Augustine: The Teacher: A Dialogue between Augustine and his son Adeodatus. In Augustine: Earlier Writings. Edited and translated by John H. S. Burleigh. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1953.
The son of Romanized Berbers, Augustine’s name derives from Augustus, denoting ‘venerable,’ a name that reflects the civil status of his family, who numbered among the honestiores or ‘honorable men,’ the aristocratic class. His own son’s name, Adeodatus, means ‘gift from God.’ If one were given to symbolism, the difference between the two names might be taken to register conversion to Christianity and the moral consequence of moving away from pride of family in the City of Man to humility before God in the City of God, the transfer of citizenship from one regime to another. Citizenship must be passed down from father to son or, for Christians, from the Father to the sons of God. But thoughtful citizenship in the City of God still requires education on earth. Augustine knew that the would-be teacher of virtue, Christian or other, faced serious problems, as shown in Plato’s Meno. The Teacher is in some ways a Christian reply to the Meno. Unlike Plato, Augustine makes himself a character in his own dialogue, along with his son; Anytus in the Meno assumed that fathers could readily teach virtue to their sons, and Augustine may think that Christians, unlike pagan aristocrats, can succeed. Jesus had recommended that sons break with their pagan families, but now that ruling families are Christians, families themselves need to be re-founded along the lines of the new Christian regime. To do so, the classical education that linked the generations also needed to be re-founded. Hence The Teacher.
Augustine begins with a teleological question: “What do you suppose is our purpose when we use words?” We want “to let people know something, or we want to learn something”—making a statement or asking a question—Adeodatus replies. Augustine corrects him, saying that a question also lets people know something, namely, that we do not know and want to know—thereby suggesting a limit to the desire to learn, one that will vary from student to student. We are telling someone that we want to be told, we want to be taught. It might be that if Christians consider the Bible to set down what virtue is, that they need only to consult it, learn God’s words, in order to know virtue. Plato would reply that learning moral principles is not the same as being virtuous, and of course Augustine, that eminent chronicler of sin, knows that.
But, Adeodatus objects, we use words to sing, often singing alone, not telling anyone anything. Yes, Augustine replies, “there is a kind of teaching, and a most important kind, which consists in reminding people of something”—a major theme of the Meno. [1] Augustine thereby broadens the purpose of words to include reminding. Music, Plato knows, gets into the soul; it is not mere knowledge but morally influential, setting the rhythm of the soul, causing harmony or disharmony among the ‘parts’ of the soul. But “I very rarely sing to remind myself of anything, almost always simply to give myself pleasure,” his son replies, giving his father a glimpse into his soul. Yes, but “what pleases you in singing is the melody”; we sing in words set to music, which isn’t the same thing as speaking. Birds sing, but do not speak (unless they are parrots, but parrots don’t tell us anything, that way, communicating in earnest only by squawks and shrieks). “You agree, then, that there is no other reason for the use of words than either to teach or to call something to mind?”
Very well, then, Adeodatus says, but what about prayer? When we pray, we use words but not to “teach God anything or remind him of anything.” God is the supreme Knower. Augustine agrees, remarking that we speak to God in “our inmost mind”—the Christian answer to the problem of outer appearance and inner reality seen in the Meno is that God does not need to guess or to inquire into the true nature of any human soul. “God is to be sought and prayed to in the secret place of the rational soul, which is called ‘the inner man.'” And God is very close by, indeed, because his Spirit dwells in you, as the Apostle Paul testifies in First Corinthians. For a Christian, as distinguished from Socrates, the Logos is the Jesus, Son of God, accessible to the soul thanks to the Holy Spirit, residing in “the inner man.” The mind is the temple where God dwells, where we sacrifice passions and false beliefs to God, to Reason.
There is also public prayer, prayer by a priest in front of congregants. One might expect Augustine to say that prayer is speech, talking to God, telling Him what we want or telling him that we fear and love Him. But by using words, Augustine means audible speech, and prayer is inaudible, except when a priest prays in a religious service, “not that God may hear, but that men may hear and, being put in remembrance, may with some consent be brought into dependence on God.” The audible prayer of priests tells the hearers what the priests want them to hear, and to believe. In the Meno, remembrance really means thinking—at best, ratiocination—but for Christians it is a re-centering of the mind on the presence of the Holy Spirit within them, consenting to his guidance; for a Christian priest, speech extends to both Christians and to non-Christians, the latter to be ‘reminded’ of their consciences, that element within their souls which is receptive to the Holy Spirit. “Such speech is nothing but a calling to remembrance of the realities of which the words are but the signs, for the memory which retains the words and turns them over and over, cause the realities to come to mind.” Public prayer calls up the “memory” of the Holy Spirit and His teachings. This is the kind of memory a Christian will cultivate, a memory of words, of the Word, not so much a ‘memory’ or set of logical deductions concerning geometric figures, as in the Meno.
But more generally, “speech is nothing but a calling to remembrance of the realities of which the words are but the signs, for the memory.” As Adeodatus will later say, we use speech “in order to teach or to call to mind.” This shifts the dialogue (itself obviously an exchange of words, by definition) back from the purpose of speech, logos, to the elements of speech, words, logoi—from teleology to analysis. The men agree that words are signs, and that signs signify, that is, they mean something. “Things which do not signify something beyond themselves cannot be signs.” To consider this more carefully, Augustine then quotes Virgil’s Aeneid, Book II, line 659: Si nihil ex tanta superis placet urbe relinqui (“If it pleases the gods that nothing be left of so great a city,” namely, Troy). The sentence has a purpose but analytically considered, do the words composing it have a purpose, a meaning? Do they refer to anything beyond themselves? If not, can a sentence, a thing composed of words, really mean something? Can we learn anything, know anything, by means of words?
There are eight words, thus eight signs, in the verse. “I suppose you understand the meaning of the verse.” Yes, says Adeodatus, by which he may mean the whole verse, the phrase. But Augustine wants him to analyze the verse, break it down into its elements. The first word, Si signifies not a thing but a “state of mind,” doubt, an answer Augustine accepts “in the meantime.” As for nihil, it seems to Adeodatus to signify “that which is not,” but Augustine raises an objection: if words signify something, how can any word signify nothing? Augustine suggests a tentative solution to this aporia in saying that nihil may also signify “a state of mind rather than a thing which is nothing,” joking that we should not let ‘nothing’ detain us. “At the proper time we shall understand more clearly this kind of difficulty, if God will.” In the Aeneid verse, nothing evidently means absence, the end of a war in which something, Troy, is reduced to nothing, a destruction approved by the pagan gods, the gods of the ‘City of Man’; in the Bible, God does the opposite, creating the heavens and the earth out of “nothing.” And in the beginning was not merely a set of words but the Word, the Logos. The Christian teacher needs to understand and to use the power of that Word, and of the words that compose the Bible. In the Meno, Socrates associates ‘memory’ or learning with geometry; in The Teacher, Augustine associates it with words because he is a Christian. Some of the moderns (notably Hobbes and Descartes) would attempt to undermine the Word by reconnecting reason with mathematics. Others, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, would undermine not only the Word but all words by deeming them mere conventions.
On to ex, a preposition, which means either ‘of’ or ‘out of.’ What the gods may want is for the Greeks to bring nothingness out of Troy, reduce it to rubble, although some Trojans might (and indeed did) survive, one of them going on to found Rome, the new “great city,” the one that would be conquered spiritually by Christians, re-founded in a manner pleasing the one God, not the gods to whom Virgil’s hero prayed, false gods—nothings that would make bring Troy to nothing. Augustine demurs: “I want you to show me, if you can, what are the things of which these [words] are the signs.” But Father, “what you ask cannot be done in conversation, where we cannot answer questions except by means of words.” Admittedly so, but can you not say a word and point to the thing it signifies, the reality it signifies? Only with “names signifying corporeal objects.” Really? What about color? It isn’t a corporeal object but “rather a quality of a corporeal object.” True, but by “corporeal objects” I mean “all the qualities of bodies which are susceptible to sense-perception,” or, more exactly, all visible objects. After all, I cannot show the corporeal object I mean to signify by a word if that object is out of sight. It is true, however, his father remarks, that one can point out invisible things, as deaf people do by the gestures of ‘sign language’ and as dancers “unfold and set forth whole stories” on stage? All right, Adeodatus concedes, but that doesn’t solve the problem of how to understand the word ex, which “neither I nor your dancing actor will ever be able to point out” the meaning of.
“But suppose he could,” Augustine says, persisting. Whatever that gesture was, the actor would still be using a sign, not the thing signified. He would still be “explain[ing] a sign by a sign.” In that case, what I just said, that is there “nothing”—that word again—which “can be shown without signs”? Yes, there is, because if—that word, again—I asked you what walking is, you could get up and walk, “using the thing itself to show me, not words or any other signs.” Embarrassed for the first time in the dialogue, Adeodatus admits that he overlooked this. At the same time, Augustine continues, not everything could be signified clearly without signs, since if I asked you what “hastening” means, and you walked fast, I might “conclude that walking was the same thing as hastening.” They soon agree that “there are two classes of things that can be demonstrated without signs: those which we are not engaged in doing when we are asked” and those we can immediately start doing, such as walking when asked what walking is, “and those in which the action consists in simply giving signs,” in the manner of deaf persons and dancers. Signs can be used to signify other signs, but only if “the question concerns signs merely.” To put the matter more generally, if words are only signs of signs, no one can learn, since in explaining one sign I am only substituting another sign for it. And if I point or gesture at something in an attempt to show you what the sign signifies, I need to know what the thing is that I’m pointing at, before I understand the sign.
To address this aporia, Augustine first directs his son’s attention to signs demonstrated by signs. Verbal signs come to us by the sense of hearing, gestural signs by sight. “A word is a meaningful articulate sound, and sound is perceived by no other sense than hearing,” but when “a word is written, a sign is given to the eyes whereby something that properly belongs to the ears is brought to mind.” Socrates precedes Plato, God precedes Moses, Jesus precedes the Apostle John. A “name” signifies “something or somebody”—Rome, Romulus, Virtue, a River—which Augustine calls “significables.” But the word “name” itself signifies not a significable but a sign, “the audible sign of audible signs.” “A name, therefore, is a word when it is pronounced articulately with a meaning.” Thus, for example, such words as “if” and “from” are words but not names; “just as every horse is an animal but every animal is not a horse, so every word is a sign but every sign is not a word.” And “all names are words, but all words are not names,” since a word is “the sign of a sign which signifies no other signs,” a sign that refers to a significable. Whereas a name is “the sign of a sign that points to other signs.” This notwithstanding, “in a general sense verbum [word] and nomen [word] have the same range of application” because “all the parts of speech have names”—nouns, verbs, conjunctions—”because pronouns can be substituted or added to them”; any part of speech can be referred to as “it,” any word or name referred to with one or another conjunction, none that “cannot be made the subject of a verb to form a complete sentence.”
Augustine then makes another distinction, this one directly relevant to teaching. Insofar as it is an articulate significant sound, a word “smites the ear.” But it does so for a telos, a purpose, namely, “that it may be perceived, remembered and known.” A word is “something that happens to the ear,” a name “something that happens in the mind,” in the “inner man,” as he had said near the beginning of the dialogue. The relation between word and name is no simple thing, however. “To use words to treat of words is as complicated as to rub fingers together and expect someone else to distinguish which fingers tingle with warmth and which help others to tingle.” What happens to your ear may register differently in your mind than in mine. If we say of Christ, “In Him was virtue,” we don’t mean that the word the word “virtue” is in Him but that the thing we name virtue is in Him. This raises a serious question about the authority of religious teaching. What if Paul was right—wielding God-given authority with respect to “realities,” the thing we name virtue in Christ—but not with respect to the word which he used to signify that reality, “especially when he himself confesses that he was unskilled in speech”? Adeodatus cannot think of a way out of this aporia. “You think that without authorities reason itself is hardly sufficient, but reason itself demonstrates that all the parts of speech may signify some thing”; if reason did not have the power to generalize, no word in Latin could be equivalent to any word in Greek. It may be that “some man, from greater stupidity or impudence, may not agree, but on the contrary may assert that he will give way only to those authorities who with universal consent are allowed to lay down the law in regard to words,” but reason tells us otherwise. Nature refutes thoroughgoing conventionalism because it can find contradictions, impossibilities, in some conventions. Words are understood not by redundant self-reference but by the ability of the soul to learn, by the logos within the soul, which ‘decodes’ the sign that would otherwise be only a noise rattling in one’s ear. In this, the teaching of The Teacher resembles the teaching of the Meno. Augustine departs from Plato and Plato’s Socrates in taking logos as the gift of the Logos, of God. But no less than Plato and Plato’s Socrates does he insist that we learn by logos working within us, not by thoughtlessly following what supposed authorities tell us.
Augustine then proceeds to show this by asking what “the goal” we have striven “to reach by all these round-about paths.” Conventionally speaking, sons should simply go along with the authority of fathers, but if fathers engage sons in pointless tasks, does paternal authority really consist of, other than their own stupidity and imprudence? Conversely, many people, and not only sons in front of their fathers, become impatient with reasoning and simply want to be told. But if the teacher gives in to this, can he truly be said to have taught his student?
Augustine’s son having demonstrated his capacity to learn, to reason, “You will pardon me, therefore, if I play with you to begin with, not for the sake of playing, but in order to exercise and sharpen our mental powers”—both of ours, not only yours—for the purpose of being able “not merely to endure the heat and light of the region where lies the blessed life, but also to love them.” In Plato’s dialogue, Meno had no such endurance, no such love. Adeodatus does: “Go on as you have begun, for I shall never think unworthy of attention anything you may think it necessary to say or to do.” That is, Adeodatus accepts his father’s authority because, just as he has proven his philosophic mettle to his father, so his father has proven the goodness of philosophy to his son, by bringing him to philosophize, to experience the good effects of philosophizing. Consideration of words, of logoi, entails philosophizing, and philosophizing orients souls away from the conventional dimension of words and towards logos. Sifting out the contradictions now seen in conventions can bring the soul to nature, to what is as it were above the conventions.
Accordingly, Augustine turns from consideration of signs signifying other signs to signs signifying significables. Augustine quickly establishes to Adeodatus’ satisfaction that “we cannot carry on a conversation at all unless the words we hear carry the mind to the things of which they are the signs.” But there is a distinction to be made. If I use the word ‘lion,’ the word ‘lion’ has come out of my mouth, but a lion hasn’t. Adeodatus understands that “our words are signs merely of things”: “it is the sign and not the thing signified which comes out of the mouth of the speaker.” Augustine compliments him, again by invoking reason: “The very law of reason,” the principle of non-contradiction, the capacity to make distinctions, which is “stamped on our minds,” has “awakened your vigilance.” Logos is in us. Thus, one can see that the word ‘man’ is “both a noun and an animal” (in fact, a “rational and mortal animal”). “It is a noun when it is regarded as a sign, and an animal when regard is had to the thing signified by the sign.” “The rule, which naturally carries the greatest weight, is that, as soon as signs are heard, the attention is directed to the things they signify,” and that we should consider “that things signified are of greater importance than their signs,” inasmuch as “whatever exists on account of something else must necessarily be of less value than that on account of which it exists.” It is noteworthy that Augustine places his discussion of the word ‘man’ in the central paragraphs of The Teacher. It is man, not God or beasts, who can learn by reasoning.
Adeodatus demurs. The Latin word for filth is lovelier than what it signifies: “Change one letter and caenum [filth] becomes caelum [heaven]”! Witty lad, he likes puns, but “importance” is not the same as “preferable.” If words signify things, Augustine replies, then they can increase our knowledge. “The knowledge conveyed by this word” from one person to another is “more valuable than the word itself” because, as Adeodatus says, when I use a word “I want to give a sign to the man with whom I am speaking, by means of which I may let him know what I think he ought to know”—that is, I want to teach him something.
Nonetheless, Adeodatus insists, “this does not mean that the thing signified is better than its sign.” Yes, but “knowledge of filth is more important than the name”; the names, ‘filth’ and ‘heaven’ could be reversed but the things signified could not be; some word is necessary to indicate the thing, which is the more important thing to know. Augustine aims at eradicating any tendency in his son toward rhetorical ornamentation. He also would have had little patience for what would be called estheticism, l’art pour l’art, centuries later.
Hierarchy implies teleology. For example, “the advice to eat in order to live rather than to live in order to eat, is justly praised simply because it shows understanding of what is means and what is end, that is to say, of what should be subordinate to what.” If a rhetorician, “some loquacious lover of verbiage,” some glutton of words, were to say he teaches for the sake of talking, he could be corrected by saying he should talk for the sake of teaching. Generally, “the use to which words are put is superior to the words; for words exist in order to be used, and used to teach”; “knowledge is better than words.”
But if the name, ‘filth,’ is preferable to filth itself, would not the knowledge of the name be preferable to knowledge of the thing? Adeodatus identifies “four terms here: the name, the thing, knowledge of the name, knowledge of the thing,” and just as the thing is “better” (in the sense of more important to know) than the name, so knowledge of the thing is better than knowledge of the name.” Augustine disagrees: knowledge of the word “vice” is “much inferior to knowledge of the vices.”
Yet, squeamish Adeodatus objects, “Do you think that knowledge is preferable even when it makes us more miserable?” Yes, because without the knowledge, we will not know, and thus not be able to correct, the underlying evil. This points to a serious problem that teachers face: the resistance of students to obtaining knowledge of unpleasant things, realities they would rather not think about. But just as physicians need to tell patients what their illness is, in order to get them to take their medicine, and patients should not blame physicians for their illnesses, so student should not blame their teachers for the students’ ignorance or for the wrongly ordered souls that resist corrections.
But there is a “greater problem,” mentioned earlier: Can “all actions which we can perform on being interrogated…be demonstrated without a sign?” The difficulty, as Adeodatus sees, is that if someone asks me, What is walking? and I get up and walk, without any explanation, he might imagine that “walking” means the distance I have walked, not the movement itself. He might suppose that “anyone who walked further or less than I had walked, had not in fact walked at all.” I need to speak or teach, to supplement the visual sign.
Granted, but “don’t you think speaking and teaching are different things?” If all speaking is telling, and we “do not teach in order that we give signs,” merely to swap words, then they must differ. Whether you teach solely with words or with words and actions, “we give signs in order to teach,” do we not? It seems that our conversation has shown that nothing can be taught without signs; that some signs are to be preferred to the things they signify; and that the knowledge of things is better than the knowledge of their signs. If “we give signs in order that we may teach, and do not teach that we may give sings,” then “teaching and giving signs are different things.” But “do you think our results now stand beyond all doubt,” Adeodatus? “I should dearly like to think that after all these turnings and twisting we have indeed reached certainty,” Father, but since you’ve asked the question, I am “anxious” that there might be more difficulties to come. Augustine commends his son’s fear of aporia as an indication of caution, as “a cautious mind” is “the best guard of tranquility.”
Adeodatus’ caution turns out to be well-founded. To reach a hasty conclusion and hold fast to it will lead to trouble. Giving a fuller answer to the question of whether knowledge is preferable even when it makes us more miserable, Augustine observes that “it is the most difficult thing in the world not to be upset when opinions which we hold, and to which we have given to ready and too willful approval, are shattered by contrary arguments and are, as it were, weapons torn from our hands.” (This may well be the cause of Anytus’ anger in the Meno, an anger that contributed to the execution of Socrates; he fears defenseless, personally and politically.) We should resist the sentiment. Rather, “it is a good thing to give in calmly to arguments that are well considered and grasped, just as it is dangerous to hold as known what in fact we do not know,” falling “into such hatred or fear of reason that we think we cannot trust even the most clearly manifest truth.” That is, misology leads to radical skepticism, the refusal to learn based not on the principle of I know that I do not know but on the self-contradictory principle, I know that I cannot know. In Christian terms, misology would readily lead to hostility toward the Word of God, indeed toward God Himself. Just as Socrates died because he had offended the Athenians with his logical challenges to their opinions, so Christ died because He had offended Jews and Romans alike, as the Logos.
It is true that some men can be taught some things by observing another’s actions, without signs. Natural objects are exhibited by God, and we can learn about them without any instruction from their Creator. Conversely, one often learns little or nothing by signs alone; a verbal description of a cat is hardly more instructive than seeing a cat. The word ‘cat’ is otherwise scarcely more than a sound to me. “We perceive the sound when it strikes our ear, while the meaning becomes clear when we look at the thing signified,” learning “the force of the word, that is the meaning which lies in the sound of the word, when we come to know the object signified by the word.” Whether we are Adam in the Garden or a child at home, typically we see something and then either assign a name to it or ask for the name that has been assigned. Teaching, then, is not simply a matter of talking, even if the aim of the talking is teaching. But the true learning goes on in the mind of the learner. In learning a thing, I do “not trust the words of another but my own eyes,” a fact that Groucho Marx plays with in his celebrated joke. A genuine teacher “bid[s] us look for things,” but does “not show them to us so that we may know them.” “He alone teaches me anything who sets before my eyes, or one of my other bodily senses, or my mind, the things which I desire to know,” inasmuch as “from words we can learn only words.” In passing, one notes that the ‘moderns’ who complained that the ‘Churchmen’ thought only in terms of words hadn’t paid attention to Augustine’s words: “Knowledge of words is completed by knowledge of things, and by the hearing of words not even words are learned,” since we do not yet know what the words mean. When we already know something, a word may remind us of it; in that sense, the teaching of the Meno, that knowledge is memory, is correct; if, however, “we do not know, we are not even reminded, but are perhaps urged to inquire.” That is, if someone uses an unfamiliar word, I know that I don’t know something, and I may ask what it means, preliminary to learning something.
What about another kind of claim, the claims of historians and, most pointedly, of sacred historians? When it comes to names, “What about those young men of whom we have heard,” Ananias, Azarias, and Missel,” who passed through the furnace fire? “All that we read of in that story happened at that time and was written down, so that I have to confess that I must believe rather than know,” a distinction understood by the Prophet Isaiah himself, who said “Unless you believe you shall not know.” “What I know I also believe, but I do not know everything that I believe.” It is “useful” to believe “many things which I do not know, among them this story about the three youths,” which teaches readers to trust God. “I know how useful it is to believe many things of which knowledge is not possible,” including any historical information, sacred or secular, which did not occur in my lifetime, or, for that matter, information presented by reporters of the ‘news.’ Near the end of the dialogue, Augustine promises a further inquiry into “the whole problem of the usefulness of words, for their usefulness properly considered is not slight.” In this dialogue, he is concerned that “we must not attribute to them a greater importance than they ought to have.”
It is different with “universals of which we can have knowledge,” ideas that we can discover through our own reasoning and need “not listen to anyone speaking and making sounds outside ourselves” to arrive at. True, “our real Teacher is He who is so listened to,” but he is “said”—said—to “dwell in the inner man,” speaking to us of “the unchangeable power and eternal wisdom of God” not from outside of ourselves but providing us “wisdom [to which] every rational soul gives heed,” although “to each is given only so much as he is able to receive, according to his own good or evil will.” That is likely to be Augustine’s explanation of Isaiah’s monition, “Unless you believe you shall not know”; your soul must be ready to receive the truth, as indeed it must be ready to reason about theoretical or practical matters. Meno and Anytus will not philosophize; atheists refuse the invitation of God. “If anyone is ever deceived it is not the fault of Truth, any more than it is the fault of the common light of day that the bodily eyes are often deceived.”
We need light to see colors, other “elements of the world and sentient bodies,” along with the senses themselves, to “perceive things of sense”—what Christian authors call “carnal things.” The mind then “uses” all of these material things “as interpreters in its search for sense-knowledge.” If I hear words relating someone else’s sense perception, I may believe what he says but I do not know it. The same goes for sense perceptions remembered by others as images in their minds. I may believe their words but I cannot know them to be true. As to “intelligible things,” what Christian authors call “spiritual things,” it is reason that enables us to pay attention to the “inner light of truth.” Put more expansively, regarding the things of sense, words suffice to teach the student that we say we perceive them, but “he learns nothing unless he himself sees what is asking about,” learning “not from words uttered but from the objects seen and his sense of sight.” These sense impressions then imprint themselves on his memory. It is in “the halls of memory [that] we bear the images of things once perceived as memorial which we can contemplate mentally and can speak of with a good conscience and without lying.” We can report them truthfully, but our listener “believes my words”—or not—rather than “learning from them.” The same goes with “the things which we behold with the mind,” with “the intelligence” in the act of noēsis and “with reason,” logos governed by the principle of non-contradiction. The “inner light of truth which illumines the inner man and is inwardly enjoyed” may be reported to another, but “if my hearer sees these things himself with his inward eye, he comes to know what I say, not as a result of my words but as a result of his own contemplation.” Strictly speaking, “it is not I who teach him,” as “he is taught not by my words but by the things themselves which inwardly God has made manifest to him.” Augustine is careful to acknowledge that such contemplation does not typically come as a result of the person’s own efforts. “It often happens that a man, when asked a question, gives a negative answer, but by further questioning can be brought to answer in the affirmative.” That is, Augustine remains a ‘Socratic,’ acknowledging the merit of dialogue and the rational dialectic it entails. Dialogue is necessary, given the “weakness” of human beings, “unable to behold the whole all at once,” but “when questioned about the parts which compose the whole,” can be “induced to bring them one by one into the light.” This of course is what Augustine has done in this dialogue with his son. In a philosophic dialogue, the words “do not make statements, but merely ask such questions as to put [the student] who is questioned in a position to learn inwardly.” (This contrasts with a police interrogation, in which questions are asked in order to force truthful answers out of the one questioned, so that the inquirer, or rather the inquisitor, may learn.) As a teacher, “I must put my question in a way suited to your ability to hear the inward teacher.”
To teach and to learn, then, both require a degree of humility as well as a degree of confidence. Christianity commends both humility and faith, and so can adapt itself to teaching. If a student hears what I say but does not know whether it’s true, he may believe it, suppose it, or doubt it. If knows that it is false, he “must oppose it and deny it.” If he knows it is true “he must testify to its truth.” But in none of these cases will he learn because he must, as the saying goes, see for himself. I can tell you all about Augustine’s dialogue, “The Teacher,” but you have learned nothing about it from my words unless you read the dialogue and see for yourself. It may be “useful to believe such things so long as ignorance lasts.” But unless some compelling reason prevents it, don’t let your ignorance last. You don’t even know if my words give you a good account of my own mind, since I might be ignorant or a liar. “A speech committed to memory and frequently conned,” as rhetoricians are wont to do, “may be spoken when we are thinking of something else entirely.” (Augustine then goes in for the kill: “This often happens when we are singing a hymn.”) Or the intended meaning of the speaker may be distorted in the minds of the listeners, as when, for example, the speaker has “simply called the thing he has in mind by a different name from the one we are accustomed to use.” This may be remedied by careful definition of the word, as Augustine has done in his own discussion of words, “but how often is a man to be found who is good at definition?”
Even if the teacher’s words are understood according to the teacher’s intention, the student does not learn from those words whether “the words spoken are true.” “Who is so foolishly curious as to send his son to school to learn what the teacher thinks?” he asks, rhetorically but reasonably. “When the teachers have expounded by means of words all the disciples which they profess”—profess—to “teach, the disciples also of virtue and wisdom”—the theme of the Meno—then their pupils take thought within themselves whether what they have been told is true, looking to the inward truth, that is to say, also far as they are able. In this way they learn.” If, as educators once loved to say, educare means to lead out or to draw out, this is what the leading consists of.
This goes for revelation and reason, both, including the revelation of truths perceived rationally within the framework of belief in revelation. Adeodatus has learned that “by means of words a man is simply put on the alert in order that he may learn,” and that “in order to know the truth of what is spoken, I must be taught by Him who dwells within and give me counsel about words spoken externally in the ear.” The philosopher loves wisdom, and by Christ’s “favor I shall love him the more ardently the more I advance in learning.”
Note
- On the Meno see “Teaching Virtue?” on this website under the category, “Philosophers.”
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