is no common city. In book 19, Augustine has no category ‘society’ that corresponds to a theologically neutral description of persons. Augustine in fact uses three terms to refer to a defined human community, populus, societas, and res publica, ‘a people,’ ‘society,’ and ‘commonwealth.’ Book 19 contains Augustine’s famous definition of what constitutes a people or a commonwealth, which he alights upon after a lengthy treatment of the standard definition attributed to Scipio Africanus (by Cicero). Consistent with his earlier statement (cf. civ. Dei. 15.1, quoted above), once Augustine is finally ready to define what he means by a ‘society,’ he does

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so with reference to the object of love that they hold in common. He writes: ‘A people (populus) is the association of a multitude of rational beings united by a common agreement on the objects of their love’ (civ. Dei. 19.24).17 It is the object of one’s love that qualifies you for civic membership. There are two cities: there are no dual citizens. I conclude, therefore, that society is central to Augustine’s moral philosophy but its progress is not. On whether education advances social progress Augustine replies, with some qualification, negatively. Education has no power to bring about this end for two reasons: first, because with the revelation of Christ we have attained in principle all the knowledge of God that we can hope and, secondly, because individuals who make up society are incorrigibly sinful. Augustine defines progress in society not according to material but theological categories, and so, in terms of our knowledge there is no further progress which the citizens of the heavenly city await within this present age. Augustine wrote before the age of Newman and there is little notion of the development of doctrine in his thinking.18 In this life we find great saints and loathsome sinners, and what remains between these two types are individuals who more or less closely confirm their wills to the object of their love. It is their direction, the object of their love, and the quality of their attachment to it, which defines their true home. Although Christians can humanize social institutions in a limited sense, Augustine does not entertain the category of social progress as such. Augustine is wary of promises to progress not, as we might at first suppose, because of a poverty of imagination (though we who benefit from the experience of 15 additional centuries of Christianity’s leavening effect are likely to assume this), but because he defines the term according to the unfolding clarity of God’s purposes for humanity. Noting this absence in Augustine’s theory of education and society achieves two results. It uncovers Augustine’s assumptions as to where the limits of educational discourse are to be set; it marks also the point at which we find the greatest distance between Augustine’s educational philosophy and our own – a subject that we shall address more fully in our remaining chapters.

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From The Common Man (1950), and cited by Haldane (2004, p. 185) at the head of his essay ‘Chesterton’s Philosophy of Education.’ On this see conf. 1.6.8 and Colin Starnes comments on the ancient view that laughter was a distinctive human trait in his Augustine’s Conversion: A Guide to the Argument of Confessions I-IX (1991, pp. 3–4 and p. 25 n14). ‘Since every sort of knowledge and decision pursues some good, what is the good that we say political science seeks? What, [in other words,] is the highest of all the goods achievable in action? As far as its name goes, most people virtually agree; for both the many and the cultivated call it happiness, and they suppose that living well and doing well are the same as being happy’ (Ethic. Nic. 1095a). ‘In Ethics and Education Peters asserts that the word “education” has “normative implications.” It has “the criterion built into [it] that something worth while should be achieved.” . . . Peters is surely right in what he says. Vast sums of money are not spent on education simply because no other uses can be found for it’ (2006, pp. 26–27). Translation taken from Papal Teachings: Education, selected and arranged by the Benedictine monks of Solesmes (1960), pp. 202–03. The Basilica, as the reader will recall, was devastated by earthquake in 1997. By 1999, after a herculean effort, most of Giotto’s frescos, thankfully, were restored. The text is The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, 5 volumes (1918–1920) by Thomas and Znaniecki, from which the OED gives this excerpt: ‘Sociology . . . has this in common with social psychology: that the values which it studies draw all their reality, all their power to influence human life, from the social attitudes which are expressed or supposedly expressed in them.’ More comprehensible is this 1921 example from the Times Literary Supplement: ‘In the effort, again, to give his characters and scenes the vivid impression of reality, all their power to influence human life, the novelist, whether voluntarily or not, cannot avoid revealing not merely his powers of mind and imagination, but his spiritual and philosophical bias, his views of society, of religion, his “values”.’

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Although English takes ‘value’ from the French valoir (to be of worth) and the Latin valere (to be strong, powerful), its metamorphosis into the plural ‘values’ was the work of other influences; the nearness in morphology between the singular and the plural should not blind us as to their distance in semantics. The two words have about as much to do with one another as does ‘bread’ with ‘bred.’ For background see Schacht (1983, 341–67) and especially Andrew (1995). This author remembers vividly the lessons he was subject to in his course titled ‘Lifestyles.’ In that class the students themselves were supposed to be the subject, and values clarification was the special study. It is seen as a virtue of our politics that each citizen is encouraged to discover his or her own values, as though barring anyone from their share in the fun would be antidemocratic or discriminatory. Of this situation not a few observers have noted that this fusion of liberal egalitarianism with German nihilism has produced in the West a most surprising concoction where under the shelter of our politics we wish to protect ‘American values,’ as much as ‘Native values,’ and ‘family values,’ as much as ‘gay values.’ The most accessible discussion of the bizarre fate of Nietzsche on the North American continent is found, of course, in Allan Bloom (1987) The Closing of the American Mind, pp. 194–226. For a study of the Canadian experience of this phenomenon, see E. Levant (2009). Referring to this text of Augustine’s, Josef Pieper (1986, pp. 166–67) has written how, ‘in the great tradition of European thinking about man it has always been held that just as the immediate certainties of seeing are the foundation and prerequisite of intellectual activity, so also love is the primal act of willing that permeates all wiling-to-do from its very source . . . . For if it is true that all beings at the core are nothing but will, and if the will, of all the forces of the psyche, is the dominant and most powerful force, then love as the primal act of the will is simultaneously the point of origin and center of existence as a whole. What kind of person one is will be decided at this point.’ Similarly, in a memorable image in the Phaedrus,Plato depicted the parts of the soul relating as a charioteer does to his two stallions. Quite clearly the chariot will crash if for the leadership of the vehicle either of the horses (representing will and desire) competes with the rider (representing reason) (Phaed. 253e). So also for there to be justice in the soul all the parts have to function in harmony. In this account a willful man who gives no regard to reason, far from being brave, is really only rash. Augustine was associated with the Manichees for over 8 years. As a religious community they claimed to derive their teachings from Jesus Christ, although their metaphysical system was more akin to Gnosticism

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than to Christianity. Mani (A.D. 216–277), the founder of Manichaeism, considered himself the Paraclete come again. Believing himself sent by God, his mission was to purify Jesus’ gospel, a message that had been corrupted by the Church (util. cred. 3.7). 14 It took him a number of years to work out the consequences of this Christian belief. For instance, in the first months after his conversion he wondered how far you could travel on the way to divinity without the liberal arts. He will go so far as to exclaim: ‘As to those who . . . make no account of the liberal and fine arts, or are incapable of being instructed in them – I know not how I could call them happy as long as they live among men’ (ord. 2.9.26). 15 How distant is this view from our own? A contemporary objection might be that the classical view appears not to account for the way that virtue and vice can often mix comfortably within the same person. Each of us can imagine friends or acquaintances (if not ourselves) who possess exemplary talents in this or that area of their lives but fail in the task of being a decent person. The contemporary form of the question might be stated thus: Must you be a virtuous lover to be a virtuous musician? Numerous examples could be cited, though one contemporary celebrity, Jacqueline du Pré (1945–1987), the passionate, ebullient, feckless English cellist of a generation ago, will suffice. As a child prodigy, Du Pré’s musical talent was early established (her interpretation of Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E Minor, for one, continues to inspire as one of the very best). Tragically, at 28 she contracted Multiple Sclerosis, which stole her career and then her life 14 years later. Even more tragic was the conduct of her private life. In her biography, subsequently set to film in Hilary and Jackie, less attractive elements were featured, and in particular, the fact that, while still married, over a 9-month period she enjoyed an affair with her sister’s husband. (This was recounted in her biography by Hilary and Piers Du Pré (1999) A Genius in the Family: An Intimate Memoir of Jacqueline du Pré, published by her brother and sister, subsequently the subject of much controversy. For an afterward on this see the article ‘Who Was Jacqueline du Pré’ in The London Independent 13 February 2001.) So here we land upon a potential dilemma for a Christian Platonist: must the excellence of cello-craft be related to the excellence of love-craft? Can you be faithless in love without diminishing your greatness as a musician? While the case of the ignoble musician may be difficult for Plato, many sophisticated people – as it appears at least from the effusive defense which du Pré received from the musical establishment – apparently found little cause to suffer. (I note, for example, how all reference to controversy surrounding du Pré’s life was studiously avoided in the entry given to her in the National Dictionary of Biography.) For those of us who do suffer, it is enough not to deny that the mixing of beauty and depravity disappoints.

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This is from the majority report to the 1973 decision Roe v Wade which ruled that the state should not limit a woman’s access to abortion.

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It was in this capacity that in 384 Augustine gave a panegyric before the Roman emperor, Valentinan II (375–92) (cf. conf. 6.6.9). For background see Brown (2000, pp. 125–30). Details of Augustine’s visit to Caesarean Mauretania (present-day Algerian and Oranian regions) are discussed in Lancel (2002, pp. 348–53). One of the difficulties with Augustine’s theory is that, unlike some other philosophers, as Nash (1969, p. 3) correctly observes, it ‘was never Augustine’s plan to construct a systematic theory of knowledge.’ Reconstructions can only be offered as the fruits of exegesis upon patchy and offered scattered references. This is not to say that Augustine abjured clarity; but he never devoted himself to systematizing his doctrines. Though we might regret the unfinished quality of much of Augustine’s work, it is, as Gilson has remarked, part of his method: ‘We immediately try to find a system in these writings, i.e., a collection of truths ready-made and linked together in an order that helps us to understand and remember them. What they give us is a method, i.e., the proper order to follow in a long series of efforts which we must make ourselves’ in Gilson (1961, p. 245). For readers interested in pursuing further Augustine’s (notoriously difficult) doctrine see, for instance, Ronald Nash (1969) and Rist (1997, pp. 73–79). Augustine takes the term (which has variant spellings in the manuscript tradition of Augustine’s De Magistro) from St. Jerome’s rendering of Daniel 3.94 as ‘ . . . et sarabala eorum non fuissent immutata.’ As Joseph Colleran (1950) notes, the precise meaning of the word is obscure and foreign to both Latin and Greek, in The Teacher, pp. 232–33; see also Brian Stock’s discussion (1996, pp. 154–57) which is critical of the empirical inferences that Augustine draws from this example. In his Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self Philip Cary (2000) helpfully explores salient differences between Platonic and Augustinian versions of introspection and ascent. In Platonic introspection (and its Plotinian version) the soul turns inward to contemplate the divine that is present in the mind; whereas for Augustine there is always a double turn, first inward and then upward to the uncreated God (cf. p. 39). So Peter Brown’s judgment (2000, p. 261). As Aristotle says near the opening of his work: ‘Of the three modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. The first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind; the third on the proof,

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or apparent proof, provided by the words of the speech itself ’ (Rhet. 1356a), translation from Ross (1946) The Works of Aristotle. For Aristotle’s place within the development of ancient theorizing on rhetoric see Laurent Pernot (2005, pp. 24–56, especially, pp. 41–44). There was even something of this tendency in St. Cyprian, the famous African martyr-bishop of the previous generation. As Augustine surmises, Cyprian’s immoderation was permitted by providence ‘so that posterity might know that his style was rescued from this exuberance by the soundness of his Christian teaching’ (doc. Christ. 4.84). In any case, Augustine finds only one of his letters distasteful, so he concludes that it is just as likely that Cyprian wrote in the manner of the pagans only once to prove that it was not fitting of Christian discourse (doc. Christ. 4.86). Machiavelli, The Prince, chapter 15. As Philip Cary (2000, p. 63) points out in his essay ‘Study as Love: Augustinian Vision and Catholic Education.’ I have benefited here particularly from Goulven Madec’s comments (1991) in his commentary on hilaritas in La Première Catéchèse: De catechizandis rudis, pp. 21–22. For background on the New Academy see, for instance, Long (1974). ‘Thus, if those men had been able to live this life again with us, they would have seen immediately to whose authority people could more easily turn for such advice, and, with a few changes here and there in their words and assertions, they would have become Christians, as indeed several Platonists have done in recent times and our own days’ (vera rel.5.7). Among classical sources we might think, for one, of Aristotle’s discussion of the nature of knowledge in the Metaphysics. In the opening sections of book Alpha, Aristotle clarifies the difference between the craftsman and the scientist, between scientific knowledge and simple know-how. The scientist understands a particular phenomenon in relation to all of its causes, whereas a craftsman knows only enough to produce an effect (Met. 981b). Scientific accounts, then, include also the knowledge of first principles (Met. 982b). Without an account of these, knowledge of creatures would be incomplete. Aristotle calls this type of knowledge of first principles divine, both because of its object and its dignity. He writes: ‘Now our science has precisely these two aspects: on the one hand, God is thought to be one of the reasons for all things and to be in some sense a beginning; on the other hand this kind of science would be the only kind or the most appropriate kind for God to have’ (Met. 983a). Interestingly, Augustine suggests that while a vestige of the trinity is in the whole mind, only the part of us which contemplates eternal matters comprises, properly speaking, the imago dei. He writes that in the higher part of the mind ‘not only a trinity may be found, but also an image of

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God, in that alone which belongs to the contemplation of eternal things; while in that other which is diverted from it in the dealing with temporal things, although there may be a trinity, yet there cannot be found an image of God’ (trin. 12.4.4). On Augustine’s doctrine of the imago dei see further Burnell’s discussion (2005, pp. 187–93) on the difference between human nature as the image of God and the human person as the image of God. Augustine’s Christian agnosticism stands near the beginning of a long tradition of reflection on language that has stressed the distance separating the signs we use from the realities we wish to grasp. Citing the Summa Contra Gentiles of St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, the opening of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) insists that whenever we speak of God we must recall that between Creator and creature no similitude can be expressed without implying an even greater dissimilitude: ‘concerning God, we cannot grasp what he is but only what he is not, and how other beings stand in relation to him.’ The full paragraph reads: ‘Admittedly, in speaking about God like this, our language is using human modes of expression; nevertheless it really does attain to God himself, though unable to express him in his infinite simplicity. Likewise, we must recall that between Creator and creature “no similitude can be expressed without implying an even greater dissimilitude”; and that “concerning God, we cannot grasp what he is, but only what he is not, and how other beings stand in relation to him”’ (CCC 43).

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Among the many detailed treatments of educational practices in the ancient world one may see, for instance, H.I. Marrou (1956), Stanley Bonner (1977), and Raffaella Cribiore (2001). Based on the evidence presented in R. Cribiore’s (2007) Appendix Two, ‘Length of Students’ Attendance.’ There is fluidity between these stages. Quintilian, for instance, observes that the line separating grammatical from rhetorical education has not always been observed (Quint. Instit. 2.1.1–6); he also suggests there could be a period of transition between grammar and rhetoric where a student would have two instructors at once (2.1.13). Differences in teaching practice within the Empire are discussed by William V. Harris (1989, pp. 233–53). See Plutarch De Poetis 16a; see further Cribriore (2001, pp. 204–10). As a consequence of Napoleon’s victories, French politics and the university reforms carried out there had an inevitable impact upon Germany. In France: ‘State-dominated, utilitarian in focus, and having virtually no

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resemblance to the prerevolution university, the new educational structure was designed to prepare reliable teachers, officials, and other professionals for the Imperial service.’ Thomas Albert Howard (2006, p. 135). It was Napoleon who first divided the medieval arts faculty into ‘science’ and ‘humanities.’ All theological institutions in France, including the Sorbonne, were closed. In Germany, some 32 higher institutions existed before 1789. Roughly half of these were dissolved over the next 30 years, and of these 9 were Catholic universities (ibid., pp. 134–37). For background see Charles E. McClelland (1980) and Walter Rüegg (2004). See Clark Kerr (2001) The Uses of the University, 5th edn., a series of essays written between 1963–2001 (based on his Godkin Lectures delivered at Harvard University) and G. Grant’s essay (1986) ‘Faith and the Multiversity’ in Technology and Justice. The second last which Kant published, and found in Immanuel Kant, Religion and Rational Theology, translated and edited by A.W. Wood and G. DiGiovanni (1996b), especially see pp. 257–64; also see Richard Rand (1992) and Stanley Hauerwas (2007). By pointing to Kant’s influence as an architect of the Enlightenment and the divisions between disciplines, I do not, of course, wish to exclude other influences on the creation of the German university, such as Humbolt and Hegel. As Abraham Flexner (1930) observes in his Universities: American, English, German, pp. 311–15: ‘The creation of the university of Berlin . . . was a deliberate break with academic tradition. Freedom in the modern sense of the word could not have characterized the medieval university; it emerged only with the development of rationalism in the late eighteenth century. The new university was intended primarily to develop knowledge, secondarily, and perhaps as a concession, to train the professional and the official classes, at the level at which knowledge may be promoted’ (p. 312). On the structure of rhetorical education see Laurent Pernot (2005, pp. 148–55). Cf. Rep. 536–41; Isoc. Antidosis 266, 355, Panathenaicus 30–32, Contra Sophisticos 21–22. For standard accounts of the difference between Platonic and Isocratic views of the value of education see, for instance, chapters 6 and 7 of Marrou (1956), David Knowles (1988, pp. 54–56), and Janet M. Atwill (1998, pp. 19–21). Cf. De congessu eruditionis gratia (On the Prelimiary Studies), 15ff. See James Bowen’s adept commentary (1981, pp. 40–46) on the educational significance of Bacon’s Novum Organum and the New Atlantis. Indeed, in light of this history, current debates within physics and biology over the scientific – not theological – evidence for intelligent design is really just carrying over the unfinished business of the sixteenth and

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seventeenth centuries. On this, for example, witness the response to Cardinal Christoph Schönborn’s recent editorial in the New York Times ‘Finding God in Nature’ on 7 July 2005, some of which the Cardinal responded to in his follow-up piece, ‘The Designs of Science’ in First Things, January 2006. To the background of the recent history of Catholic education in North America one might point, for instance, to the claim of absolute autonomy from the Church called for by leading Catholic educators in the 1967 Land O’Lakes Statement. In the opening lines the statement declared: ‘To perform its teaching and research functions effectively the Catholic university must have a true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself.’ On this unprecedented break in the Catholic intellectual tradition historian Philip Gleason (1995, p. 317) has written: ‘Issued against the background of academic freedom crises, theological dissent, student unrest, and the change to lay boards of trustees – and coming as it did form a group of prestigious Catholic educators – the Land O’Lakes statement was, indeed, a declaration of independence from the hierarchy and a symbolic turning point’ in Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century. On this see further M. Polyani’s (1958) Personal Knowledge. Whose original outline goes back possibly to Pythagoras, certainly to Plato and Isocrates. See Knowles (1988, pp. 54–56); on the question of the transmission of this tradition to Augustine, which was likely through Varro’s Disciplinarum Libri, Shanzer (2005, pp. 69–112) argues that Augustine relied not on Porphyry but on Varro as a source for his own outline of the disciplines, at p. 74. In this chapter all translations are mine unless noted. On this see further R.J. O’Connell (1968, pp. 228–57). Translation by Chadwick (1991, p. 15). On this see M.L. West (1992, pp. 246–53) and Carnes Lord (1982, pp. 82–85). For a summary of Rousseau’s educational philosophy see James Bowen (1981, pp. 183–202). Philocalia 13.1–2; and see Marguerite Harl (1993, p. 400) and M.J. Edwards (2002, p. 8). Ad Adulescentes 4.8; see also Philip Rousseau (1994, pp. 48–57). A helpful summary of this debate is found in Hughes (2000, pp. 98–99). On this see Marrou (1958) Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique; Vessey’s commentary (1998) with detailed references in ‘The Demise of the Christian Writer in the Remaking of “Late Antiquity”: From H.-I. Marrou’s Saint Augustine (1938) to Peter Brown’s Holy Man (1983),’ Journal of Early Christian Studies 6.3: 377–411.

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Christoph Schaublin (1995), ‘De doctrina Christiana: A Classic of Western Culture?’ in De doctrina Christiana: A Classic of Western Culture? p. 61, cited by Hughes (2000, p. 98). Details of Julian’s life and legislation can be found, for instance, in Polymnia Athanassiadi-Fowden (1981) and, with reference to Augustine, is discussed among other places in Carol Harrison (2000, pp. 56–57). Similar statements at doc. Christ. 2.128, 2.133, 2.135, 2.138. On Abelard’s use of De doctrina Christiana to defend his use of logic against the older tradition of monastic study which gave greater deference to authoritative texts than he was willing, see the opening pages of Introductio ad Theologiam, PL 178.979–1114 and R.P.H. Green (1997), Augustine: De Doctrina Christiana, introduction and translation, xxi; for Abelard’s view of the place of authorities in theology, with reference to St. Bernard, see C. Stephen Jaeger (1994, pp. 229–36), and more generally, John Marenbon (1997). See Meredith J. Gill’s discussion (2005) of the frescos by Giusto de’ Menabuoi (Glory of Saint Augustine with the Virtues and the Liberal Arts, ca. 1370) and Sarafino Serafini (Augustine and the Allegory of Knowledge, ca. 1378) and, more generally, of the vision of Augustine as devoted to philosophical and literary study that was promoted by the Augustinian Order of Hermits, in Augustine in the Italian Renaissance: Art and Philosophy from Petrarch to Michaelangelo, pp. 58–60, and p. 93. For references and discussion see Gill (2005, pp. 21–27). For references see B.A. Gerrish (1962, p. 1). Surely, part of Augustine’s shift of focus can be accounted for by his change in vocation. He would not for long be able to play Socrates, wasting his days in dialectical foolery (an aspect of Augustine’s early method discussed by Catherine Conybeare (2006)): by 391 he was a priest; 2 years after that, he was a bishop. From then on his days were invested in preaching, writing, pamphleteering, and saving Roman North Africa from the blade of the Barbarians. On this see C. Harrison (2006, pp. 41–54) and Frederick Van Fleteren (1999, pp. 63–67). As noted and cited above in Harrison, there are obvious similarities and differences between ascent in Plotinus and Augustine, notably, that for Plotinus the one does not stretch out toward us: ‘The one has no desire towards us, to make us its centre but our desire is towards it to realise it as our centre’ (Enn. 6.9.8.33).

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Pope Galasius I had famously written in his Letter to Emperor Anastasis, ‘Two there are, august Emperor, by which this world is ruled: the consecrated authority of priests and the royal power’ in Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan (1999) From Irenaeus to Grotius: a sourcebook in Christian political thought, 100–1625, p. 179. What Galasius here asserts is the conviction that rule is shared; that the secular authority, though distinct and operating in its own sphere, nonetheless is to recognize a spiritual and moral authority in the Church which it could not ignore. The establishment of Christendom, in one Augustinian interpretation, is a progressive step forward. For exposition and defense of the historical idea of Christendom see Oliver O’Donovan (1996) Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology, pp. 193–242. Niebuhr (1951), Christianity and Culture, pp. 206–18. Cf. Marrou (1958, pp. x and 499), and see Vessey’s review (2005) of Marrou’s work in his ‘Introduction’ to Augustine and the Disciplines, pp. 1–12. The law mandated that Catholic Christianity, as understood by the bishop of Rome, be accepted as the empire’s official religion. On this see Bill Leadbetter (2000, pp. 283–95). The universality of the Catholic Church, and its capacity to call forth people from all nations, is one of Augustine’s key arguments against the Donatists. Believing in a ‘pure’ Church which defined its earthly membership in terms of strict obedience would, in effect, return Christianity to the isolation of the Jews; and for this reason, ‘is His Church made manifest, not in Africa alone, as they [the Donatists] most impudently venture in the madness of their vanity to assert, but spread abroad throughout the world’ (ep. 185.1.3). See further Brown (2000, pp. 216–21 and 229–39). A lengthy defense of his position is given in his epistle 93. There we find Augustine explain that many former adherents to the – often extremely violent – sect of the Donatists now testify to how grateful they have become for having been given the chance to escape without impunity. Augustine writes of his change of mind in a letter dated ca. 407 to a certain bishop belonging to a sect, the Rogatists, who held similar views to the Donatists: ‘I yielded, therefore, to these examples, which my colleagues [i.e. fellow bishops] proposed to me. For my opinion originally was that no one should be forced to the unity of Christ, but that we should act with words, fight with arguments, and conquer by reason. Otherwise, we might have as false Catholics those whom we had known to be obvious heretics. But this opinion of mine was defeated, not by the words of its opponents, but by examples of those who offered proof. For the first argument against me was my own city. Though it was an entirely Donatist sect, it was converted to the Catholic unity out of fear of the imperial laws, and we now see that it detests the destructiveness of this stubbornness of yours so that no one

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would believe that it was ever a part of it. And it was the same with many other cities . . . ’ (ep. 93.16). 8 It is worth remembering that legal structures in particular benefited from the conversion of the emperors, as for example, in Constantine’s legislation that there should be no unnecessary work done on Sundays. 9 This is why he can link the two within the same breath in a way that later Christian political theory will not: ‘Hence the first just men were set up as shepherds of flocks, rather than as kings of men . . . for it is understood, of course, that the condition of slavery is justly imposed upon the sinner’(civ. Dei. 19.15). 10 Approximately 20 years on, Pelagius famously quoted from this work in support of his own exploration of virtue and the will, which Augustine would expend much effort to oppose. Helpful background to Pelagius and his controversy may be found in Brown (2000, pp. 340–52) and Dodaro (2004). 11 We should note that within the patristic tradition of commentary upon St. Paul several accounts of the doctrine of original sin were already in currency by the fourth century (Daniélou, 1980). 12 For background to ancient views on the will in antiquity see Albrecht Dihle (1982). 13 On the question of whether or not moral perfection can be attained in this mortal condition, by the end of his writing Augustine takes it as obvious that between this life and the next there exists this enormous difference: whereas now all the virtues are necessary for our combat against temptation, in heaven such virtues will prove unnecessary because of our secure distance from temptations (trin. 14.9.12). ‘But that which justice is now concerned with in helping the wretched, and prudence in controlling evil pleasures, will not exist there, where there will be no evil at all.’ 14 Augustine contrasts the Catholic view of human nature (created good, corrupted through sin, redeemed in Christ) with Manichean and Pelagian alternatives in this way: ‘For both of them [i.e. Manicheans and Pelagians] refuse to have it delivered by Christ’s flesh and blood, – the one, because they destroy that very flesh and blood, as if He did not take upon Him these at all in man or of man; and the other, because they assert that there is no evil in infants from which they should be delivered by the sacrament of this flesh and blood. Between them lies the human creature in infants, with a good origination, with a corrupted propagation, confessing for its goods a most excellent Creator, seeking for its evils a most merciful Redeemer, having the Manicheans as disparagers of its benefits, having the Pelagians as deniers of its evils, and both as persecutors’ (emphasis mine) (c. ep. Pel. 4.4.4). 15 For Augustine, friendship is central in a way that it is not even for Aristotle (who gave the finest systematic account of the relationship

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between friendship and happiness among the ancients). Aristotle certainly views friendship as a primary human good. At the start of book 4 in his Nichomachean Ethics, for example, he writes: ‘Further, [friendship] is most necessary for our life. For no one would choose to live without friends even if he had all the other goods. Indeed rich people and holders of powerful positions, even more than other people, seem to need friends . . . ’ (Ethic. Nic. 1155a). Nonetheless, by the time he comes to book 10 friendship comes second to solitary contemplation: ‘Moreover, the selfsufficiency we spoke of will be found in study more than in anything else. For admittedly the wise person, the just person, and the other virtuous people all need the good things necessary for life. Still, when these are adequately supplied, the just person needs other people as partners and recipients of his just actions; and the same is true of the temperate person, the brave person, and each of the others. But the wise person is able, and more able the wiser he is, to study even by himself; and though he presumably does it better with colleagues, even so he is more self-sufficient than any other [virtuous person]’ (Ethic. Nic. 1177a). The qualification ‘he presumably does [study] better with colleagues’ is not equivalent to the contemplation that Christians hope to achieve ‘in the company of the angels of all the saints.’ 16 O’Donovan (2005), ‘The Political Thought of City of God 19’ in Bonds of Imperfection: Christian Politics Past and Present, p. 51. Given what Augustine goes on to say about society, it is not immediately clear why the wise man should wish to entangle himself in the web of social communications. After all, life in society is fraught with dangers. Over the next four chapters (civ. Dei. 19.5–9) Augustine outlines the miscommunications that thwart happiness. The inadequacies of personal virtue compound when set within the ascending structures of society. As Augustine’s analysis moves further away from the primary levels of human community, from family (19.5), to city (19.6), to empire and the entire world (19.7), the warm glow of friendship dims as the threats to understanding gather. In addition to the betrayal of brothers and the intrigues of lovers whose hearts one cannot know, there are the evils that attend the execution of justice in the city. Specific legal and judicial judgments are always based upon inferential reasoning; and the sheer lack of knowledge on the part of the judge leads too many times to disaster for the innocent. Augustine takes this as one of the most tragic outcomes that society makes inevitable. Torture, false conviction, acquittal of the guilty – these are but the inescapable ancillaries to society and the judicial tasks upon which it is founded. Ignorance is unavoidable. Society requires judgment but there are no capable judges, since ‘those who pronounce judgment cannot see into the consciences of those whom they judge’ (19.6). 17 Sanford and Green’s translation (Loeb Classical Library nos. 415).

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There is little by way of a doctrine of progress, but it is not altogether absent. At (bapt. 2.3.4), for instance, Augustine thinks that one ecumenical can update the teachings of another. See further R.B. Eno S.S. (1999).

Chapter 6

Augustine and Some Philosophers of Education

What makes a classic? Surely one measure is its ability to attract readers. And no age has been found lacking in readers of Augustine’s works. As Jaroslav Pelikan has well noted, the history of Western thought up to the Middle-Ages and into our own can be understood as ‘a series of footnotes’ to Augustine (Pelikan, 1971, 330). There is at present no concise account of the reception of Augustine’s educational philosophy adequate to its consequence, and I shall not attempt one here. What I do offer is a sketch of that reception history through the lens of three texts, one from the twelfth, thirteenth, and sixteenth centuries, as well as some general remarks on Augustine’s reception in modern and contemporary scholarship. Before explaining my selection, it is worth reflecting on what a detailed treatment of Augustine’s reception history would have to achieve and what obstacles one would have to surmount. One approach would be to trace the ways that Augustinian themes were developed by later philosophers in their own educational works. Thus, wherever questions of knowledge and illumination were treated, from Boethius to Bossuet, we might tease out the subtle ways in which the influence of the great master’s thought was left lingering, which it almost always was. Wherever the relation between happiness and education was discussed, as it has been by thinkers as diverse as Kant and Newman, we would be obliged to show their departure from and dependence upon Augustine. The problem with this way of approaching the question of reception is that the subject might easily prove too expansive. What could you exclude? After all, Augustine was for nearly a millennium the primary conduit of ancient philosophical sources – Aristotelian, Stoic, and above all, Platonic – to the later Latin tradition. In his fusion of classical and Biblical texts Augustine arguably has done more than

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anyone to shape the history of Western thought, and, in this respect at least, philosophers often are still arguing for or against Augustine regardless of whether his influence is acknowledged. Another approach would be to select only those authors and texts that quote directly from Augustine in the construction of their own arguments. Limiting oneself to philosophical texts that quote directly from Augustine, let us say, on happiness, virtue, or teaching would certainly narrow one’s scope of enquiry, but at the cost of tunneling one’s vision. The habit of providing strict and literal citation of one’s sources is a recent academic convention. And to attend only to those places where Augustine is mentioned by name would be to miss much along the way. In the absence of a detailed history, what I offer is a peek through a series of windows: a glimpse of the way that Augustine’s thought has been taken up and put down in three texts in the history of educational philosophy: the Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor, De magistro of St. Thomas Aquinas, and Erasmus’ Antibarbari. Two considerations recommend this selection. First, all of the above mark key moments in the history of Western education thought. As such, their dependence upon Augustinian themes illustrates the lasting currency which Augustine’s educational ideas have enjoyed. Second, they respond to different features of Augustine’s theory. The Didascalicon adapts and extends Augustine’s treatment of the liberal arts curriculum; Aquinas’ work modifies Augustine’s account of teaching; the Antibarbari adopts Augustine’s use of secular literature for his own manifesto of Christian humanism and the ultimate end of learning. Beyond providing windows onto what is a vast horizon, these glances over the history of Augustine’s reception suggest the rich and varied ways that his thought has helped to shape later developments. What application they might have for today is the topic of our final chapter.

Hugh of St. Victor’s Didascalicon (ca. 1120) We have said that there are four branches of knowledge only, and that they contain all the rest . . . According to our best sources, it was in Hugh’s 18th year that his uncle, Bishop Reinhard of Halberstadt, Saxony, sent him to Paris to study at

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the newly established Abbey of St. Victor. Hugh presented himself to the monastery’s first abbot, Guilduin, on 17 June 1115 and in 1133 became ‘master’ of the school. He died in 1141 after 25 years at the Abbey.1 Composed in the late 1120s Hugh’s masterpiece, Didascalicon: De studio legendi, is a practical guide to the method, matter, and purpose of reading. The work was written for those who came to the Abbey school to study both the arts and Scripture and as the fruit of both Hugh’s own practical experience and his wide erudition, his book selects and describes in concise form all the branches of learning useful to man and shows how they lead to human perfection. As a guide to the arts the Didascalicon stands in a long tradition. Varieties of this literature go back in antiquity at least to Plato, and in the Christian West, to St. Augustine. As we have already noted, after his conversion Augustine set out to compose a cycle of books on the liberal arts, based, likely, on the model of the Roman philosopher Varro. After Augustine, Cassiodorus (ca. 490– ca. 583) in the sixth century, Isidore of Seville (ca. 560–636) in the seventh century, and Rhaban Maur (ca. 776–836) in the eighth century carried forth the encyclopedic tradition, each for their own purposes. Cassiadorus, for example, in his Institutiones divinarum et saecularium lectionum, writes for the aims of his new monastic foundation at Vivarium. Isidore’s Etymologiae is an encyclopedic text much closer to the modern sense of a compendium of universal learning. And Rhabanus’ De institutione clericorum, different again, is a manual for priests preparing for the Germanic missions (Taylor, 1991, 28–30). Hugh’s work is similar to all of these but identical to none. Established in 1108 on the outskirts of the most thriving intellectual community in the twelfth century, historians have noted how the Abbey of St. Victor developed as a new form of religious community. In particular, while exposing itself to the lively intellectual currents flowing out of Paris, the Abbey remained steeped in the traditions of monastic discipline and learning (Harkens, 2006, 220). Hugh’s work reflects this double ambition of the Abbey of St. Victor. And in this attempt to blend the old and the new it is helpful for us to read the Didascalicon, and Hugh’s use of Augustine, against two trends of the twelfth century. First is the debate over the scientific character of theology. This was played out in the controversies that surrounded the career of Peter Abelard, and which provoked the reassertions of St. Bernard of the primacy of contemplation over disputation in

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theological study. Second is the revival of interest among philosophers in natural philosophy and cosmological theories, of which William of Conches’ were preeminent (Taylor, 1991, 19–28). Hugh’s work responds to both of these impulses while relying upon the language and philosophy of Augustine. Indeed, because of his likeness to the great father in his own life Hugh was even called ‘secundus Augustinus’ (the second Augustine).2 In what follows, I hope to show to what extent the similarities between their approaches to education are real and to what extent merely apparent. Hugh’s defense of the monastic ideal of meditative reading selfconsciously looks back to Augustine’s early treatment of the liberal arts curriculum. Hugh sets education in a theological and Christological context when he identifies the end of study with divine union. As for Augustine, the goal of study in the Didascalicon is the restoration of the soul to divine likeness; learning, as the pursuit of wisdom, is defined as an essentially religious activity. The arts are propaedeutic. Their function is to lead us back to Christ. As he writes at the opening of book 2: This, then, is what the arts are concerned with, this is what they intend, namely, to restore within us the divine likeness, a likeness which to us is a form but to God is his nature. The more we are conformed to the divine nature, the more do we possess Wisdom, for then there begins to shine forth again in us what has forever existed in the divine Idea or Pattern, coming and going in us but standing changeless in God. (Did. 2.1) Since the clash between Plato and Isocrates (over whether wisdom or eloquence marks the proper aim of liberal learning) there have always been defenders of the minority, Platonic, position.3 Aristotle (384–322 B.C.), for one, in his book 10 of the Nichomachean Ethics, placed contemplation as the goal of the virtuous life. Cicero (106–143 B.C.) extolled the liberal arts as a means to wisdom in his De re publica;4 as did Seneca (4 B.C.– A.D. 65).5 Among Christians it was Augustine who first systematically subsumed this ancient ambition into a theological framework.6 As a recent convert Augustine set out to write a series of manuals on the arts. These books, as outlined in the De ordine, the De musica, and elsewhere, aimed to instruct the mind of the student to rise

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‘from the contemplation of material to immaterial things’ (ret. 1.1.3). ‘For instruction in the liberal arts’ (Nam eruditio disciplinarum liberalium), Augustine encourages one of his own students, ‘produces devotees (amatores) more alert and steadfast and better equipped for embracing truth . . . ’ As Augustine continues, not only do such devotees prepare themselves for attaining truth, they also find themselves capable, in the end, to ‘more lovingly cling to that which is called the happy life’ (ord. 1.8.24). Persons ‘who are well trained in the liberal arts’ are not content until they behold ‘the whole countenance of Truth, whose splendor already glows in a certain measure in those arts’ (sol. 2.20.35).7 Hugh shares with Augustine his ambition for the curriculum that, by the study of material form and regularity, the student, properly disposed, could ascend through an orderly sequence of investigations all the way to the mind of God.8 Moreover, like Augustine and unlike the scholastics, Hugh perpetuates the older ideal of philosophy as the sum of Christian wisdom. Though philosophy includes the knowledge of the natural world, philosophy nevertheless orders this knowledge with a view to our last end. Philosophy, then, is the love and pursuit of Wisdom, and, in a certain way, a friendship with it: not, however, of that ‘wisdom’ which is concerned with certain tools and with knowledge and skill in some craft, but of that Wisdom which, wanting in nothing, is a living Mind and the sole primordial Idea or Pattern of things. (Did. 1.2) A few paragraphs later is a shorthand version of the same: ‘Philosophy is the discipline which investigates comprehensively the ideas of all things, human and divine’ (Philosophia est disciplina omnium rerum humanarum atque divinarum rationes plene investigans) (Did. 1.4). While the first text is a quotation from Boethius,9 and the second a near parallel from Cassiodorus,10 one could readily draw verbal echoes from Augustine. We might point, for example, to where Augustine defines wisdom as ‘the knowledge of human and divine matters’ relevant to the happy life (c. Acad. 1.8.23), or, where he calls Christian wisdom simply ‘the one true philosophy’ (quae una est vera philosophia) (c. Jul. 4.14.72). In the twelfth century this was not the dominant view. Where some of

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Hugh’s contemporaries focused on dialectic, and others on natural philosophy, Hugh’s reassertion of the religious aim of education and the unity of natural and revealed truth into a single Christian wisdom claims the older Augustinian tradition for authority and inspiration. Beyond these fundamental agreements, Hugh’s teaching on the curriculum includes innovations. Hugh’s emphasis upon what has been called the ‘restorative efficacy’ of the liberal arts, he follows the early rather than the later Augustine.11 We recall how after completing several works on dialectic, grammar, and rhetoric, Augustine abandoned his projected series. In later years he did take it up again, but not without revision. Lost was the desire to found a curriculum based on the classical cycle of disciplines (the so-called ‘γος ί’), found was a curriculum centered upon Scriptural exegesis and contemplation. In the De doctrina Christiana, at least, the arts are treated as means rather than as ends in themselves. They are reduced to tools for Biblical exegesis in a way that Hugh does not require. For Hugh the arts are never above Scripture, but they lead to the same end. Hugh even integrates the ‘mechanical arts’ in his vision of restoration through reading that goes far beyond either the early or late Augustine. To grasp the significance of this turn we can contrast Hugh’s division of the parts of philosophy with Augustine’s. Augustine, following Plato and the Stoics, had accepted what was by his time the traditional tripartite division of philosophy into physics, ethics, and logic.12 On this matter Hugh, somewhat surprisingly, does not follow suit. It appears that it was in response to the new dialecticians and natural scientists that Hugh adopted a fourfold classification of philosophy that broke with a long Augustinian-Platonic tradition. After reviewing the historical origins of the parts of philosophy, he divides them in this way: We have said that there are four branches of knowledge only, and that they contain all the rest: they are the theoretical, which strives for the contemplation of truth; the practical, which considers the regulation of morals; the mechanical, which supervises the occupations of this life (quae huius vitae actiones dispensat); and the logical, which provides the knowledge necessary for correct speaking and clear argumentation. (Did. 1.11)

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The first, second, and fourth branches map readily enough onto physics, ethics, and logic in Augustine’s division. What is innovative is Hugh’s endorsement of mechanical, that is, natural philosophy. Hugh’s mechanical study is the investigation of the physical world as it pertains to the alleviating of men’s discomforts. It is that empirical investigation which manages or cares for (dispensare) our mortal bodies. This is neither what Cicero nor what Augustine had in mind by physics. Physics (physicus) in Augustine’s usage is purely a theoretical study (cf. c. Acad. 3.11.24). Insofar as such inquiry involves the senses in any manner Augustine denigrates it, as other Platonists do, because of its uncertain epistemological foundations (83 Quest. 1.9). To the extent that such inquiry might benefit man’s estate he treats it under other individual arts such as medicine, agriculture, and navigation – and declares no interest in them (as at doc. Christ. 2.115). Not so with Hugh. The study of nature for Hugh mitigates against the consequences of the fall and, to this extent, contributes to our recovery of original nature. ‘Of all human acts or pursuits, then, governed as these are by Wisdom, the end and the intention ought to regard either the restoring of our nature’s integrity, or the relieving of those weaknesses to which our present life lies subject’ (Did. 1.5).13 There have always been doctors and engineers. But, by integrating the practical study of nature’s laws within a course of philosophical education in the arts, Hugh both looks back to Aristotle and anticipates Francis Bacon, for whom the restorative aspect of the study of mechanical nature will be placed squarely within a heterodox Christian framework.14 Lastly, in his approach to the liberal arts curriculum Hugh implicitly rejects Augustine’s distinction between uti and frui, use and enjoyment, insofar as this had established the interpretive context for Augustine’s discussion on the arts in relation to Scripture in De doctrina Christiana. As Augustine set out in book 1, things may be used or enjoyed: God (and people for the sake of God) is to be enjoyed, everything else must be used. When Augustine discusses principles of exegesis, he extrapolated this same distinction to the method of study. The liberal arts, he argued, while in themselves good, stand in relation to Scripture as created things do to the creator. The arts serve as means. Knowledge of medicine is useful because it enlivens our understanding of Scriptural figures of speech, familiarity with navigation helps interpret Biblical

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stories (doc. Christ. 2.115–117), and so on. Perhaps Augustine’s immediate subject matter (namely, Scriptural interpretation) is sufficient to account for his perfunctory treatment of the arts (cf. doc. Christ. 2.116). Whether this is so, it remains that Augustine never bothered to show how the practical arts might positively function within an overall theory of knowledge. This Hugh achieves. In the Didascalicon, Hugh proposes that although the mechanical arts directed to the alleviation of physical suffering are of a secondary value, they can still find a place within the overall aim of our human perfection in God. If we accept the rough portrait that for Augustine there are two views of the arts, one in the De ordine and De musica, another in the De doctrina Christiana, then we may conclude that Hugh’s treatment of the quantity and value of the liberal arts curriculum is a reconciliation and extension of these two distinct projects.15 As with the late Augustine, Hugh assigns to the arts a propaedeutic value in their relation to Scripture. But like the early Augustine, Hugh also recognizes the intrinsic worth of the liberal arts as a method for partially restoring the divine nature that has been marred by sin. Having looked briefly at Hugh of St. Victor’s critical reception of Augustine’s writing on the matter of education, we turn next to Aquinas on the function of the teacher.

Aquinas’ De Magistro (ca. 1256) It should be said that Augustine in On the Teacher does not mean to deny that a man teaches from without . . . Earlier we saw that Augustine relegates the teacher to the status of an occasion of knowledge. As words cannot impart knowledge but only direct us to objects, so also teachers do not actually teach (docere). At most, they prompt the mind’s recollection: they are the occasion of insight rendered possible by Christ. Because Christ illumines the intellect by making present unchanging truths, he is the only true teacher. But does this account adequately reflect our experience of teaching and learning? And, if Augustine leaves so little scope to the teacher, why did he have so much to say about the art of instruction? The distance between Augustine’s theory and practice has led many to wonder whether his

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doctrine of illumination was satisfactorily formulated and prompted later Christian commentators, from the thirteenth century on, to attempt to make sense of Augustine’s theory of illumination, and to expand upon it. Among those who wished to preserve Augustine’s doctrine of illumination, even while offering his own emendations, was St. Thomas Aquinas. His most extended commentary on Augustine’s theory is found in the Quaestiones Disputatae (Disputed Questions), and within this, question 11 De magistro, a self-contained work bearing the identical title to Augustine’s dialogue. The Quaestiones were written between 1256 and 1259 and are a collection of some 29 disputations that Aquinas composed while he was a Regent Master at the University of Paris. As a ‘master’ of theology Aquinas was called upon to participate in public disputations whereby he would post a thesis later to be defended before the university community. Challenges would be brought before the master in a question-and-answer format; after the event, Aquinas would then have been obliged to present to the university in written form his considered response to the best questions. While certainly not a verbatim transcript, these questions and replies given in Aquinas’ written text bear the impress of its origin in scholastic dispute. When exploring Aquinas’ critical treatment of Augustine one should remember that in his approach to philosophy he saw himself, foremost, as a disciple of the great Church Father.16 Concerning the primary methods and ends of philosophy Aquinas makes as his own Augustine’s view of the intellectual apostolate, which is this: that the gift of the mind is to show forth the glory of God. One of the ways that God’s glory is manifest is in the mind’s ability to grasp the nature of things, to understand things in themselves and in their relationship to other objects. The wise man, according to Aquinas, is the one who orders all his knowledge to our first cause and final end, which is God. Aquinas sets out the office of the philosopher in one of the most beautiful passages in the entire history of philosophy: ‘Now, the end of each thing is that which is intended by its first author or mover. But the first author and mover of the universe is an intellect, as will be later shown. The ultimate end of the universe must, therefore, be the good of an intellect. This good is truth’ (Contra Gentiles, 1.2). A corollary of monotheistic belief is that all of our knowledge can, in principle, be related back to the one God, to the one source of truth. He writes elsewhere that ‘happiness

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is joy in truth’ (beatitudo est gaudium in vertitate) (Summa Theologiae I–II q.3 a.4 resp.) – a quotation from Augustine’s Confessions 10.23.33. A few lines later in the same text Aquinas quotes Augustine again (this time from the De trinitate 10.1), to join this axiom of psychology to a principle of epistemology: nothing is loved except what is known. He writes: ‘Love ranks above knowledge in moving, but knowledge precedes love in attaining: for naught is loved save what is known, as Augustine says’17 (non enim diligitur nisi cognitum, ut dicit Augustinus in X de Trin) (Summa Theologiae I–II q.3 a.4 resp.). Truth brings joy to be sure; but joy requires knowledge. One of the labors of the Christian intellectual is to make possible such joy for others. Aquinas thinks that the Christian intellectual aims to draw the mind near to the fullness of truth and, in principle nothing falls outside of his vision. One can begin the search for truth by investigating anything: rocks, trees, beasts, or angels. Insofar as these are objects of our understanding, they contribute to our knowledge of the one symphony of truth. To illustrate, in a key text in the Summa Theologiae, in the midst of discussing the theories of cognition in Aristotle, Avicenna, and Augustine, Aquinas makes a side-remark about his own method of philosophical reasoning, demonstrating further his indebtedness to Augustine. Quoting from De doctrina Christiana 2.2 (‘If those who are called philosophers said by chance anything that was true . . . ’) Aquinas writes that, on the example of Augustine, we too should be willing to borrow from whatever truths may have been taught by pagan thinkers: ‘Consequently whenever Augustine, who was imbued with the doctrines of the Platonists, found in their teaching anything consistent with the faith, he adopted it: and those things which he found contrary to the faith he amended’ (Summa Theologiae I q.84 a.5). Truth is truth wherever it may be found. This is Augustine’s guiding principle; Aquinas’ adoption of it is in part what allowed him to transcend, so it appears, certain limitations of his master. If Aquinas looks to Augustine as his primary theological inspiration, on the mechanisms of cognition he most closely follows Aristotle. Aquinas believed that among the ancients Aristotle or simply ‘philosophus’ (‘the philosopher,’ Aquinas’ name for Aristotle) proved the best guide. Aristotle’s theory of cognition charted a middle course between the excesses of idealism and the deficiencies of materialism. Aquinas’

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reason for this judgment is illustrated in one of his short summaries of the history of philosophy; at question 84, article 6 of the prima pars of the Summa Theologiae he asks whether intellectual knowledge is derived from sensible things. Citing Aristotle as his immediate authority, he answers in the affirmative. The starting point for knowledge is indeed in the senses. In forming his reply Aquinas takes the opportunity to survey the leading alternative opinions from antiquity. First is the materialist position, which he ascribes to Democritus. In this view sense is affected by sensible, material objects. Aquinas also agrees this is the case. The error in the materialist position, however, is in the false conclusion which they derive, namely, that since knowledge begins in the senses we can therefore only know about material things. To the other extreme is the idealist position, represented by Plato. He thought (again rightly, according to Aquinas) that the intellect is distinct from the senses; and that corporeal objects cannot affect incorporeal powers. He drew a wrong conclusion, however, when he supposed that therefore knowledge could not be derived from sensible things. Aristotle’s middle way was to combine features of both positions with an addition of his own. With the materialists he concurs that our knowledge is derived from sense experience; with the idealists he admits that sensible things cannot make an impression on immaterial things. How then do the two spheres interact? Aristotle’s solution, which Aquinas in outline adopts, is that the intellect must have two principles of cognition, two powers within the same mind. In formulating his own answer, Aquinas observes, plainly enough, that the senses of our bodily organs receive impressions. These impressions are transferred to my eye or my hand as when I see or touch the hot coal that has leapt out of my fire place. By an act of the imagination, such impressions, in turn, become images or phantasma which can be recalled through the memory. However, in order to have knowledge, an image of this or that piece of coal will not be sufficient, since to have knowledge of something is to understand its universal features, that is to say, to grasp what it is essentially. At this juncture the active intellect and the potential intellect come into Aquinas’ account. Recall that Aquinas agrees with the materialists that knowledge must begin with the senses (that is why a man without experience of color, that is to say a blind man, has no knowledge of colors). At the same time he also affirms, with the Platonists,

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that knowledge properly speaking cannot be of sensible things. What we know, in Aquinas’ terminology, is a ‘quiddity,’ a nature that exists within a particular material object. My rock, this iron, your piece of wood, and the images we form of them are the prerequisites of knowledge but not, properly speaking, the objects of our knowledge. After imagination has rendered the piece of coal an image that I can remember, another part of the mind, what Aquinas terms the active intellect (intellectus agens), ‘illumines’ this image such that its intelligible, that is, universal features, can be abstracted. In effect, the active intellect has the same function as does the sun in Plato’s allegory of the cave. Except now, instead of light pouring in from the outside the principle of illumination is within. Lastly, the intelligible species of ‘a piece of coal’ has then to be united to the image in my mind of the hot, grey, lump of rock, presently resting upon my carpet. This transformation is the work of the potential intellect, which receives into itself intelligible forms analogously to the way that the physical eye receives the imprint of material objects into itself.18 There is a great deal more that should be said about Aquinas’ theory.19 The point for us is that Aquinas offers this explanation as a means of accounting for two basic questions of epistemology: how it is that unchanging forms are present within changing matter; and how these are rendered intelligible to the mind. Forms exist within matter (not, as for Plato, in a separate realm); forms become intelligible through abstraction. For Aquinas the virtue of Aristotle’s theory is that, by paying careful attention to the mechanics of sensation one is able to more closely account for our actual experience of learning. Turning now to the De magistro, in Aquinas’ treatment of the teacher he aims to prove how it is possible to keep a doctrine of illumination without relegating the teacher to an ‘accidental cause’ or a mere occasion of knowledge. He does this, ostensibly, by joining Augustine’s notion of illumination with Aristotle’s theory of abstraction. Insofar as he is successful, Aquinas’ version has the advantage of accounting for the way that teachers aid students and, by extension, of giving a better framework for Augustine’s own reflections on pedagogy. Aquinas begins by considering the Meno’s conclusion that learning is merely recollection: So too some said that knowledge of all things is created along with the soul and that through teaching and the external aids of teaching

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nothing else happens than that the soul is led to the remembrance or consideration of what it previously knew. Hence they say that learning is nothing but remembering. (Quaest. disp. de ver. q.11, resp.) As Aquinas understands it, for both Augustine and Plato genuine knowledge (as opposed to opinion) is either present or absent from the mind. Similarly to the way the light of a bulb is either on or off, you will either see the truth of something or you will not. Aquinas disagrees that knowledge must either be innate or entirely absent. Following Aristotle, he suggests that there can be a third state in between knowledge and ignorance: potential knowledge. By this he means that we have certain ‘seeds of the sciences’ preexisting in the mind (quod praeexistunt in nobis quaedam scientiarum semina) (Quaest. disp. de ver. q.11, resp.). What Aquinas describes is an aptitude for learning: a capacity present before but dependent upon experience. To complete the metaphor, Aquinas’ claim is that the seeds can develop into knowledge only after experience is added to them. Aquinas identifies two types of such seeds. These are either axiomatic laws of thought (like the law of noncontradiction), or what he calls primary notions such as of ‘being’ or ‘one.’ And, in a limited way, all knowledge is contained potentially in these universal principles. But we must be clear: these seeds are not knowledge. They need to be nurtured by experience and by the exercise of thought. A few lines further down from the passage cited above Aquinas continues: Therefore when the mind is led from this universal knowledge to the actual knowing of particulars, which it previously knew in the universal and as it were potentially (in potentia), then someone is said to acquire science (scientiam acquirere). While St. Thomas agrees that the realities must previously be known within the mind in some fashion, they are known only in a general way. In Aquinas’ example: to learn from a teacher what a man is ‘we must know something of him beforehand, such as the notion of animal or of substance or at least of being itself ’ (Quaest. Disp. de ver. q.11, ad 3). As he claims, without a prior grasp of being it would be impossible to have scientia about any particular being. The mind would be incapable of adding to its knowledge since it would find itself in a position no

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better than that of a clever poodle: with no capacity for intelligible cognitions upon which to build. The teacher, in this account, acts with nature to bring forth understanding in the same way that a physician acts with nature to bring forth health (Quaest. disp. de ver. q.11, resp.). Aquinas thus agrees with Augustine that it is God which illumines the mind through these universal principles.20 But he differs from him in ascribing a greater responsibility to the activity of the mind. First, although the knowledge of first principles is caused by God, for Aquinas, and unlike Augustine, God’s illumination of the mind is mediated. ‘The light of reason by which principles of this kind [i.e. self-evident ones] is placed in us by God . . . ’ (Quaest. Disp. de ver. q.11, resp.). Illumination occurs, in other words, whenever the mind abstracts from images (phantasma). Second, Aquinas specifies how this understanding of illumination clarifies our view teaching and learning. More than God’s intervention is required for potential knowledge to be actualized.21 This something more is achieved either through the independent efforts of discovery by the student (inventio) or through the aid afforded by the skill of the teacher (disciplina). As Aquinas makes clear in the next question, not only is it possible for the tutor to help lead the student; certain subjects are mastered best when the student is guided by a teacher whose expertise affords him a synoptic view of the whole.22 To further mark off this difference in operations between God and the human teacher Aquinas sets the discussion of learning into the context of primary and secondary causation. While the first belongs undoubtedly to God, the second attaches either to the student or to the student and teacher in conjunction. Objects are known in some way, they are also unknown in other ways. Hence, the teacher is not simply an occasion of knowledge. What medieval defenders of Augustine’s epistemology (such as St. Bonaventure) feared was that allowing room for secondary causation would diminish God’s importance as the primary cause of knowledge. Aquinas’ reply to these was that divine causality can be complemented without compromise by human cooperation. After all, allowing humans a significant contribution demonstrates God’s generosity toward us.23 Further, this account seems more accurately to correspond to the way that teaching functions: through signs teachers help to complete the student’s grasp of realities that they already but imperfectly understand.24

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Aquinas takes this solution to be a genuine extension of Augustine’s theory in that it preserves the doctrine of divine illumination in some fashion. But if this preserves Augustine’s doctrine, it also gives it a new shape. Aquinas cannot help but recognize this. Conscious that by grafting Aristotle’s theory of abstraction onto the doctrine of illumination he has traveled some distance from his own master’s theory, Aquinas is anxious to make clear that he at least does not wish to view himself as landed in an entirely new country. After the round of public disputations in the winter term of 1256 in Paris we can imagine Aquinas walking home from university with his Augustinian colleagues insisting to them: ‘But this is what Augustine would have said!’ Indeed, this is what Augustine might have said – but didn’t, would be their reply. Such a charitable gloss finds its way into his written version when Aquinas responds to the eighth objection (which is a quotation from Augustine): ‘It should be said’ he explains, ‘that Augustine in On the Teacher does not mean to deny that a man teaches from without when he proves that God alone teaches within.’ This needed to be said, because what Augustine denied is not precisely what Aquinas affirmed. Augustine only meant that ‘God alone teaches within’ . . . which is, after all, a perfectly acceptable conclusion (Quaest. disp. de ver. q.11, ad 8).

Erasmus of Rotterdam’s Antibarbari (1520) None of the liberal disciplines is Christian, because they neither treat of Christ nor were invented by Christians; but they all concern Christ. The term ‘art for art’s sake’ (l’art pour l’art) invaded literary theory around the turn of the twentieth century. Associated with Theophile Gautier (1811–1872) and Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), the doctrine proposed art as a good unto itself. If art is to be true, so the theory went, then she must be her own master. To regulate its course, or bring artistic development under the discipline of politics, or religion, or even nature would be to drain her vitality.25 Nothing could be further from the view of Erasmus. Humanists of the early Renaissance expected literature to serve moral purposes, indeed, that the study of good letters (bonae litterae) was the best means for securing them. This assumption underlines all of Erasmus’ moral and educational writing. It is the subject of

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numerous of his epigrams, such as: ‘The horse is turned by the bit, the ship by the rudder; and men are steered by words’; and, ‘Hearing and reading authors is like eating: our aim is not pleasure only but wellbeing.’26 So, literature aims not at pleasure only; but it does aim to please. On why style matters Erasmus contrasts as much with the dominant literati of recent times as he did with the learned scribes of his own. Traveling from the thirteenth century to Augustine’s reception in the sixteenth century we survey an altogether altered prospect. Western Europe, at the moment of the breakup of Christendom was occupied with different authorities and different quarrels than those which Aquinas faced. Where Aquinas spoke of Aristotle simply as ‘the Philosopher,’ Erasmus and fellow humanists referred to Cicero as ‘the Orator,’ and with equal veneration.27 Not that his own education had encouraged study of the classics. Erasmus’ love for literature, as he relates in the dedicatory epistle to the Antibarbari, was ‘ignited’ by ‘a kind of natural feeling’ of sympathy for the Muses. That feeling never diminished; its increase thrust him into the middle of the fiercest conflicts of his age. Some of these disputes were instigated by Erasmus, but by no means were all. The collision between reformers and contemporary Churchmen developed also as a result of the frayed intellectual culture of the late Middle-Ages. In order to understand Erasmus on education and his use of Augustine, two areas of controversy are necessary to recall: the problem of the right order of reason within theology, and the question of the reform of the Church. Erasmus’ defense of liberal education and his call upon Augustine as an expert authority in his case for the classics is best viewed against the backdrop of these two debates. Taking Erasmus’ appropriation of the De doctrina Christiana within his own Antibarari as our primary text, below we shall see that while Erasmus shares with Augustine the opinion that wisdom is the primary aim of education, they weigh differently the contribution that pagan literature can make to that aspiration. Where Augustine relegated the pagan disciplines to the status of aids to Biblical hermeneutics, Erasmus credited them as particular and, so it appears, indispensable sources of moral wisdom. During the early-sixteenth-century debate over the place of reason in theology, figures like Erasmus and Luther were not, in the main, disputing with scholastic heirs of Thomistic philosophy but the disciples of

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Duns Scotus (ca. 1265–1308) and William of Ockham (ca. 1285–1341). St. Thomas Aquinas certainly enjoyed renewed attention during the so-called Second Scholasticism of Francisco Vittoria (1480–1546), Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621), and Francisco Suarez (1548–1617); but this was only after centuries of neglect. The later-sixteenth-century rehabilitation of Aquinas was inspired, as it happened, in reaction to the criticisms framed by the humanists and reformers.28 It was the blueprint of Aquinas’ Summa, not the elucidations of (the Augustinians) Scotus and Bonaventure, that later theologians studied for their own construction of the Catholic Counter Reformation. But all this is beyond our period. After Thomas’ death, and owing partly to the condemnation of certain Thomistic theses by the Bishop of Paris in 1277 (Gilson, 2002), his philosophy had few imitators. In his appropriation of Aristotelian realism Aquinas had propounded an optimistic account of the mind’s potential for knowledge. In its place fourteenth and fifteenth-century scholastics reasserted more characteristically Augustinian views of psychology and epistemology, developing positions that have since gone under the titles of voluntarism and nominalism. The first is the elevation of will over reason; the second, a denial of universal or abstract concepts. What links these two doctrines is their common diminution of the intellect’s power to grasp things as they are, as opposed to as they merely seem. Duns Scotus in particular is remembered, perhaps not always with justice, for his emphasis on the freedom of the will, its potentia to act, and this at the expense of the rationality of freedom’s choice.29 Even more decisive was Ockham’s extension of the separation of reason from will. Volition, for Ockham, is the characteristic human faculty, and it is primarily through will that we relate to God. A corollary of this is that to love God is to obey his commands, even if the reasons for these are not well understood. In consequence of this shift in emphasis in the ordering of human psychology, God’s purposes were no longer seen to be congruent with the natural aspirations of human nature, which they were for Aquinas.30 As becomes evident in the mysticism of Meister Eckhart (ca. 1260–1327) or the pietism of Thomas à Kempis (ca. 1380–1471), if reason cannot know God’s reasons, then increasingly all that we are left with is knowledge of his law – not divine or natural law, mind you, but law as it is manifest in positive revelation,

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in Scripture. The return to ancient texts in the Renaissance and Reformation must be seen against this narrowing of the sources of religious knowledge. This climate of the diminished confidence in reason produced in humanists and reformers an aversion to the whole of the scholastic enterprise, especially their devotion to Aristotle. Not to put too fine a point on this difference of opinion, the father of the Reformation summarized his position this way: ‘Briefly, the whole Aristotle is to theology as darkness is to light.’ Always a subtle controversialist, Luther’s early statement in his 1517 Disputatio Contra Scholasticam marks the spirit of the age rather well.31 It illustrates, too, the way that reformers of the period shared more with their enemies than they were sometimes capable to admit. Despite its wrath against Aristotle the early sixteenth century simply accepted much of the skepticism that characterize the late scholastics. And not surprisingly, in their refusal of metaphysics the reformers turned above all to ethics.32 This is also Erasmus’ point of departure. Though a meticulous editor and philologist, he shows little patience for theoretical enquiries into the nature of knowledge or of being as such. These to him are uninteresting. More than that, epistemology and metaphysics prove harmful inasmuch as they distract from the Gospel and the rigors of discipleship. What occupied Erasmus, chiefly, was action.33 Philosophy for him meant moral philosophy. ‘What I call philosophy is not a method of analysing first principles, matter, time, motion, infinity, but that wisdom which Solomon deemed more precious than all riches . . . ’ (ep. 2533: 109–13). And it is literature not disputation that best serves this aim. The problem with scholastic theologians, so he argued, is that they precisely lacked style. They left their readers frigid. In a letter in defense of his Praise of Folly he writes, for instance, of the ‘barbarous and artificial style, its ignorance of all sound learning’ of the schoolmen (ep. 337: 424–26).34 This is more than a rant against poor taste. Deficiency in style betrays for Erasmus poverty of mind. As he writes in another educational manual, ‘style is to thought as clothes are to the body’ (De copia, 306). Style drapes over the form of our ideas and either invites or repels further exploration. Lady wisdom, in truth, always presents her best. And that is how we know that the scholastics live without her. What they write is boring. To be boring, therefore, is to be without sense. And to dishonor the beauty of such a

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lady is, for Erasmus, unpardonable. Since moral exhortation is the chief purpose of philosophy, not to please is not to improve your reader: this is why style matters. It should not from the above be inferred that Erasmus wished to excise reason from theology altogether. On the contrary, he wished to direct it to other labors. This is his other reason for attack against the scholars of his day: their contempt for Biblical languages. Erasmus expresses his view frankly in a letter to his friend Martin Dorp dated 1515: You may take the view that all human learning is contemptible in comparison with love for true piety and believe that you will arrive at such wisdom more quickly by being transformed through Christ. You may also believe that anything worth understanding is more fully comprehended through the light of faith than from the books of men, and I can readily share your opinion. But if in the present state of the world you persuade yourself that you can have a true understanding of theology without a knowledge of languages, especially of the one in which most of the holy scriptures have come down to us, you are entirely wrong.35 Instead of wasting years on logic and Aristotle, the young should sharpen their wits upon the flint of Greek grammar. Since, for Erasmus, our understanding of things is mediated primarily through symbols,36 mastery of their usage is mastery of accurate perception. Language is the lens through which we perceive the world. The finer the instrument the more distinct will be our perceptions. For education the implication is clear: ‘Grammar, therefore, claims primacy of place and at the outset boys must be instructed in two – Greek, of course, and Latin.’ The thought and style of the best authors should be mastered from an early age. These languages in particular recommend our attentions because ‘ . . . almost everything worth learning is set forth within these two languages’ (De Rationii Studi, 667). As we shall see this claim takes on theological significance when set within the context of Erasmus’ Antibarbari. In addition to debate over the nature of the Church’s theology, Erasmus’ time was occupied with the question of the reform of the

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Church’s structure. Erasmus was vitriolic in his attacks against the corruption of the clergy, the political elite, and, most of all, the condition of education. Erasmus wished, of course, not only for the revival of the classical literature of pagan antiquity; he wished also for a return to the study of the Bible and the Fathers, among them St. Augustine. Erasmus’ earliest manifesto of his program for educational reform, and also where he makes most use of Augustine to justify these aims, is in the Antibarbari. Begun about 1500, when Erasmus was ‘before 20 years of age’ (Antibarb. 16),though only published in 1520, the text was widely read in his own lifetime, going into ten editions.37 In this, he set out his views of the present decay of Christian intellectual culture, its causes, and an outline of a program of recovery. This outline in particular calls for the revival of the wisdom of Greece and Rome. In the work he identifies three classes of opposition: the quasi-religious, the halfeducated, and the overly enthusiastic. These are, first, the ‘spiritual’ Christians that hold faith in opposition to reason; secondly, scholastic theologians who neglect scripture in pursuit of faith; and thirdly, those humanist reformers who, despising the Church, love the classics with neither faith nor true reason.38 Erasmus never achieved his original design for the work. The text as we find it is a dialogue among four friends and addresses only the first group, the misguidedly spiritual, ‘who want the Republic of Letters to be destroyed root and branch’ (Antibarb. 42). The leading question of the dialogue is the cause of the present decline in learning. In the midst of his defense against the barbarians Erasmus invokes Augustine’s authority to establish two principles: that all wisdom is God’s, and that providence has bestowed wisdom as the specific gift of the ancients. What is more, this is a gift that Christians cannot afford to be without. The first of these claims Erasmus could expect his readers to accept without argument. Truth, irrespective of its geographical or temporal origin is the rightful property of the Church. On this conviction Augustine’s own employment of the ancients serves as a model for other believers: When it comes to the philosophers, who particularly profess to teach the way to happiness, what does [Augustine] say? . . . Listen to what this justest of men says about them: ‘If those who are called

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philosophers, especially the Platonists, have chanced to say things that are true, and in agreement with our faith, far from fearing these utterances we should claim them for our own, taking them over from their unlawful possessors.’ (Antibarb. 96–97; quoting doc. Christ. 2.144) Augustine’s authority is evoked again in support of a second principle, which is, however, controversial. that study of the classics is not only helpful but necessary to Christian maturation. Erasmus’ innovative claim is that in the normal course of our search for wisdom God has seen fit that all ages should be schooled by antiquity. Over several pages Erasmus quotes large portions of the De doctrina Christiana in defense of the liberal arts before turning to Augustine’s allegorical interpretation of the Jews’ spoiling of the Egyptians (cf. doc. Christ. 2.145). Upon this text Erasmus adds his own gloss. Just as the scrupulous among the Jews had to be assured that their theft was not really stealing, so also Christians must recognize that the wisdom of the pagans is intended for them. Here again we must avoid the imputation of making difficulties on the question of what is to be left to the heathen as pernicious or adopted as useful; Augustine excepts nothing from his classification [of the liberal arts] but those things he names as superstitious. Otherwise he does not withdraw from that arrangement of his, and this is characteristic of him: he wrote that those disciplines which were discovered by human minds, like dialectic, rhetoric, natural science, history, and so on, seemed to him marked out with gold and silver, because men themselves did not produce them but dug them out like gold and silver from what might be called the ore of divine providence (quasi metallis diuinae prouidentiae), which runs through all things. (Antibarb. 97–98; the last two lines paraphrase doc. Christ. 2.145) As we recall, Augustine also recommended that the arts be pillaged. But, in the De doctrina Christiana, this was for decidedly Christian purposes. And to put the arts to Christian purposes meant, for Augustine, at the service of proclamation. ‘These treasures,’ Augustine wrote near

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the end of his discussion of the liberal arts, are to be applied ‘ . . . to their true function, that of preaching the gospel’ (doc. Christ. 2.145). Erasmus does not simply parrot the master. His proclivity for embedding citations from the De doctrina Christiana within his Antibarbari should not lull us into presuming that they bear an identical message. Erasmus’ deployment of Augustine is calculated. His use of Augustine intends to disarm his opponents who rely upon the same authority.39 This is not to claim that Erasmus is disingenuous. It is only that he recognizes well whom he must convince and what is most likely to prove convincing. And it is not only the De doctrina Christiana which Erasmus draws upon. Among his other contributing authorities whom he quotes at length are St. Paul, St. Jerome, and Gratian.40 Erasmus’ key rhetorical device in the Antibarbari is the method of confounding authorities by authorities: dropping names, making allusions, and inserting long excerpts to a cumulative effect. As a rhetorical tool, it aims to overwhelm. Without furnishing detailed analysis of particular texts, the application of layers of acknowledged authorities erects before the unskilled adversary a wall of formidable opposition. Thus, when within his précis of Augustine’s allegorical interpretation Erasmus adds that the pillaging of the Egyptian’s gold ‘was done with the sanction of God (deo autore)’ (Antibarb. 97), sanction here takes on a new force. What is sanctioned is not the appropriation of the arts for the sake of exegesis – as it was for Augustine – but their independent cultivation. Erasmus does not believe that the Iliad supersedes the Psalter. But it does add something distinctive within the economy of salvation. By reading Homer Christians enhance their understanding of God’s revelation. What Augustine suggests as beneficial, Erasmus marks as practically necessary. I shall come to the theological reason behind this difference of opinion in a moment. Here, it is relevant to note that for many years Erasmus was known for his marked aversion to Augustine. In the Antibarbari and elsewhere Erasmus commonly ranks Augustine behind other of the Church’s Fathers. Augustine’s style, for one, ‘was rather obscure and involved’ (Antibarb. 105). In judgments of conscience he was a man who appeared ‘to tremble without cause’ (Antibarb. 94). Both Protestants and Catholics wondered at this lacuna in Erasmus’ appreciation. Luther, for one, encouraged Erasmus to spend more time

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absorbing the works of Augustine.41 Erasmus’ Catholic critics thought the same, particularly after his opinions on Augustine became more widely published. Erasmus’ unflattering portrait of the saint in his first edition of his Annotations on the New Testament (1516), reproduced below, caught the attention of certain of his critics: Augustine was undeniably a saint and a man of integrity endowed with a keen mind, but was immensely credulous, and moreover, lacking the equipment of languages. . . . In his knowledge of the biblical languages he was so inferior to Jerome that it would be impudent to compare one man with the other.42 Not only did Erasmus have a mixed view of Augustine, he also seems not to have been thoroughly acquainted with his corpus until late in his career. For example, in this first edition of the New Testament (1516) he quotes not more than six of Augustine’s works throughout his annotations. This is rather modest, given the towering position that Augustine’s many commentaries held within Catholic exegesis. It was, so it appears, only in response to requests by theologians at Louvain that Erasmus began to immerse himself in the father. In the very next year he began the herculean labor of producing a critical edition of Augustine’s works, just as he had done previously for several pagan authors.43 He completed the work in 1529. Within a few years, and certainly by his second edition of the New Testament (1519), the fruits of this labor began to reward. In this second edition Erasmus demonstrates a vastly expanded understanding of Augustine’s corpus, citing more than 40 of his books in his own annotations.44 In light of this history we should not be surprised to find that, despite copious references to Augustine, Erasmus’ educational views are not as indebted to the De doctrina Christiana as might first appear.45 Earlier in the Antibarbari Erasmus had made it clear that pagan learning belongs within God’s universal plan for salvation. Common patristic exegesis, including Augustine’s own (cf. Gn. adv. Man. 1.23.35–1.24.41), divided the history of the world prior to Christ according to the stages of God’s revelation to the Jews.46 We recall here Augustine’s 6 ages of the world, and the habit of ascribing the cause of Greek learning to the Jews (Droge, 1989). So also was the mapping of time was done with

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reference to the Jews. And where other nations (e.g. the Greeks) did contribute to wisdom, standard patristic exegesis attributed the material source of their wisdom to Jewish writings. Pagan wisdom, in other words, was typically regarded to be of a derivative origin. Ambrose thought that Cicero must have read the Hebrew Bible; Jerome believed the same of Plato; Tertullian wondered aloud, ‘Which of the poets, which of the sophists is there who has not drunk from the fount of the prophets?’ (Boyle, 1981, 12). After the fall of the Roman Empire however and the rise of successor kingdoms a minority of writers on Christian historiography took a new turn. As others have shown, historians such as Paulus Orosius (ca. 385–420) (a friend of St. Augustine’s) in his Historiarum adversus paganos libri (Books of the Histories Against the Pagans), attempted to integrate the record of secular nations within their accounts of universal history. One consequence of this shift in patristic reflection was that it opened the possibility for a wider appreciation of the place of gentile nations in the economy of divine salvation. Erasmus inserts himself in this other tradition without alerting us to the difference (Boyle, 1981, 13). For Erasmus Greece and Rome achieved more than imitation; their wisdom was derived not from the Jews but from nature. Besides inventing the arts of history, tragedy, and philosophy, the ancients bequeathed to the Church the very script of the Gospel. And so, Erasmus concludes that God did not intend the vast learning of the ancients ‘to be useless and done to no purpose’ (Antibarb. 60). While Erasmus always reserves the revelation of Christ as the highest gift, he thoroughly integrates the fruit of pagan learning as within the divine economy. God’s gift to the pagans – and from which Christians must continue to learn – is ‘the thing nearest to the highest good, that is the summit of learning’ (Antibarb. 61). In sum, Erasmus like Augustine identifies wisdom as the proper end of the liberal arts. Wisdom unadorned will not entice. To leave eligible young suitors without the allurements of wisdom is to send them off impoverished, and away to less noble loves. Do you wish to learn style? Read the classics. This is the heart of Erasmus’ educational reform. And in comparison to later philosophers of education Erasmus is a legitimate heir to the Augustinian tradition of reflection on the place of the arts within a Christian culture. Nonetheless, though

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Erasmus might have us believe that he merely paraphrases the great father, the Antibarbari does not restate simply Augustine’s attitude to liberal education as it was given in the De doctrina Christiana. Erasmus supplies copious citation for effect, and should not blur our vision of the crucial differences between the two, particularly as these concern the value of secular literature for the formation of the Christian mind. Erasmus thinks necessary what Augustine deemed merely helpful. Though this may indeed be a legitimate extension of Augustine’s thought, it is more than the recapitulation of a book that reduced the function of the liberal arts to the service of eloquent preaching.

Augustine’s legacy in modern times If we were studying the history of education, it would be strange to skip over the early Christian era and all the Middle Ages. But we are looking for questions and ideas that arose in philosophical thought and still intrigue or beset us today. (Noddings, 1995, 14) Earlier we claimed that there never has been an age wanting for readers of Augustine. This statement is true but it calls out for qualification. Although Augustine has always been a central figure in Western education, since the Middle-Ages his popularity and the quality of his influence has varied considerably from one century to another. During the sixteenth century Augustine’s texts were contested territory between Protestant Reformers and Catholics. Luther (himself an Augustinian monk) claimed his patronage. In Luther’s debate with Erasmus on the question of freewill, as for instance in On the Bondage of the Will (1525), Luther recommended that his opponent would benefit from a more detailed reading of Augustine. John Calvin similarly looked to the saint as an authority in support of his own theories of divine illumination, original sin, and predestination. During the seventeenth century Augustine’s presence was most alive in France. This was the century of Descartes (1596–1650), Bossuet (1627–1704), and Jansen (1585–1638). The striking parallels between

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Descartes and Augustine have long been acknowledged, even during his own life, as Mersenne, a close friend of Descartes wrote: ‘The more a man will be well read in the teaching of St. Augustine, the more will he be disposed to embrace the philosophy of Monsieur Descartes’ (Howie, 1969, 298). In his attempt to supervene the many knotted arguments of the scholastics, Descartes grounded the certainty of knowledge in the immediate perception of consciousness. In this way, Cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am) echoes rather nicely Augustine’s own Si fallor sum (if I error I am). To many of Descartes’ followers, such as, notably, Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715), the French Oratorian priest, Cartesianism represented a logical extension of Augustine’s Christian philosophy. Despite enthusiasts, however, Descartes’ works were condemned by Protestant magistrates and officials at the universities of Leiden and Utrecht, and similarly placed on the Catholic Church’s Index of prohibited books before the end of the century (Schouls, 1996). Whether Descartes represents the fulfillment or repudiation of Augustinianism in the West is still a matter of debate. 47 Besides Augustine’s influence on debates over metaphysics and epistemology, the two preeminent seventeenth century controversies in ethics likewise were fought over differing interpretations of the same corpus. The first, over ‘pure love,’ occupied Bossuet and Fénelon (1651–1715). Here the question was whether humans can or should love God without interest in their own happiness. Both attempted to be faithful to Augustine; both had to reconcile seemingly contradictory sentiments about the nature and propriety of self-love that Augustine had inserted into the tradition. Bossuet was the more decidedly Thomistic between the two. He affirmed without qualification the goodness of created natures, and formally at least, prevailed in the dispute. In 1699 Pope Innocent XII ruled in his favor that a creature’s love could not extend, properly speaking, to willing his or her own damnation. (The textual basis for the possibility of such a debate is the subject of an often-cited modern study The Problem of Self Love in St. Augustine by Oliver O’Donovan.) Other skirmishes focused directly upon the relation between grace and freewill.48 Cornelius Jansen’s posthumous publication of his synthesis of Augustine’s doctrine Augustinus (1638), for instance, enflamed old divisions, once more, over the nature and relative scope of human freedom given our need for divine grace. Bishop

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Jansen boasted of having read the whole corpus of Augustine several times and his anti-Pelagian works some 30 times (Lamberigts, 1999). A Jansenist community of Port Royal, which acted as a teaching order, molded its pedagogical practices after the views of their founder and his interpretation of the crippling effects of sin and predestination (Howie, 1969, 298). In retrospect, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, perhaps more than any other era, witnessed to the fecundity of Augustine’s thought. And yet, these also made manifest the potential of his ideas to be turned in quite unhappy directions. In taking on the defense of our need for grace, for instance, Augustine may have won the battle against Pelagius, but it proved to be a Pyrrhic victory. Obfuscation is no virtue in theology. At the same time it is always possible to inquire into mysteries in ways that distorts rather than illumine the realities that stand behind our words. On the necessary coincidence of both human and divine freedom, those who have wished to express more than what Catholic dogma has deemed possible have unfortunately found in Augustine’s later writings on grace a continual spring of inspiration. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by contrast drew upon other sources. This diminished regard for Augustine is attributable, for the most part, to the de-Christianization of Europe. With Rousseau (1772–1778), Kant (1724–1808), and Hume (1711–1776) as the leading political and moral philosophers, the eighteenth century turned toward rationalism and natural philosophy and away from Christian and Platonic thought. Rousseau represents what Leo Strauss has called the ‘first wave’ of the critique of Enlightenment modernity. While sharing much in common with other early modern philosophers, such as the theory of the social contract, Rousseau saw early the dangers of founding political life on the principle of enlightened self-interest. The problem was, as he saw it, that the new science of human nature had rendered society unfit for people. ‘Man was born free and is everywhere in chains,’ so Rousseau opens his The Social Contract (1762). He is everywhere in chains because his society and his education has caused him to become artificial. In Emile Rousseau attempted to show how duty and inclination could be harmoniously united within the individual, how man could remain at once true to his ‘natural’ self and be rendered fit for civil society. Rousseau thought this might be achieved only

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through education. In the eighteenth century it was Rousseau’s new doctrine of éducation naturelle, ‘natural education,’ as expounded in his Nouvelle Héloise and Emile, which attracted the widest attention – and incited the most ferocious criticism (Oelkers, 2008, 187–204). During the height of Germany’s intellectual dominance, in the nineteenth century, there was a return to the idealist tradition, but not as it was mediated through Roman and Medieval sources. Rather, Germany looked above all to Greece, to its philosophy, and to its literary achievements. The leading Protestant theologian of the first half of that century, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), for instance, was, arguably, more a disciple of Plato and Kant than of Augustine. At the end of the century it was Nietzsche’s (1844–1900) meditation upon Greek tragedy that helped him to form his own novel ideas about the will and the irrational. It is not coincidental that his first book, published in 1872, an exaltation of the ‘Dionysian’ creative, artistic, irrational side of the Greek tradition, was titled The Birth of Tragedy, Out of the Spirit of Music (Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik). In the Catholic world also during the nineteenth century, it was St. Thomas Aquinas, not St. Augustine, who triumphed. Pope Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris (1879) instigated a worldwide reform of Catholic educational institutions. The renewal of Catholic intellectual life that began at the turn of the century and continued right up to the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) was the direct result of this reform. Finally, since the Council Augustine’s thought has enjoyed something of a renaissance in higher learning. The hegemony of scholastic methods, divisions, and doctrines over the curricula of Catholic universities and colleges has, of course, been displaced by an eclectic pluralism. Into this context Augustine has emerged once again (and with him the Greek Fathers) into the mainstream Catholic, and significant elements of Protestant, intellectual life, often under the banner of Ressourcement, a return to the sources of the Christian tradition. Today Thomists stress the continuity between the two great doctors, a trend in modern scholarship nicely captured by the title of one recent international conference and collection of papers on the theme, Aquinas the Augustinian.49 In North America, in particular, Augustine has found a place once again within the university and college curricula of select institutions. Obviously, most tertiary institutions in Canada and the United States do not require their students to encounter a core set of texts in the

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humanities (where Augustine might be discovered). But some do. Robert Hutchins’ Great Books movement was the counterreform to the elective system which he instigated during his tenure as president at the University of Chicago (1929–1951). Throughout the middle part of the twentieth century Hutchins, Mortimer Adler (1902–2001), and others, argued vigorously for a return to an older European liberal arts model of education, and with it a recovery of the canon of Western literature. St. John’s College (Annapolis, MD), Thomas Aquinas College (Santa Paula, CA), and King’s College (Halifax, NS), are the oldest among the growing number of ‘Great Books’ programs on the continent. Other institutions, such as Villanova University (Villanova, PA), feature Augustine’s writings as a means of introducing students to the tradition of liberal learning.

Contemporary Scholarship on Augustine Having noted, in short compass, the various ways which Augustine has remained present throughout the last few hundred years of Western scholarship, I wish next to comment on the treatment (and lack thereof ) which his educational ideas have received from two groups of contemporary scholars in particular: historians of ancient thought who have taken an interest in Augustine’s educational ideas, and professional historians and philosophers of education. We shall see that while the former have taken a keen, if rather unsystematic, interest in Augustine’s educational ideas, the latter have, with rare exceptions, tended to ignore him altogether. In my concluding comments I wish to offer some explanation as to why this is so. In addition to a number of journals, there are two standard encyclopedias devoted to Augustine’s life and intellectual contribution. The ambitious Augustinus-Lexikon (1986–) is an ongoing, multivolume encyclopedia, housed at the Center for Augustinian Studies at the University of Würzburg. Substantial entries on virtually every aspect of his thought and context, written by an international group of scholars in English, French, and German, includes also helpful articles on terms such as ‘artes liberales,’ ‘auctoritas,’ and ‘disciplina.’ The more accessible Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia (1999), likewise features several relevant essays. A third reference, the Oxford Guide to the

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Historical Reception of Augustine (K. Pollmann and W. Otten, eds.), shortly forthcoming, will no doubt prove useful for those wishing to assess the influence of Augustine’s educational concepts on later ages. By far the most distinguished history of ancient education is Marrou’s Histoire de l’éducation dans l’antiquité (1948, English trans. 1958). The work includes a generous account of Augustine’s thought, and has served as the basis for most other histories of education that draw Augustine within their narrative. Augustine’s place in the transmission of educational ideals from antiquity to the Medieval period is the subject of an earlier important study by Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique (1936). Ilsetraut Hadot’s Arts libéraux et philosophie dans la pensée antique (1984) challenged Marrou’s central thesis and argued that in the transmission of the classical ideal of the liberal arts the place of honor belongs to later Neoplatonists such as Porphyry, not particularly to the Doctor of Grace. (Stanely Bonner’s excellent Education in Ancient Rome (1977), unfortunately, closes with the second century A.D.) Three recent collections of essays in English, Reading and Wisdom: The De Doctrina Christiana of Augustine in the Middle Ages (1995), Augustine and Liberal Education (2000), and Augustine and the Disciplines (2005), have taken up in greater detail specific educational themes in Augustine’s corpus; these and other focused studies (e.g. Steppat, 1980; Doignon, 1986; Foley, 1999; Schlapbach, 2003; Meredith, 2005) have contributed intelligently to debate over Augustine’s sources and the extent of his influence upon the development of the theory and practice of liberal learning in the West. Twentieth-century Anglophone histories of education are much more uneven. The 1911–1913 multivolume Cyclopedia of Education set the tone for what followed. The work reflects the editor’s apparent disdain for tradition and enthusiastic embrace of the (then) emerging social sciences. In the entry on Augustine, after a précis of the importance of his thought as a leading figure in Christian history, the author then declines to hope that this influence should continue. In his judgment, Augustine’s erudition ‘was as loose and ill disciplined as it was vast and varied,’ and with a nod to Gibbon he notes that while Augustine’s works were good for their time, in hindsight they have proved to be ‘one of the causes of the decay of culture and education in Europe’ (1911: vol.1, p. 300). In the postwar period A.E. Meyer’s

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An Educational History of the Western World (1965) fails even to mention Augustine. Lukas’ Our Western Educational Heritage (1972) offers three pages to our subject. A Legacy of Learning: A History of Western Education, written by Power (1991), summarizes his ideas on illumination in one page. As far as reference works go, the ten volume International Encyclopedia of Education (1994, 2nd edn.) includes a passable entry on Augustine. J.J. Chambliss’ (ed.) Philosophy of Education: An Encyclopdea (1996) offers a delightful piece by John C. Cavadini, while the single volume Routledge International Encyclopedia of Education (2008) ignores Augustine altogether. There is an old saying, ‘if you haven’t got anything nice to say, better not to say it at all.’ One wishes that some historians of education could have taken the adage a little closer to heart when it came to their dealings with Augustine. In this class I place Lawton and Gordon, whose A History of Western Educational Ideas (2002) extends, generously enough, several pages to Augustine. Their history seems to go out of its way, however, to extinguish in their readers any desire to learn more about Augustine that may have been unwittingly enkindled by their book. After concluding their remarks on Augustine’s texts they summarize the value of his writings (and several centuries of other Patristic works) with the blanket judgment that these ancient educators ‘encouraged a static view of knowledge,’ and that this static view is one that subsequently ‘proved to be an impediment to necessary changes’ (p. 43). Static view of knowledge? Impediment to necessary changes? Anyone who can slough off Augustine with these terms has clearly not bothered to read very closely. On the positive side, Bowen’s threevolume A History of Western Education (1981) is, on Augustine, as on other figures, reliable. With some exceptions, philosophers of education have tended to share the same lack of concern for the historical origins of their discipline as have analytic philosophers more generally.50 John Dewey, for one, was unusually endowed with a confidence in the progress of the subject. His optimism for the future correlated with his lack of concern for the past. At numerous points Dewey makes false claims about the history of educational thought. He will generalize about ‘past philosophies’ of education, often without stating which ‘past philosophers’ he refers to, or even upon which texts his judgments are based.

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For example, in his entry in the aforementioned Cyclopedia of Education Dewey contributed an essay titled ‘Philosophy of Education.’ In his article Dewey asserted that, in previous times, philosophers of education lacked rigor in their approach to the acquisition of knowledge, and hence their conclusions about the process of learning were similarly spurious. As he wrote: The whole idea and scope of knowledge-getting in education has reflected the absence of such a method [i.e. Dewey’s own], so that learning has meant, on the whole, piling up, worshipping, and holding fast to what is handed down from the past with the title of knowledge. But the actual practice of knowing has finally reached a point where learning means discovery, not memorizing traditions; where knowledge is actively constructed, not passively absorbed; and where men’s beliefs must be openly recognized to be experimental in nature, involving hypothesis and testing through being set at work. My aim is not to criticize what merits might properly attach to Dewey’s theory of knowledge acquisition but simply to note the inaccuracy of his claim about the past. Is he speaking of Aristotle? Augustine? Kant? Since the reader has no idea whom Dewey wished to attack, I am unclear as to where a defense could be directed. Certainly none of the above philosophers would have recognized as their own such a description of what constitutes sound pedagogy. Could he really have meant to include Rousseau as one who worshipped tradition – as though he thought other men’s beliefs should simply pass ‘with the title of knowledge’? (The whole point of Emile is to undermine everything that came before him in the field of education.) Does he think this would describe Thomas Aquinas? It is obvious enough that Dewey cannot be taken seriously as an historian. There are, of course, many who are rightly considered to be philosophers of education who do take history seriously. We think here, for instance, of the work of Martha Nussbaum, and her important 1997 study Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defence for Reform in Liberal Education (which I shall revisit in the final chapter); or, of different persuasions, of John Haldane (2004), or Alistair MacIntyre (1990), or James Muir (1996), among others. Also, there is a very fine summary

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of Augustine’s educational ideas, Educational Theory and Practice in St. Augustine (1969) that was written by Gordon Howie, a classicistturned professor of education. But these are exceptions. Why do philosophers of education as a professional guild care so little about the past? This question is relevant for us because explanation is needed to account for why so few contemporary philosophers of education draw upon Augustine’s thought to any significant degree. A comprehensive reply would require more than can be offered here, but some at least have attributed this lack of interest as a result of Dewey’s influence over the discipline.51 His progressive view of knowledge (and hence his lack of interest in history) goes some distance to explain, I think, why later scholars formed by his approach have cared so little about the past. To take just one example, we might consider Nel Nodding’s treatment of historical figures in her Philosophy of Education (1995, 2nd edn. 2007). The book, which is considered by many a standard in the field, is divided, reasonably enough, into two uneven sections: history and theory. The first two chapters offer an historical survey of leading educational philosophers. The remaining chapters take up conceptual themes in the light of that history and (often) in conversation with twentieth century philosophers, such as Dewey. On justifying her leap from Aristotle to Rousseau in her discussion of the history of educational philosophy she offers this (p. 14): If we were studying the history of education, it would be strange to skip over the early Christian era and all the Middle Ages. But we are looking for questions and ideas that arose in philosophical thought and still intrigue or beset us today. Noddings acknowledges, then, that there are other thinkers in the past that had something to say about pedagogy. But the reason for omitting the ideas of Augustine, Aquinas, and Erasmus from her readers’ view is, apparently, because these neither arose out of ‘philosophical thought’ nor qualify as being of interest for today. (Does this mean she thinks similarly of Locke and Kant – figures also absent from her historical survey?) Debate about the value and nature of education in our democratic societies has not been furthered by this inattention to the past.

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A second, nonaccidental cause, for why leading philosophers can without irony exclude well over a millennium and a half from their survey of the history educational philosophy is because many within the field see their discipline as modeled after the social sciences. (Certainly, as in the case of the social sciences, academic specialization in ‘the philosophy of education’ is a relatively new endeavor. As far as I am aware, the term ‘philosophy of education’ was first employed in the aforementioned Cyclopedia of Education, 1911–1913.) It would not be wholly unfair for someone to object that the above criticism of the field is disingenuous. After all, it is not only forgetfulness that has caused many to ignore the past. Many are not interested as a matter of principle. Augustine and others are ignored, as it were, by default because of the way in which the discipline itself functions. On this view, it is about as important for philosophers of education to know the history of their field as it is for physicists to know the history of theirs. This sort of educational philosopher might argue further that, in education as in physics, our knowledge increases in a systematically progressive fashion, and that, in education as in physics, later writers appropriate and assume into their own work only the sound conclusions belonging to earlier writers. On this view, Dewey would be more important to understand than Rousseau for the same reasons that Einstein is more important to understand than Newton. Though I disagree with the premise that leads one to render the nature of the enterprise in this way, I can appreciate how the conclusion logically follows. Moreover, I grant that this is in fact the express opinion of some. For a significant number of educational philosophers their discipline is simply an extension and application of the social sciences to one particular human endeavor: learning. Along this line James Kaminisky, in an article in the Harvard Educational Review (1992), claimed that it is possible to specify the precise year and day of the founding of his discipline. Properly speaking, educational philosophy began on 24 February 1935. That was the date of the establishment of the John Dewey Society in Atlantic city. Such a late year for the beginning of what might otherwise have been thought of as a rather traditional human activity (thinking about learning) is explained by the author’s particular definition of his terms. According to Kaminisky, ‘educational philosophy’ is a designation properly restricted to those and

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only those educational writings that conform to the methods and aims of the social sciences. Those methods were only recently discovered. So he concludes, ‘Educational philosophy – the academic enterprise – was a response to new times, new questions, and new social concerns’ (Kaminsky, 1992, 195). And besides, the John Dewey Society was really influential in shaping public educational policy in the United States of America (ibid., 179).

Chapter 7

St. Augustine and the Defense of Liberal Education

In this final chapter, we shift focus in order to reflect on the possibilities of appropriating Augustine’s philosophy of education to our own time. Section I sketches, in broad strokes, the political and moral context in which debate about liberal education is conducted. Section II considers some of the objections to the idea of classical education that Augustine attempted to answer and suggests ways that his arguments could still be relevant to the defense of liberal learning today.

I: The Context of Debate on Liberal Education From the university to the multiversity Who can tell us what a liberal education is for? To what end the university? Patterned after the medieval guilds, its foremost and original purpose, as Newman beautifully described it, ‘aims at raising the intellectual tone of society,’ at cultivating gentlemen. The university’s essential spirit, he argued, strives to cultivate liberal knowledge in students and teachers alike.1 Of course, long since has Newman’s ceased to be the leading conception of what makes a university.2 That moral and intellectual confidence with which the institution was founded nearly a 1000 years ago has dissolved. Already by 1852, when Newman penned these words, the German research university was already in ascendancy. As political and industrial revolutions advanced, science and research displaced teaching and the liberal arts at the centre of the university. Writing in 1930 Abraham Flexner gave expression to the ‘Idea of the Modern University’ that had eclipsed the ancient one.3 But that too has passed. Today we do better to speak of the multiversity if we are to

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consider the theoretical basis of the university at all.4 The multiversity is inconsistent. She has no single goddess as her patron; rather, she is ruled by a pantheon of conflicting powers and interests. Based more on a set of practices and associations than on a coherent theoretical model, the contemporary academy draws upon competing visions of its purpose.5 And since the end of the Second World War it has been the American university, more than any other, which has defined the nature of the institution. In recent years a host of books have drawn our attention to the soullessness of the secular university. Included among these are Tom Wolfe’s I am Charlotte Simmons (2004), Gavin D’Costa’s Theology and the Public Square: Church, Academy and Nation (2005), and C. John Sommerville’s Decline of the Secular University (2006), which claims that the liberal university’s refusal to engage in religious arguments has resulted in its increasing marginalization within American society. I grant that these and similar indictments against European and North American secular universities are, to a large extent, true. And yet, however inconsistent are our own opinions of the value of the university (and the liberal arts within it), and however drastic is its current failure to live up to our expectations, few institutions continue to inspire such public support as does the university. Nearly all our professionals receive their training there: government, business, and the judiciary all look to the university when they require expert opinion; there is an established link between a nation’s university-research activity and its economic strength – and, obvious since the middle of the twentieth century, its effectiveness at waging war. Now, while all of these and more can be offered as explanations for why liberal societies continue to defend this medieval institution, none of this type is sufficient. The reasons for our attachment lay elsewhere, buried within a theological conception of human aspiration that continues to sustain the modern university, however much it may be despised or simply ignored. Failure to attend to the claims of theology as a public form of discourse has made us blind to the true causes of our attachment to the university. In what follows I want to explore why it is that liberal societies continue to value the university but increasingly find it difficult to articulate coherent reasons for its defense. I shall argue that any plausible defense of the value of the university within Western societies

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requires the concomitant recognition of two propositions: first, of the moral value of the search into the meaning of human freedom and, secondly, of the certainty that human freedom can only properly be exercised in obedience to the objective order of truth. I shall further argue that, for all its strengths, Liberalism as a political doctrine cannot conceptually unite these two propositions because of its commitment to a voluntaristic interpretation of freedom. As a modest proposal for constructive progress in this debate, in my concluding remarks I suggest three ways that St. Augustine’s educational thought makes more intelligible our own educational ideals than do major competing accounts.

Liberal education and liberalism Liberal societies honor the university but fail to grasp the true nature of a liberal education that has traditionally been the purpose of every university. Were all the prestige presently derived from economic and military advantages transferred, say, to technical and vocational colleges, these still would not add up to what we mean, or should mean, by a university. That is because an educational institution worthy of our highest affection has as its central goal the task of making available a liberal education. If this is, as I want to claim it is, what makes the university worthy of our society’s highest public honor, it is important to understand what we mean to add to the idea of higher education by the adjective ‘liberal.’ Certainly, this has something to do with the complex concept of ‘freedom.’ As Josef Pieper articulated 50 years ago in his Leisure: the Basis of Culture, freedom is an ideal which leading educators throughout the Western tradition came to think could be cultivated by a certain type of education undertaken with a certain kind of end in view. Crucial for us to grasp, more now even than in Pieper’s time, is that the political good pursued within Liberalism correlates to our understanding of liberal education in two distinct but related ways. In one way it informs what we take the characteristics of a free human being to be, in another, how such a person approaches his education.6 First, take up his characteristics. In our etymology as in our history, the liberal arts have been those disciplines suited to the liberalis, the free

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man. In the ancient world the free man’s interests contrasted with the aspirations occupying the slave. The liberalis has interests outside of the practical world, outside of the world of work. It is in this sense that we still retain the notion that a liberal education ought, somehow, to make students high-minded: as professionals, doctors, lawyers, civil servants, and military officers are all held to a code higher than what is required of the general population. And it is no coincidence that the university is responsible for producing most of them. The liberally educated person properly exercises his or her freedom for ends that reach beyond mere self-interest; his concerns include more than economic survival. This is one of the reasons why we continue to look to the university as one of the chief, indeed, one of the last, publicly recognized conduits of liberal virtues upon which liberal democracy depends. (I do not imply that the university is the only institution which aims so high: only that it recognizably does so.) At its best a liberal education which the university provides is supposed to carry forward the sentiments and moral habits that underlie the just order of society. It is an education suited especially for citizens within a free society. We demand, for example, that every student leave the university knowing how to read and write well; they should be able to argue. We expect that university students imbibe a sense of fair mindedness and tolerance, and, in political questions, the ability to approach complex problems with more than the resources of simple prejudice. At university we hope students will make good friends, cultivate good taste, and, at the least, become interesting to talk to. But to anticipate an objection: that the legal possession of one man over another is no longer a political reality is only incidentally problematic to our understanding the older distinction. This is because there remain activities and states of mind that we continue to recognize as servile. There remains slavish thinking and slavish acting. Being small-minded, intolerant, and given to prejudice, we believe, impede a person’s freedom to become good: any of these vices quite obviously disqualifies a person from attaining to a freedom worth owning. Thus, while the political conditions for the old distinction have disappeared, the spiritual and psychological ones have not. There is a second sense by which we call the liberal arts ‘free.’ This has more to do with our use of the disciplines than with the kind of person

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they are intended to produce. The liberal arts are said to be ‘free’ because they are studied for their own sake. Again, we may draw a contrast. Some disciplines are undertaken with a practical end clearly in sight, such as law, medicine, or engineering. The liberal arts are not like that. The most common division of the liberal arts, the one transmitted to the medieval world by St. Augustine, among others, and adopted by the time of the thirteenth century, had two parts: the trivium (consisting of grammar, logic, and rhetoric), and the quadrivium (consisting of arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy).7 Now when the tradition said, as Newman did in the nineteenth century, that the liberal arts ought to be studied for their own sake, it did not mean that they should be studied ‘simply and for no sake at all.’8 Rather, the liberal arts are free because they are oriented toward the most basic of human ends, and not in the first instance toward the means suited to any one specific end. In this way liberal arts are preparatory: important for man qua man, important insofar as every human being has an interest in his own happiness and in cultivating his own freedom. As Hugo of St. Victor taught, the arts are ‘the best instruments, the best rudiments by which the way is prepared for the mind’s complete knowledge of philosophical truth’ (Did. 3.3). Hence, while in the sequence of study the liberal arts are prior to philosophy, in the order of priority they anticipate and are oriented toward philosophy. They are disciplines that train the mind in skills that make you capable to philosophize, to think philosophically about the true nature of your own freedom. Liberal education, then, has always included the kind of disciplines that are of interest to a free person, whose education includes also the search for knowledge about freedom. Both aspects go together. Both distinguish this sort of education from merely technical and even scientific training. As it is commonly understood today, scientific education, cut off from its roots in philosophy and therefore the study of teleology, begins already with a conception of value, and must proceed from there. Liberal education, by contrast, begins partially with a conception of value (i.e. an idea of what human freedom is meant for) and partially seeks to find this out. Though scientific study can tell us a great deal about the world, it does not tell us what part of the world is valuable to study. Another kind of inquiry is needed for that. And in our tradition we still know that a liberal education – in the sense I have been

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describing – is very important, even that the health of a liberal society depends on it. We need an education that prepares us to think about human ends. This much, I suggest, continues to invoke wide agreement. But what those ends are, or in other words, what the nature of that freedom which a liberal education ought to promote is, no longer does.

Why liberalism cannot defend liberal education My thesis thus far has been that only with increasing difficulty does liberal society provide an explanation for why we should defend the university even though, oddly, it is widely recognized as a conduit of the skills and disciplines valued by our own political doctrine; further, that a liberal education requires the concurrent acceptance of two conditions stated above. Before I suggest how St. Augustine can make better sense of our educational aspirations we need to show, next, what features pertain within Liberalism that makes these two notions difficult to join. Liberalism is an answer to the question of the human political good that developed in self-conscious reaction against the tradition of Latin Christendom. It is true that ‘Liberalism,’ as such, admits of no univocal description. The Liberalism of Locke is not that of Kant, and neither is the same as Rawls.’ There exists a plurality of visions of the good life within our political tradition. Indeed that Liberalism can accommodate a wide array of opinions is seen by its defenders as one of its exemplary virtues. And yet, the range of liberal beliefs is not infinitely diffuse. Its features emerged concretely out of the eighteenth century and there exist a sufficient number of familial resemblances that make identification possible: government by consent, the primacy of the individual, and faith in a doctrine of progress count as a few of the most obvious among these (Song, 1997, 40–48). Now it is significant that the practice of the liberal arts, as a widely realized educational ideal, predates the birth of Liberalism as a political ideal by about six centuries. Where we might have been tempted to believe our love for the university sprang from its expressing an ideal embedded within our own political tradition, the way a parent loves what she recognizes in her child, it is we, in fact, which are the offspring. Liberalism did not produce the

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ideal of liberal education but inherited it. We are the beneficiaries: its origins lie elsewhere. But this fact alone does not account for the ambiguous position of the university within our society. And it does not, of itself, explain why we cannot bring ourselves to hold in union the twin conditions that, as I argued above, make liberal education possible (i.e. both holding a substantive conception of the goal of freedom, and having as our aim the search for its meaning). Although there are several accounts of Liberalism, for our purposes two grand narratives of its birth and destiny suggest themselves. Each narrative evaluates and describes Liberalism’s origin and end in opposing ways. The first, which I think more compelling, accounts for the origin of Liberalism as a Christian heresy.9 The second, now dominant view, asks us to believe that society sprang out of the well of individual self-interest. Conjuring society out of individuality, and thereby laying hold of a self-sufficiency which monotheism allowed only to God, this narrative imagines the gift of human community flowing not from the divine act of creation, but from the creative exercise of human will. By this account, liberal justice founds its legitimacy upon an original contract, from out of which (no less miraculously) flows a continuing source of political identity. Insofar as we have accepted this second story as our own, we will not be able to account for our love for the university. A people that believe its justice is founded singly upon consent cannot comprehend what it has not, of itself, willed. In this kind of society, technological achievements are supposed to excite for the same reason as does the ballot: they are both expressive acts of will, that is, of our freedom. And of a freedom apparently indeterminate: a freedom formed by nothing outside of itself, least of all by a god. Thus, insofar as liberal society remains skeptical about its ability to know an objective end for our freedom, the meaning of the liberal arts too will remain unknown. At the centre of our highest educational ideal lies both a question and an answer: dogma and an open search. How these two are compatible is a riddle we have forgotten how to solve. When did we forget? That date is not easy to specify, precisely, though its general location can be mapped onto any number of credible histories of the rise and fall of Western philosophy. Relevant here is the failed conviction within late medieval scholasticism that the

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human mind shares a connaturality with the good. In all parts of Latin Christendom it became difficult to believe that our reason was suited to understand God’s reasons and that our will, though damaged, was suited to follow God’s will. The consequences of this developed variously: early on in psychology, by Peter Abelard; then in epistemology and political philosophy, by Duns Scotus and Marsilius of Padua; and later, in a more radical way, in the theology of Martin Luther. By Thomas Hobbes these tributaries had united into a single, formidable stream, which has flooded the intellectual currents running through the West since then. For our purpose it is sufficient to sketch something of the consequences of voluntarism upon our educational thought picking up the story only from the start of the last century. One surprising feature about this history is that, within the Anglo-American tradition at least, skepticism has often comfortably settled alongside dogmatic conclusions about the value of liberal democracy. I take as my first example the work of John Dewey. As is well known, Dewey’s singular influence over educational theory hardly finds an equal. In the past century, within the English-speaking world, virtually all accounts of the aims of education proceeded along the lines of argument established by Dewey, who sought to derive a philosophy of education consistent with democratic justice. As his preface to Democracy and Education (1916) explains, ‘The following pages endeavor to detect and state the ideas implied in a democratic society and to apply these ideas to the problems of the enterprise of education.’10 Fifty years later, with the publication of British educational philosopher R.S. Peters’s Ethics and Education (1966), the objective remained the same: pedagogical theory had only to make more explicit the implied educational norms presupposed within a democratic society.11 Here there was certainly dogma. Philosophers of education, like everybody else, could assume a cultural consensus that united the justice of democratic institutions with the inevitability of scientific advance. But there was hardly need for a genuine search – either into metaphysics or into the history of their discipline. Faith in the advance of progress made such work redundant. Accepting Kant’s critique of metaphysics and the tradition of positivist philosophy that inherited that critique, Dewey’s idea of a liberal education had little in common with the aims of the older tradition of

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the liberal arts. Combining all the natural science, logical analysis, and literary appreciation you can, still does not add up either to what Christianity understood by philosophy or what Augustine outlined as the liberal arts. By way of contrast, the scholastic tradition, Dewey’s immediate target of criticism, had defined human freedom as the movement of a rational soul, a soul endowed with a free will (liberum arbitrium). As St. Thomas had famously defined it, the will is a rational appetite reaching out toward ends perceived by the intellect as good. It is an appetitive power; but it is also intrinsically oriented toward the good and therefore an aspect of the intellect (cf. Summa Theologiae I q.83 aa.1–3). Will and reason are integrated powers: the freedom of the one dependent upon the right exercise of the other. In contrast, for Dewey, ultimate human ends are closed to rationality and all that remains open to the intellect is reflection upon efficient causes, mere problem solving. What characterizes the present debate? Not optimism but despair. That cultural confidence which long united the grand narrative of science and democracy within our civilization has now broken up. Educators too often fail to offer their students a unified curriculum for the reason that they do not believe in the unity of truth. The new emphasis is on diversity: political theorists and educators today commonly presume that a theory of cultural pluralism provides the best framework within which moral debate can proceed in a secular liberal society.12 Certainly, even in the midst of our contemporary political fragmentation, not all accounts of the scope of education have been as narrow as Dewey’s. Among educationists there remains a number of dissenting scholars that continue to defend the liberal arts based directly on classical Greek and Roman models of education. This type of defense, which I shall here presumptuously call ‘non-Augustinian,’ seeks to interpret the tradition of the liberal arts apart from the distorting influence of Christianity. Under this class falls the work of Martha Nussbaum. In her recent essay on reform within higher education, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defence for Reform in Liberal Education (1997), Nussbaum argued that the strength of the liberal arts tradition (in America) lies in its ability to produce students capable of flourishing within a liberal democracy. Nussbaum shares with Dewey a confidence in the liberal principles of democratic justice, except, unlike Dewey, it is a Liberalism

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which is, in rhetoric at least, committed to the pursuit of no one definitive view of the good life. Rather, a multitude of visions of the good should be allowed to flourish, particularly those rooted in a cultural or sexual identity. Pluralism within the political community, so defined, ought to translate into pluralism within the educational curriculum. To this end she writes: Today’s teachers are shaping future citizens in an age of cultural diversity and increasing internationalization. Our country is inescapably plural. As citizens we are frequently called upon to make decisions that require some understanding of racial and ethnic and religious groups in our nation, and of the situation of its women and its minorities in terms of sexual orientation . . . The new emphasis on ‘diversity’ in college and university curricula is above all a way of grappling with the altered requirements of citizenship, an attempt to produce adults who can function as citizens not just of some local region or group but also, and more importantly, as citizens of a complex interlocking world. (p. 6) Nussbaum’s book documents the various ways that such reforms are being implemented across the United States. Nevertheless, as her evaluation of the administrative policies of both Notre Dame and Brigham Young University makes clear, not every kind of diversity, in her view, is good.13 Her book evaluates a number of religiously informed policies that she thinks incompatible with the vocation of the university. And in principle I do not object to Nussbaum’s objecting to religious policies. Some of them may well be bad policies; and, as St. Augustine would say, not all religion is true religion. Nussbaum fails, however, to persuasively justify her principles of discrimination. She does not demonstrate how a religiously skeptical approach to education is inherently more rational than a religious one. Despite her many appeals to the classical tradition in general and to the Stoic idea of universal citizenship in particular, Nussbaum’s ‘universal reason’ turns out to be a kind that conspicuously excludes the possibility of the Christian revelation. The reader is initially surprised at the praise she offers John Paul II for his defense of the freedom of religion (cf. pp. 259 and 286). Continuing on, however, one begins to suspect insincerity. At every point

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that Notre Dame has pursued policies that conform to Catholic moral teaching – that is to say, Catholic moral teaching as defined by the Vatican – on abortion (p. 269), contraception (p. 275), homosexuality (p. 277), and dissent in general (p. 268), Nussbaum charges the institution with damaging the conditions of free inquiry. Hindering free thought is a serious charge to make against a university and, in this case, it is not well founded. It would have been better for Nussbaum to state plainly that the Pope is simply inconsistent: that it is a contradiction both to defend religious freedom and to defend the permanent validity of moral truths. Alternatively, she might have claimed that the particular moral opinions which the Catholic Church teaches are false. Either line of attack would be more honest. As it is, I do not think Nussbaum’s disagreement is with Notre Dame as an educational institution per se. It is, rather, with the Roman Catholic Church. Her disapproval of Notre Dame as a university extends only insofar as it attempts to function as a Catholic one. In defense of a Catholic university, briefly, the Christian tradition has never been content to define ‘intellectual freedom’ in primarily negative terms.14 True freedom, as the same Pope emphasized in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor (1993), is possible only when pursued in conformity with the truth. Truth is a good not opposed to freedom but constituting its very condition. And as it happens, in matters of faith and morals, truth is what the Catholic Church claims to know. It is far from obvious that the defense of truth and the protection of the freedom of conscience need not conflict. Quoting Newman, celebrating the dignity of the freedom of the individual’s conscience properly formed, John Paul II wrote: ‘Conscience has rights because it has duties’ (Veritatis Splendor, §34). These are duties to the objective order of reality – apprehended through the natural law and, if one is a believer, revelation. Thus a Catholic institution, by definition, presupposes definite claims about the structure of ontology. So, it appears, Nussbaum’s critique of a Catholic university is disingenuous: the truth or falsity of an institution’s philosophical and theological presuppositions has to be argued on other than the educational grounds Nussbaum covers. In short, what she delivers is not a critique of Notre Dame’s educational policy but a complaint against its metaphysical starting point. Every school deploys some concept of freedom: Nussbaum simply disagrees with the ones adopted by universities striving to be Christian.

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II: St. Augustine’s Defence St. Augustine’s contribution to the debate on liberal education In these closing remarks, I wish to highlight three lines of argumentation which a contemporary Augustinian philosopher might appeal to in defense of a classical and Christian view of liberal learning. Though I cannot provide more than an outline of a defense of this thesis, I suggest that the resources of Augustine’s thought might well make better sense of our own noblest aspirations for liberal education. The three themes most relevant to current debates on the value of liberal education I take to be these: Augustine’s teaching on happiness as the goal of moral striving, his refutation of skepticism, and his outline of the principles of Christian pedagogy. First, on happiness, everyone seeks it. ‘All men desire happiness’ (Beatos nos esse volumes) (b. vita. 2.10). Drawing upon a classical topos, Augustine roots his educational thought in this axiom of human psychology. As we have already seen, through his Confessions he shows that this desire for happiness is the first movement in the soul’s quest for God. In the De beata vita and Soliloquia Augustine argues that the possibility of certain knowledge about God and the soul are the necessary conditions to human happiness. As Augustine will later recount in his Confessions, Cicero’s philosophical framework could not provide so much. Under the strain of his personal moral failure and his inability to conceive of an immaterial good, reading the Hortensius turned Augustine not to philosophical theism but to Manichean materialism. Faced with the moral and epistemological contradictions in this position, and confronted with the plurality of competing claims to truth about God and its relation to the soul, Augustine for a time fell into skepticism. The experience of ‘diversity’ within a political community is not unique to modern societies. And the sheer plurality of opinions about what is important to include within an education tells us nothing about which is correct. Against his critics, Augustine’s analysis of the value of knowledge in its relation to liberal education can accommodate for our experience of diversity. He will concede to Nussbaum and the pluralist that there exists a multiplicity of legitimate goods for humans to pursue. But he adds that these can and should be related to the highest good that human beings naturally seek, which is happiness in God.

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In itself this conclusion does not lead us very far. It merely turns us back to the original site of disagreement that marked off ancient Christian and pagan answers to a common question: What is human happiness? Again, ours is not the only time which has been ‘inescapably plural’: the ancient world too knew multiple visions of the human good. There were alternate accounts of liberal education to Augustine’s, the most famous being Martianus Capella’s De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, a roughly contemporary apology for the seven liberal arts. Pagan in form, it was intended as the basis for a universal education conceived apart from Christian revelation. Capella’s allegory was part of a broad and aggressive reassertion of pagan thought and religion throughout the Roman Empire at this time whose mounting energies reached a high pitch in the re-paganizing reforms of Emperor Julian the Apostate (A.D. 331–363) and in Symmachus’ bid to restore the Altar of Victory to the Senate House (A.D. 384). 15 In the midst of the pluralism of our own day, and drawing upon Augustine’s articulation of the problem and its solution, we may reaffirm the central claim of his moral philosophy: man is made for happiness in God. The second theme comes out of Augustine’s Contra Academicos. Against the ancient skeptics Augustine argued that we know many things with certainty: we know that a whole is greater than its parts, that the universe is either one or many and that we know what we perceive objects to be. Then as now, the real enemy to learning is not the darkness of ignorance but indifference. St. Thomas Aquinas remarks in his Treatise on Grace that sin damaged human psychology not primarily in its capacity to know the good but in its capacity to desire the good (cf. Summa Theologiae I–II q.109 a.2). Thomas’ insight here is thoroughly Augustinian. In Augustine’s refutation of the Skeptics, it is not so much skepticism that Augustine feared in the young as the apathy that follows from it. Weakening the will’s motive to search for truth, skepticism entails both indifference and anarchy: two opposing passions set off by a common spiritual malady. Augustine’s skeptics are similar but not identical to our own (Popkin, 1991). Moderns tend to adopt, less consistently, an implied dualism in the order of ontology to accommodate for the success of natural philosophy. The wedge driven between science and wisdom in the eighteenth-century split apart that once happy marriage between Facts

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and Values that left poets and philosophers ever since languishing for the enchanted world they once knew. Theologians too have suffered. Unable to overcome Kant’s critique of knowledge, by the middle of the twentieth-century skepticism had cut a wide swath over the field of Roman Catholic moral theology. One of John Paul II’s notable replies was the encyclical Veritatis Splendor where in a key passage he wrote: the root of these presuppositions [that demand the Church revise her fundamental moral teaching] is the more or less obvious influence of currents of thought which end by detaching human freedom from its essential and constitutive relationship to truth. (§4) John Paul warned that as our democratic civilization descends further into moral relativism it hastens its own collapse into tyranny. Moral inquiry, like every inquiry, is a search for the truth; it is only the shameless abandonment of hope that could lead one to conclude that truth can never be found – to admit this would simply be to give up the search. In short, on an Augustinian account, systematic doubt is primarily a defect of the will, only secondarily is it an error of the intellect. If at Cassiciacum Augustine was successful in defeating skepticism what did he think the liberal arts will help students to find? Not only that truth can be discovered but also that it is valuable. This proposition, which stands behind every sane intellectual pursuit, has been the object of direct attack within continental philosophy for over a century now. Announcing the theme of all subsequently Postmodern philosophy Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed not only that God was dead but also that we were better off not knowing it. Through his parable of the madman, Nietzsche introduced into the history of Modern philosophy the novel claim that truth is antagonistic to human flourishing.16 Nietzsche’s view, of course, is not entirely novel. The reduction of truth to power in antiquity was expressed by some of the sophists and has been enacted by tyrants great and small. What is novel in our time is that philosophers themselves have become the spokespersons for the triumph of the irrational. In any case, the possibility of Nietzsche’s view always has to be faced. If there is no truth to discover than happiness will, inevitably, be identified with some other aspect of the soul besides reason. If disagreements cannot be settled by some mode of rationality,

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what remains is will or appetite, politics or the market. Augustine was aware of this challenge. As we observed in his treatment of ancient skepticism he is keenly aware of the consequence that the loss of faith in reason has for law and morality. His early educational work is a refutation of that claim. On philosophical grounds and by the authority of revelation man can be sure that the truth will set us free – to know and serve the living God. Yet, however valuable is the defense of our capacity for truth, we do well to avoid an error which Augustine in his early dialogues nearly fell into himself, which is of expecting from the arts too much. This brings us to the third theme I wish to highlight, Christian pedagogy. Formal education is no substitute for religion.17 At the opening of the De beata vita Augustine called the liberal arts the portam ad philosophiam. The liberal arts are the entry to philosophy, nothing more nothing less. They neither substitute for philosophy nor are they unrelated to it. What needs to be recovered, because it has been most neglected, is the Augustinian conception of the value of education. To use a phrase from the De doctrina Christiana, the disciplines are ‘keys.’ They do not contain, they unlock. Through the order of the disciplines set out in book 2 of his early dialogue, De ordine, Augustine showed how the mind could be trained to move through the set of inductions proper to each discipline, linguistic, empirical, then mathematical reasoning. This is the sequence of study most conducive to the student’s early intellectual progress along the way to the science of God. For, in his view, it is to the science of God that everything worthwhile leads. Hence, although there are economically and politically prudential reasons for promoting the study of the liberal arts, in Augustine’s view the value of education derives ultimately from its capacity to promote human happiness in God.

Conclusion It will be obvious that this Augustinian vision of the value of liberal education is incompatible with the presently dominant orientation in most universities. On the most credible secular view, literature, the arts,

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and the history of philosophy are studied primarily in relation to their value as works of man: as the best examples of human attempts to answer permanent questions.18 While there is indeed much to recommend study of the great works of literature and art, it is clear that some conception of wisdom is required to discriminate between the many records of human achievement available.19 It seems to me that the present dominance of the elective system is one symptom of our unwillingness to make prescriptive judgments about the value of such works. We are reluctant to speak about which books or in what order they should be presented to the student; we are reluctant to recommend a path along which the student’s search for wisdom may proceed. Why is this? As it seems to me, one reason is that we lack the moral confidence that there will be something worthwhile to find on the other side of 4 years of undergraduate education. What other treasures, besides money and prestige, are we willing to promise our university grads? Specifically within the humanities, as a matter of academic policy, institutions often assume that greater diversity of course selection and methodologies promote the discovery of truth. But that policy is dubious. It too often assumes that the right program of study and the correct methodology in a given discipline are a matter for endless debate. By failing to articulate the right ordering of subjects, universities burden students with a question that they themselves refuse to answer. The present ordering of knowledge encourages scholars to hide within the locked doors of their specialization with the hope that the question of the ordering of knowledge need never be asked. And it usually is not asked. Let me draw these reflections to a close. Although the university currently reflects a plurality of conflicting notions about the value of higher education, we do continue to look to it as though it were capable of expressing, so I want to suggest, something of what is most noble in the tradition of liberal justice. But in our education as in our politics late modern liberalism has become an enigma to itself: it can no longer articulate a coherent justification for the principles it stirs us to defend. Having turned away from its intellectual and moral foundations in Christian theism it no longer knows how or for what reason it values the institutions that it does. And this is especially true of the university. In Augustine’s early educational thought, however, I think we can

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find a way to make understandable John Paul II’s call to Catholic universities:20 to unite existentially by intellectual effort two orders of reality that too frequently tend to be placed in opposition as though they were inimical: the search for truth and the certainty of already knowing the fount of truth. (§1) The search for truth and the certainty of knowing its source – these are the twin conditions which Augustine’s educational thought brings together. Echoing the language of the Confessions, the Catechism of the Catholic Church opens: ‘The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created for God and by God’ (CCC, §27). Genuine liberal education, which seeks to direct and cultivate the full exercise of man’s freedom, is possible only when it is ordered according to the knowledge of, among other things, the truth that man is created for God and by God. Education begins in wonder. It begins in wonder at the beauty of creation as much as in the longing of our own hearts for completion. On Augustine’s account, education begins in wonder and ends in wisdom. And, in one form of Augustinianism at least, wisdom about man is precisely that competency Christ entrusted to his Church. As Pope Paul VI said in an address before the General Assembly of the United Nations, the Church is an ‘expert in humanity.’21 Acknowledging the Church’s mission in the economy of salvation, Christian liberal education takes as its beginning the supposition that divinely revealed truth properly orders and illumines the study of all other disciplines.

Notes

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Few details of Hugh’s life are known; their outline and the sources for our knowledge of these are discussed in Paul Rorem (2009, pp. 9–11). For further references see Harkens (2006, p. 220). ‘Hugh’s writings are drenched in Augustine. He lived in a community that followed Augustine’s rule. He read, reread, and copied the texts of his master. Reading and writing were for him two almost indistinguishable sides of the same stadium. How thoroughly Hugh’s texts are compilations, interpretations, and rewordings of Augustine can best be seen in his work on the sacraments, which remained a torso. His final illness and death prevented him from finishing its last chapters; only an early draft is extant. And this draft consists mostly of excerpts from Augustine which he had not yet fully digested into his own diction and style.’ See Ivan Illich (1993) The Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon, pp. 9–10. On the subtle interactions between the two traditions of educational theory see Marrou (1958, 127–36). Nonetheless, in terms of political effect, unquestionably Isocrates and the rhetorical ideal prevailed: ‘His success on this level was even greater than Plato’s: like the Academy, only even more so, his school was a centre for the formation of men of politics’ (p. 128). As at De re publica 1.17.28; Harkins (2006, p. 230). As for example, in his epistle 88, where he is critical of those who use the liberal arts for other than the pursuit of wisdom. On the twelfth century revival of Seneca’s thought see L.D. Reynolds (1965, pp. 112–24). Earlier treatments can be found in Origen (A.D. 185–232) Philocalia 12.1–2 and in St. Basil of Caesarea’s (A.D. 329–379) letter Ad Adulscentes. See further O’Connell (1968, pp. 191–93). This, at least, was Augustine’s early ambition. In Porphyrium dialogi 1.3; and see Taylor (1991, p. 181, n21). Cf. Institutiones 2.3.5; and see Taylor (1991, p. 183, n27). By this Harkens (2006, p. 244) means that, for Augustine, the liberal arts can help to restore that which was lost in the fall: ‘What was lost with the Original Sin of Adam and Eve, according to the Victorine master, was the primal order of the human soul, the image of God in which human kind

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was first created . . . The mechanical [arts] militate against bodily mortality, the practical teach him how to embody virtue, and the theoretical enable him to begin to know both himself and his God.’ See Augustine’s use of the traditional division at c. Acad. 3.10.23–3.13.29, and Cicero’s use of the same at Academia 2.41.127–28. In his Appendix to the Didascalicon, he clarifies that men suffer the consequences of three evils in this life: ignorance, vice, and weakness. To these three are given the remedies of wisdom, virtue, and a need (necessitas), which he defines as ‘something without which we cannot live, but [with which, that is, when supplied] we would live more happily’ (Did. Appendix A). For recent commentary on the theological significance of Bacon’s project see Benedict XVI (2007) Spes Salvi (Saved in Hope). Whether or not Hugh can be justified on theological grounds for attempting to integrate the mechanical arts with the liberal studies, or whether he is simply washing over the difference between servile and free disciplines enumerated already by Cicero is not our concern for the moment. For a good modern study on the distinction between free and servile disciplines see J. Pieper (1998) Leisure: The Basis of Culture. This is the conclusion of Harkins (2006, pp. 244–46), upon which I have drawn. This, of course, does not mean that Aquinas relied slavishly upon Augustine. As the great Dominican scholar M.D. Chenu has observed, in the 12 opening questions of the Summa Theologiae ‘Saint Thomas refers to other authors 160 times: Aristotle 55 times, Augustine 44, Dionysius 25, the Latin Fathers 23, the Greek Fathers 4, and secular authors 9.’ (cited in Dauphinais, 2007, xii). Nor did Aquinas hesitate to draw different conclusions than Augustine (as we shall see below). What it does mean is that Aquinas read Augustine reverently, that is, when he disagrees with Augustine he rarely makes this explicit. More commonly, where he feels this is necessary, Aquinas tries to show how Augustine’s views can be adapted so as to contribute to some fuller explication of a particular doctrine. ‘dilectio praeeminet cognitioni in movendo, sed cognitio praevia est dilectioni in attingendo, non enim diligitur nisi cognitum, ut dicit Augustinus in X de Trin’ (Summa Theologiae I–II 3.4 resp). On the last two paragraphs, my thanks to Jordan Olver for his helping me to understand better Aquinas’ theory of cognition. On this see further Gilson’s account (2002, 247–55). The locus classicus of Aristotle’s discussion is in his De anima 3.5. Treatment of Aristotle’s hylomorphism (the composite union of body and soul) and abstraction (the process of rendering universal forms from changing matter) can be found in Owens (1992, pp. 139–65).

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As Gilson comments (2002, p. 251), ‘These principles are the first source and the guarantee of all our certain knowledge. It is from them that we set out to discover the truth, and in the end reasoning always refers back to them in order to verify its conclusions. On the other hand, our ability to form them on contact with the sensible world reflects in all human souls that divine truth in which they participate. Thus we can say in this sense, but only in this sense, that inasmuch as the soul knows all things by the first principles of knowledge it sees everything in the divine truth or in the eternal essences of things.’ 21 To this end we see these two clarifications: First, the teacher acts by presenting signs to the student. ‘It should be said that intelligible forms are inscribed in the learner and through them the knowledge acquired through teaching is constituted, immediately by the agent intellect, but mediately by him who teaches. For the teacher proposes signs of intelligible things from which the agent intellect receives intelligible intentions and inscribes them in the possible intellect’ (Quaest. disp. de ver. q.11, ad 11). It is from these impressions that knowledge is brought forth from potency to act: ‘However, although through a created power the seminal reasons are not actualized as if they were infused by some created power, nonetheless what is in them originally and virtually can be brought to actuality by the act of a created power’ (emphasis mine) (ad 5; and see ad 6). Second, on the question of where in the intellect the semina scientiarum exist, Aquinas specifies that it is in the active intellect; in other words, this is where divine illumination occurs. For, if the seeds of science were absent from the active intellect, Aquinas explains, inventio would be impossible; we could not move from passive to active knowledge except for the aid of an instructor (Quaest. disp. de ver. q.11, resp.) – which would be an absurd conclusion, since it would only push our problem onto the teacher: ‘how did he learn?’, and so on ad infinitum. 22 ‘The one teaching, who explicitly knows the whole science can lead us to science more expeditiously than anyone can be brought to it on his own because he foreknows the principles of the science in some generality’ (Quaest. disp. de ver. q.12, ad 4). 23 In this way he writes: ‘The first cause out of the eminence of his goodness (ex eminentia bonitatis suae) not only makes things to be but also to be causes’ (Quaest. disp. de ver. q.11, resp.) 24 For background to Aquinas’ theory of knowledge see, for instance, E. Gilson (2002) Thomism: The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, pp. 241–73; and for a helpful essay on the relation between Aquinas and Augustine on learning see Donald A. Gallagher (1961, pp. 46–66). 25 See Raby (1988, pp. 34–36). 26 See his Parallels in volume 23 of the Collected Works of Erasmus (1978), Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 183 and 181.

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See Craig Thompson’s introduction (1978) to volume 23 of the Collected Works of Erasmus, xxxiv. Arguably the single most decisive act that contributed to the revival of Thomistic thought was the founding of the Society of Jesus by Ignatius of Loyola in 1540. In the fourth part of Ignatius’ Constitution of the Society he sets out the Ratio Studiorum, the method of study to be adopted in Jesuit colleges, which places St. Thomas’ Summa Theologiae at the centre of the curriculum, displacing Peter Lombard’s Sentence Commentary. The pattern of Thomistic education that St. Ignatius established spread throughout Europe such that by 1710 some 612 Jesuit universities and colleges followed the Ratio Studiorum. See Robert E. Gross (1998, pp. 65–90, esp. 71–73), ‘The first meeting of Catholic Scholasticism with d Ge lugs pa Scholasticism’ in Scholasticism: Cross Cultural and Comparative Perspectives. On Scotus’ position as an intermediary between Thomas and Ockham one historian observes: ‘It would seem, then, that Scotus occupies a midway, if one may so put it, between St. Thomas and Ockham. He agrees with the former that there are moral principles which are unalterable and he does not teach that the entire moral law depends on the arbitrary decision of God’s will. On the other hand he attributed a much greater degree of prominence to the divine will in the determination of the moral order than St. Thomas had done, and he appears to have held that obligation, at least in regard to certain commandments, depends on that will as distinct from the divine intellect’ in Copleston (1950, p. 550). For the Medieval background to these theories in William of Ockham and his followers see for instance Copleston (1953), on voluntarism pp. 106–10, on nominalism pp. 122–27, and on the impact of Ockham’s ideas on later Medieval thinkers pp. 148–52. Proposition nos. 50 (cited above) is one among several like statements, such as nos. 44: ‘Indeed no one can become a theologian unless he becomes one without Aristotle’ in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings (2005, pp. 36–37). On the intellectual context inherited by Erasmus and the reformers, one historian has aptly noted: ‘Behind the great emphasis in late medieval theology on divine transcendance, on the arbitrary nature of the law and on the inability of man to fathom the purposes of the divinity except by recourse to the extrinsic norms of revelation, looms the Pelagian principle of the late fifteenth-century schoolman.’ See A.H.T. Levi’s introduction (1988) to the Penguin edition of The Praise of Folly, p. 20. This is not to be confused with simple Stoicism. Erasmus’ interest in moral philosophy is rooted in his larger understanding of the philosophia Christi. The life of the intellect must never be severed from the imitation of Christ, which for us involves ascetic discipline. As he writes in his Ratio

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verae theologiae (1518): ‘While it is very easy to tell, it is quite difficult to lift our mind to this philosophy, which is not Platonic, nor Stoic, nor Peripatetic, but truly Divine. We should do so in a way not only purified from all stains of vice, but also serene and quieted from every storm of passion. Thus the image of the eternal Truth may be reflected in us more clearly than in a placid stream or a smooth and resplendent mirror.’ On Erasmus’ place within the ascetic tradition see A. Reese (1991) Erasmus and the Ascetic Tradition, especially at p. 163ff from which this translation is taken. These two letters are pointed out by Thompson in his introduction at xxiii and xxviii. Taken from the translation printed in A.H.T. Levi’s edition (1988, pp. 239–40). ‘For things are learnt only by the sounds we attach to them, a person who is not skilled in the force of language is, of necessity, shortsighted, deluded, and unbalanced in his judgment of things as well’ (De Ratione Studii, 666). For background details on the composition of the work and the reason for the timing of its 1520 (in answer to his detractors, particularly at the University of Louvain) see the introduction to the Collected Works of Erasmus translation by Margaret Phillips pp. 1–15, especially at p. 11. Antibarbari 42–45; note that these three classes have been identified in various ways, and I have benefited from Istvan Bejczy’s terminology as set out in his (1996) ‘Overcoming the Middle-Ages: Historical Reasoning in Erasmus’ Antibarbarian Writings’ in Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook, pp. 34–53 at p. 38. In 1520 these are, most immediately, the theologians at Louvain. See note above. Johannes Gratianus: the twelfth century compiler of the Decretum and founder of the science of canon law. In Luther’s first attempt to contact Erasmus, through Georg Spalatin in 1516, Luther advices Erasmus to pay particular attention to the antiPelagian works (ep. 501 Spalatin to Erasmus), pointed out by Visser at p. 74. Quoted in Arnoud Visser (2008, p. 73). On this see Nikolaus Staubach (1997, pp. 455–56). R.D. Sider (1999, pp. 312–14). The most extensive study of Erasmus’ dependence upon the De doctrina Christiana is found in Béné (1969). Augustine also has a tripartite division of history: humanity’s history prior to the law, under the law, and after the law (cf. c. Faust. 12.14). See further R.A. Markus (1999, p. 433) commenting on Augustine’s unanimity with the patristic tradition: ‘The whole of human history was articulated in terms of decisive landmarks within the history of salvation.’

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See Descartes’ Meditations book 2 and Augustine’s sol. 2.1 and trin. 10.10.13. Where some have seen Descartes as the fulfillment of Augustine’s essentialism (over and against Thomistic existentialism), others have, I believe more accurately, recognized the radical differences that separate the two philosophers. On this difference Hanby has written (2003, p. 135): ‘Encapsulated in this contrast are two antithetical economies, two vastly different understandings of the self, the God to whom it is ordered, and the role of the world in fulfilling that order . . . In the one, voluntas is the site of our erotic participation in an anterior gift, and it is at once self-moved and moved by the beauty of that gift. Here will, whether human or divine, is constituted in a relationship of love for the beloved, and its freedom is established in dispossession. In the other, will names an inviolable power, and freedom consists in demonstrating this inviolability, through the double negation both of itself and of created beauty.’ 48 One of these, known as the de auxiliis (‘concerning aids’) debate, was carried on between the Jesuits and the Dominicans over the correct balance between grace and the free human response to God’s mercy. This disagreement, too, was only settled after a papal intervention when Pope Paul V in 1607 decreed that both the Jesuit and Dominican formulations of the question did justice to the truth of revelation but that neither was free to call the other heretical. 49 Aquinas the Augustinian, edited by M. Dauphinais, M. Levering and B. David (2007), as a collection of essays on this theme, is the result of a conference of international theologians and philosophers who had gathered in 2005 at Ave Maria University, Florida. 50 From Dewey on the lack of engagement in the study of the history of educational philosophy has remained a marked feature among major educationalist scholars of the previous 30 years (such as R.S. Peters, P.H. Hirst, and John White). For illustrations of this see James R. Muir (2005, pp. 169–71). 51 As J.R. Muir has argued (1996, p. 12): ‘Dewey’s legacy to the philosophy of education within educational studies is the perpetuation of the narrow Victorian focus on schooling, combined with both a loss of learning in the history of educational thought and isolation from the contemporary educational scholarship of classicists and others. It is only in this sense that educational philosophy originated with John Dewey.’

Chapter 7 1

John Henry Newman (1923), The Idea of the University, Discourses 7.10, 5.9, and Preface.

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One may be tempted to say that Newman’s idea never was the leading one. If we take John of Salisbury’s description of Bernard of Chartres’ teaching aims and methods as illustrative (cf. Metalogicon 1.24), then we should, perhaps, look to Chartres and twelfth century Cathedral Schools more than to the universities if we are wishing to discover a period in medieval history when institutions of higher education consistently sought to unite both the moral and intellectual aims of education that Newman celebrates; cf. R.W. Southern (1970, pp. 61–85) and Richard C. Dales (1992, pp. 155–68). The 60 or so universities of the Medieval West varied widely in the composition of their curricula, their social functions, and their intellectual orientations. One need only contrast the curricular aims of thirteenth century Paris with the curriculum of the University of Bologna, the one, more speculatively oriented, focusing on theology, the other turned to the affairs of commerce and politics through law; cf. Jacques Verger (1992, pp. 47–52). Abraham Flexner (1930) Universities: American, English, German. Flexner’s work is an early sociological study treating the university as an institution shaped by and capable of acting upon society. Canadian political philosopher George Grant argued, for instance, that the late modern ‘multiversity’ is the institutional outcome of the theoretical relationship established between faith and modern science during the early modern period: ‘Reason as project, (i.e. reason as thrown forth) is the summoning of something before us and the putting of questions to it, so that it is forced to give its reasons for being the way it is as an object. Our paradigm is that we have knowledge when we represent anything to ourselves as object, and question it, so that it will give us its reasons . . . . The limitations of the human mind in synthesizing facts necessitates the growing division of research into differing departments and further subdivisions. This paradigm of knowledge makes it therefore appropriate to speak of the multiversity.’ See (1986, pp. 36–37) ‘Faith and the Multiversity’ in Grant’s collection Technology and Justice. Clark Kerr (2001, p. 14) coined the neologism ‘multiversity’ in his The Uses of the University, a series of essays written between 1963–2001 (based on his Godkin Lectures delivered at Harvard University) 5th edn. See Josef Pieper (1998, pp. 44–79) Leisure: the Basis of Culture [1948] and Christopher Derrick (2001) Escape from Scepticism: Liberal Education as if Truth Mattered. This does not mean the arts were equally studied at every university. Thirteenth century Oxford, for instance, placed more emphasis on the quadrivium, excelling in mathematics and optics, than did the University of Paris; cf. Gordon Leff (1975, pp. 139–42). As Newman (1923, p. xviii) explains in his Preface: ‘In some [a liberal arts education] will have developed habits of business, power of influencing

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others, and sagacity. In others it will elicit the talent of philosophical speculation, and lead the mind forward to eminence in this or that intellectual department. In all [liberal education] will be a faculty of entering with comparative ease into any subject of thought, and of taking up with aptitude any science or profession.’ For a defense of this view see Oliver O’Donovan (1996) Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology, especially pp. 243–52 and Aidan Nichols O.P. (1999), Christendom Awake: On Re-Energising the Church in Culture, pp. 71–89. Dewey (1966 [1916]) Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. R.S. Peters (1970 [1966]) Ethics and Education, chapter 11, ‘Democracy and Education’ and especially, p. 313. I understand the promotion of cultural pluralism to be synonymous with the promotion of multiculturalism, which Brian Barry (2002, p. 230) defined aptly as ‘cultural relativism and accommodation of culturally distinctive groups.’ Martha Nussbaum (1997). In chapter 8 Nussbaum treats these two ‘Religious Universities’ under the headings ‘The Study of non-Western Cultures,’ ‘Ethnic and Racial Minorities,’ ‘Women’s Studies,’ and ‘Homosexuality,’ to determine how successfully they promote genuine liberal education as she understands it. See John Haldane (2004, pp. 59–74) Faithful Reason: Essays Catholic and Philosophical and Avery Dulles, S.J. (1992, pp. 105–18) The Craft of Theology: From Symbol to System for good discussions of the nature and extent of academic freedom in relation to ecclesial authorities. In his introduction to Martianus’ work William Harris Stahl (1971, p. 5) notes: ‘Martianus was himself such a gentleman, living in an age when the victory of Christianity over paganism was not yet complete. Longstanding rivalries between Christians and pagans, and the more recent successes of Christianity, had intensified the desire of pagans to undertake, as a social responsibility, the preservation of classical culture.’ For a summary of the philosophical differences between Neoplatonism and Christianity in the fourth century see M. Edwards (2006) final chapter in Culture and Philosophy in the Age of Plotinus. Cf. The Gay Science, no. 125, Beyond Good and Evil, 1.1, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. This is a mistake that I attribute to Alan Bloom (1987) – even though much of what he argued for in The Closing of the American Mind remains compatible with Augustine’s educational thought. This view was made popular by Matthew Arnold, see especially his lecture ‘Literature and Science’ (1882).

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This idea is developed in Alasdair MacIntyre’s chapter (1990) ‘Reconstituting University as an Institution and the Lecture as a Genre’ in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition, pp. 228–30. 20 On Catholic Universities [Ex Corde Ecclesiae] (1990). Although many Catholic universities have begun to initiate the institutional renewal called for in Ex Corde Ecclesiae, David Ruel Foster (2003, pp. 109–12) has perceptively argued that it is actually Fides et Ratio which has and will continue to have the most dramatic influence upon the reform of Catholic higher education. Where the first is directed toward administrators the second, because of its challenge to the philosophical skepticism that was presupposed in many of the institutional decisions taken by Catholic institutions during the 1960s, is directed toward faculty. 21 Given on 4 October 1965 and quoted by John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor, §4.

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English translations of Augustine’s texts commonly cited Against the Academicians and The Teacher. Translation and Introduction by Peter King. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1995. Against the Epistle of Manichaeus Called Fundamental. Nicene Post Nicene Fathers (hereafter NPNF), 4, first series. Ed. P. Schaff. Peabody, MS: Hendrickson Publishers, 1995. Against Two Letters of the Pelagians. NPNF 5, first series. Peabody, MS: Hendrickson Publishers, 1995. City of God. Translation by Bettingson. London: Penguin, 2003. City of God. Translation by Sanford and Green et. al. Loeb Classical Library (hereafter LCL). London: William Heinemann, 1965. Confessions. Translation by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. De doctrina Christiana. Translation by R.P.H. Green, Oxford Early Christian Texts.Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love. Translation and Notes by Bruce Harbert, Introduction by Boniface Ramsey, O.P. New York: New City Press, 1999. Instructing Beginners in the Faith. Translated with Introduction and Notes by Raymond Canning. New York: New City Press, 2006. La Première Catéchèse: De catechizandis rudis. Translation with commentary by Goulven Madec (1991), in Bibliothèque Augustinienne: Oeuvres de Saint Augustin 11/1. Paris: Études Augustiniennes. On Divine Providence and the Problem of Evil. Translation by R. Russell. The Fathers of the Church (hereafter FC), vol. 1. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press 1948. St Augustine Against the Academics, Ancient Christian Writers, vol. 12. Translation with Notes by John J. O’Meara. Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1951. Sermons III/10 (341–400). Translation and Notes by Edmund Hill, O.P. in The Works of Saint Augustine. New York: New City Press, 1995. Soliloquies and Immortality of the Soul. Edited and translated by G. Watson. Warminster, England: Aris and Phillips, 1990. Tractates on the Gospel of John. Translation by J. W. Rettig. FC 78. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1998.

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Classical, patristic, and medieval works Aquinas. The Divisions and Methods of the Sciences. Translated and edited by A. Maurer. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1986. Aquinas. Quaestiones Disputatae. Translated by R. McInerny. London: Penguin, 1998. Aquinas. Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate (Disputed Questions on Truth), in Thomas Aquinas: Selected Writings. Translated by R. McInerny. London: Penguin, 1998. Aquinas. Summa Theologiae in A Summa of the Summa. Edited by P. Kreeft. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1990. Aristotle. Metaphysics. Translated by R. Hope. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1960. Aristotle. Nichomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin, 2nd edn. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1999. Basil. The Letters of Saint Basil. Translation and Introduction by Deferrari and McGuire. Loeb Classical Library (hereafter LCL), 270. London: William Heinemann, 1912. Capella, Martianus. Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, vol. 1. Translation with Introduction by William Harris Stahl. New York: Columbia University Press, 1971. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd edition, Vaticana: Liberia Editrice Vaticana, 1997. Colleran, Joseph is the translator and editor with notes of St. Augustine: The Greatness of the Soul and The Teacher. Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1950. Cyprian. On the Unity of the Church. Trans. E. Wallis. Ante-Nicene Fathers of the Church, vol. 5. ed. P. Schaff. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994. Erasmus. De Ratio Studii in Collected Works of Erasmus 24. Edited by C.R. Thompson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1978. Erasmus. Parallels in vol. 23 of the Collected Works of Erasmus. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978. Erasmus. The Praise of Folly. Translated by B. Radice, Introduction by A.H.T. Levi. London: Penguin, 1988. Herodotus. The Histories. Translated by A.D. Godley. LCL, 117. Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press, 1996. Hugh of St. Victor. The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor: a Medieval Guide to the Arts. Translation, Introduction and Notes by Jerome Taylor. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Isocrates. On the Peace. Areopagiticus. Against the Sophists. Antidosis. Panathenaicus. Translated by George Norlin. LCL, 209. Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press, 1929.

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Jerome. On Illustrious Men. Translated by Thomas P. Halton. FC, 100. Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America, 1999. Jerome. Select Letters. Translated by F.A. Wright. LCL, 262. Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press, 1933. Luther, Martin. Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, 2nd edn. Edited by Timothy F. Lull. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 2005. Marcobius. Macrobius: The Saturnalia. Translated with Introduction and Notes by Percival Vaughan Davies. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. Origen. The Philocalia of Origen. Revised text, edited with Introduction by J.A. Robinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1893. Plato. Meno. Translated by G.M.A. Grube in Plato: Complete Works. Edited by J.M. Cooper. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1997. Plato. The Republic. Translated by Allan Bloom, 2nd edn. New York: Basic Books, 1991. Plotinus. Enneads and Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus. Translated by A.H. Armstrong. LCL, 440. Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press, 1989. Porphyry. Enneads and Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus. Translated by A.H. Armstrong. LCL, 440. Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press, 1989. Quintilian, Marcus Fabius. Quintilian on Education: A Translation of Selected Passages from the Institutio Oratoria with an Introductory Essay. Translated by William M. Smail. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938. Seneca. Epistles 66–92. Translated by M. Gummere. LCL, 76. Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press, 1920. Sextus Empiricus. Against the Professors. Translated by R.G. Bury. LCL, 382. Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press, 1949. Vitruvius. De Architectura. Translated with commentary and illustrations by Thomas Noble Howe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

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Hadot, Pierre (1995), Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to. Foucault. Translated by Michael Chase with an Introduction by Arnold I. Davidson. Oxford: Blackwell. Hagendahl, Harold (1967), Augustine and the Latin Classics, 2 vols. Göteborg: Acta. Universitatis Gothoburgensis. Haldane, John (2004), Faithful Reason: Essays Catholic and Philosophical. London: Routeledge. Hanby, M. (2003), Augustine and Modernity. London: Routledge. Harl, Marguerite (1983), Origène Philocalie 1–20 Sur Les Écritures, Sources chrétiennes 302. Paris: Études Augustiniennes. Harmless, William (1995), Augustine and the Catechumenate, Collegeville, MN: The. Liturgical Press. Harkins, F.T. (2006), ‘Secundus Augustinus: Hugh of St. Victor on the Liberal Arts’. Augustinian Studies 37.2, 219–46. Harris, William V. (1989), Ancient Literacy. London: Harvard University Press. Harrison, Carol (2000), Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harrison, Carol (2006), Rethinking Augustine’s Early Theology: an Argument for Continuity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harrison, Simon (2006), Augustine’s Way into the Will: The Theological and Philosophical Significance of De Libero Arbitrio. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harrison S.J. (2000), Apuleius: A Latin Sophist. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hauerwas, Stanley (2007), The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God. London: Blackwell Publishers. Heine, Ronald H. (2004), ‘The Beginnings of Latin Christian Literature’, in L. Ayers, F. Young, and A. Louth (eds.), Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 131–41. Heßbrüggen-Walter, Stefan (2005), ‘Augustine’s Critique of Dialectic’, in Karla Pollmann and Mark Vessey (eds.), Augustine and the Disciplines. Oxford: OUP, 184–205. Holt, Laura (1998), ‘Wisdom’s Teacher: Augustine the Teacher at Cassiciacum’. Augustinian Studies 29.2, 47–61. Howard, Thomas Albert (2006), Protestantism and the Rise of the Modern German University, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Howie, Gordon (1969), Educational Theory and Practice in St. Augustine. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hübner, W. (1986), ‘Disciplina’, in C. Mayer (ed.), Augustinus-Lexikon, vol. 2. Basel: Schwabe & Co., 457–63. Hughes, Kevin L. (2000), ‘ “The Arts Reputed Liberal”: Augustine on the Perils of Liberal Education’, in Kim Paffenroth and Kevin L. Hughes (eds.),

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Index

à Kempis, Thomas 129 Abelard, Peter 80, 115, 155 Academicians 62 Adler, Mortimer 141 Ambrose, St. 5, 6, 10, 11, 136 Anselm, St. 17 Aquinas, St. Thomas 120–30 De Magistro 114, 124–7 debt to St. Augustine 120–2 on the effects of sin 160 use of Aristotle 122–4 Aristotle 14, 119 on logic and science 16–17, 71 Luther’s view of 130 Nichomachean Ethics 32–3, 116 On Rhetoric (Augustine’s use of ) 56–7 theory of knowledge (abstraction) 122–4, 127 art 127–8 Augustine, St. (principal works cited) Against the Academicians (Contra Academicos) 63, 160 City of God (De civitate Dei) order of love 39 progress and history 84–6, 89 theory of politics in Book XIX 89–90, 95 Confessions (Confessiones) 13, 20, 67, 81 Augustine’s conversion 6–11 habit (consuetudo) and memory 92–3 on the liberal arts 73–5 skepticism and religious knowledge 37, 63 On Christian Doctrine (De doctrina Christiana) Augustine’s views of rhetoric 46–8, 55–7 Erasmus’s use of 133–7 Hugh of St. Victor’s relation to 118–20

on Biblical culture 87 on the liberal arts 75–81, 162 on the limits of language in theology 64–5 ‘use’ versus ‘enjoyment’ (uti and frui) 33 On the Freedom of the Will (De libero arbitrio) 13, 64, 91–2 On the Greatness of the Soul (De animae quantitae) 71, 80 On the Happy Life (De beata vita) 43, 159, 162 On the Morals of the Catholic Church (De moribus ecclesiae catholicae) 41–2 On the Usefulness of Believing (De utilitate credendi) 5, 88 On True Religion (De vera religione) 14, 17, 62, 88 Instructing Beginners in Faith (De catechizandis rudibus) cheerfulness (hilaritas) 59–61 disposition of the teacher 58–61 on the method of teaching 52–4 stages of salvation history 84–6 Letters (epistulae) 12, 93 On Music (De musica) 116, 120 On Order (De ordine) 71, 73, 80, 116, 117, 120, 162 Reconsiderations (Retractiones) 11, 12, 13, 71, 73, 80 Soliloquies (Soliloquia) 117 On the Teacher (De magistro) 48, 49, 50, 127 On the Trinity (De trinitate) 64, 122 authority 41, 58, 63, 80, 118, 128, 162 of Augustine 87, 132–4, 137 Ayer, A.J. 15

Index

Bacon, Francis 71, 119 Basil, St. 75, 79 beauty 90, 91, 130 Bellarmine, Robert 129 Bible (Scripture) 5, 55, 136 allegorical interpretation of 6, 16, 85 as authority 11, 15, 18, 20, 41–2, 51, 55, 75–6, 79, 81, 92, 131–2 and culture 87, 30 use of in Hugh of St. Victor 115, 118–20 Boethius 117 Bonaventure, St. 126, 129 Bossuet 138 Brown, Peter 21 Capella, Martianus 4, 160 Cassiciacum (dialogues) 6, 70–3, 76, 81 Cassidorus 115, 117 Catechism of the Catholic Church 164 Chadwick, Henry 37 Chesterton, G.K. 31 Church, the 62, 77, 161, 164 as mediator of salvation 11 its relation to philosophy 5, 13, 18, 23, 79, 128, 132, 136, 138, 158 in universal history 7, 85, 88–90, 94 Christ, Jesus and the liberal arts 17, 79, 116–17, 164 as exemplary teacher 61, 66 illumination of intellect 51–2, 120, 126–7 incarnation and philosophy of history 84–7, 90, 97 mediation of 10–11 transformation through 131 Christian education 34, 71–3 Abbey School of St. Victor 115 see Schools Augustine’s contribution to 159–64 Christian teacher 55–61 Cicero 4, 55, 56, 116, 119, 128, 136 Hortensius 37, 77, 159 Council of Orange 23 curriculum Augustine on 67–82 ‘diversity’ and curricula 157–8

189

Hugh of St. Victor’s views of 116–20 Cyprian, St. 11 D’Costa, Gavin 149 Descartes, René 137–8 Dewey, John 143–7, 155–6 Donatists 88, 94 doubt see skepticism Duns Scotus 129, 155 Eckhart, Meister 129 education aims, purpose of 31–45, 155 ancient 46, 68, 142 Augustine see Augustine Christian 71–2, 77, 159–64 contemporary historians of 137, 141–7 Erasmus on 127–37 higher 150–3, 156–7, 163 Hugh of St. Victor on 114–20 liberal see liberal arts Rousseau’s view of 140 Thomas Aquinas on 120–7 eloquence 56–8, 116 Erasmus 114, 127–37, 145 evil effects of 19, 91–2, 94 problem of 18, 91 theories of 21, 63 and values 36–7 faith 5, 6, 10, 55 Christian faith vs paganism 77–8 and intellectual freedom 72 philosophy and theology in Erasmus 131–3 and progress 87–90 and reason 14–18, 62–5, 122, 155, 158 separation from reason 69 teaching the 60–1 and values 37–9 Fénelon, François 138 Freud, Sigmund 22 Galileo, Galilei 15–16 Gibbon, Edward 4, 142

190

Index

Gilson, Etienne 129 grace 18–20, 23–4, 80, 93, 138 Hadot, Ilsetraut 142 happiness 66, 95, 138 and education 35–9, 73–5, 82, 121 as universal aspiration 8–9, 31–5, 159–62 and virtue 39–45, 93 Herbert, George 9–10 Herodotus 39–40 Hobbes, Thomas 155 Howie, Gordon 145 Hugh of St. Victor 24, 114–20 Hutchings, Robert 141 illumination 48–52, 66, 113, 143 Aquinas’ use of Augustine’s doctrine 120–7 imagination act of 123–4 Christian 67 Innocent XII, Pope 138 Isidore of Seville 115 Isocrates 58, 70, 116 Jansenism 137–9 Jerome, St. 23, 134–6 John Dewey Society, the 146–7 John Paul II, Pope 157, 158, 161, 164 Julian the Apostate 77, 78, 160 Kant, Immanuel 71, 81, 83, 139, 145, and the modern university 69 critique of metaphysics 14, 155, 161 political liberalism 153 Leo XIII, Pope 140 liberal arts 24, 42 concept of (historical) 68–71, 73–82, 114–20, 136–7, 142, 148–54 modern uses of 156, 160–2 liberal arts (disciplines) arithmetic (mathematics) 16, 70, 71, 73, 152, 162 astronomy 15, 70, 71, 79, 152 dialectic 17, 70, 71, 73, 79, 80, 118, 133

geometry 70, 71, 152 grammar 55, 70, 71, 79, 118, 131, 152 music 70, 71, 73, 79, 140, 152 rhetoric 35, 52, 55–9, 66, 68, 70, 71, 75, 79, 118, 133, 152 trivium and quadrivium 71, 152 logic 17, 79, 118, 119, 152 love above knowledge 122 cardinal virtues as four forms of 39, 42 as motive for teaching 58–61, 66 order of 31, 38–9 perversion of (amans amare) 35–6 ‘pure love’ debate 138 and the ‘two cities’ 89, 97 unites us to God 42–3 Malbanche, Nicolas 138 Mani (Manichees) 5, 6, 18, 41, 63, 91, 159 Markus, R.A. 95–6 Marrou, Henri 76, 87, 142 Marx, Karl (Marxism) 22, 84 materialism (and education) 22 memory 48–9, 92 Meno’s paradox 48–9 Mill, John Stuart 84 monk (monastic) 7, 20, 47, 115 motivation 54, 57, 75 multiversity 148 Newman, John Henry 97, 113, 148 Niebuhr, H. Richard 87 Nietzsche, Friedrich 37, 140, 161 Noddings, Nel 137, 145 nominalism 129 Nussbaum, Martha 144, 156–8, 159 Ockham, William of 129 Origen 6, 68, 75, 79 paideia, classical ideal of 69, 78 Paul VI, Pope 164 Paul, St. 18, 19, 92, 134 Paulus Orosius 136 Peters, R.S. 34, 155 Philo of Alexandria 70

Index

philosophy Augustine and Platonic 11, 62 Augustine’s conception of 13–18, 63 and history 95–7 and the liberal arts 31, 42, 68, 80, 70, 116–19, 162 rise and decline 128–31, 154–6 philosophy of education Augustine’s reception in modern 142–7 Pieper, Josef 150 Plato 74, 83, 115, 116, 118, 123, 125, 136 140 Epistle 62 Meno 48–9 Republic 40, 51, 58, 70, 77, 91 Symposium 90 Platonism (Platonists) 10–11, 16, 19, 63, 77, 93, 119, 133, 142 pluralism 157 Possidius 12 predestination 22, 137, 139 psychology 22, 37, 129, 155, 160 of student and teacher 57, 58, 122 Quintilian 55, 59, 68, 70 Rawls, John 153 reason 5, 40, 41, 71, 126, and faith 14–18, 79–81, 132 loss of confidence in 62–3, 155–7, 161–2 and religious language 63–4 relativism 37, 161 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 75, 139, 140, 144–6 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 140 schools abbey 115 Academic 63 Ancient (Greek and Roman) 68, 75, 77 business 81 modern colleges and universities 69, 82, 141, 158 pagan 46, 55, 58, 78–9, 133

191

public 37 sense perception 50–1, 63, 64, 119, 123 signs 11, 49, 50, 62, 88, 126 Simplicianus 11 sin, original 90, 137 skepticism 62–5, 130, 155, 159–62 Socrates 40, 49, 51, 90 Sommerville, C. John 149 soul ascent of 80 city as image of 40 perfection of 32, 41–3, 90–1 powers of 93–4, 156 Stoicism 113, 118, 157 Strauss, Leo 139 Suarez, Francisco 129 teacher Augustine as 6–7, 22 at centre of university 148, 157 Christ as 120, 124–6 role in antiquity 68, 70, 75, 77 teaching, activity of 46–61, 94 Tertullian 5, 136 truth as aim of speech 55–8, 75 contemplation of 69, 81, 117–18, 152 and doubt see skepticism and happiness 43–5 joy in 93, 122 knowledge vs opinion 125 scientia contrasted with sapientia 72, 82 unity of 15–16 values 36–9 Varro 4, 94, 115 Victorinus 11 Virgil 4, 6, 68, 74, 77 virtue 19, 31, 32–3, 37, 40, 52, 59, 63, 73, 80 and happiness 39–43, 45 of hilaritas 59–61 limits of 83, 90–7 in political liberalism 151 voluntarism 129

192

Index

will 3, 54, 138, 160 freedom of 13, 91–4, 129, 154–6 and lust for power (libido dominandi) 91 as power of decision (voluntas) 18–19 and two cities 89–91 and values 36–8

Wilde, Oscar 127 wisdom as aim of liberal arts 38, 40–3, 72, 74,116–19, 161–4 creation as source of 15–17, 136, 162 philosophy and 82, 130–2