B. W. Hare. Revue Des Etudes Augustiniennes produces an exhaustive Bulletin Augustinien o f some 400 titles. Yet, despite the many justifiable

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1 THE EDUCATIONAL APOSTOLATE OF ST AUGUSTINE; B. W. Hare The study of Augustine is endless, and every year, the Revue Des Etudes Augustiniennes produces an exhaustive Bulletin Augustinien o f some 400 titles. Yet, despite the many justifiable claims concerning the irresistibility and the influence of his thought as, for example, when the French Philosopher, Maurice B londel1, writing on the fifteenth centenary of Augustine s death, refers to the freshness, the seminal virtues, and the dynamic fertilizing energy of his thinking, or as when reference is made to fresh samples of the timeless quality and m odernity of his intellectual and moral points of view 2, there has been a neglect of Augustine s educational ideas. The excellent A Guide to the Thought o f Saint Augustine 3 by the French Jesuit, Eugene Partalie;does not concern itself with Augustine s views on education; Van der Meer s study Augustine the Bishop4 makes but a very brief reference to education; whilst the International Congress held in France in September 1954 under the title Augustinus Magister 5 to mark the sixteenth centenary of his birth, had 112 em inent Augustinian scholars presenting papers not one of which was specifically concerned with education. A random selection of standard text books on the history of education reveals either a complete disregard of Augustine or just a passing mention, confined to a few lines, or, at the most, a paragraph or two. However, some recent books have either devoted a chapter to the educational thinking of Augustine as, for example, S.J. Curtis and M.E.H. Boultwood s A Short History o f Educational Ideas 6 which includes an excellent and comprehensive account of Augustine as an educator, and the contribution of Pearl Kibre to The Educated Man 7edited by Paul Nash et al., or they have been given over entirely to a treatm ent of Augustine the educator. Two very recent books in this category are E. Kevane s Augustine the Educator 8, a com prehensive study in the fundamentals of Christian education, and G. Howie s Educational Theory and Practice in St Augustine9, a penetrating and thorough discussion of Augustine s educational thought and influence. It is not the intention o f this article to go 71

2 over ground so comprehensively tilled at depth by these authors, but rather to make some observations on topics specifically related to the teacher and the art of teaching. It is sometimes helpful, in this age of mass education, with its attendant anxiety over and concern for any and all pedagogical techniques that will aid the learning process, to remember th;»t no age has been w ithout such concern nor w ithout teachers who have attem pted to solve such problems. Augustine was such a teacher in his own age, and it is im portant to bear in mind that his schoolday experiences and his period as a young teacher considerably influenced the im portant role he was to assign education when, later on in his life, he became Bishop of Hippo. A ugustine10 sprang from a comparatively humble social class and his father, Patricius, a small landowner, struggled, through great sacrifices by himself and his family (they had to scrape and go poorly dressed), to assure to his m ost gifted son that liberal, classical education in the Later Empire was the surest means of advancement, opening the way to the teaching or legal professions and to administrative positions of authority and power. However, because of inadequacy of resources, Augustine s studies were interrupted for a year, when he was sixteen. This is the year in which Augustine tells us the briars of unclean desires grew rank over my head 11, the year in which the madness of lust, the muddy concupiscence of the flesh and the bubbling over of adolescence dom inated his life. He was on the way to becoming one of history s m ost spectacular drop-outs when, through the help of a family friend and benefactor, Romanianus, he was able to resume his secondary studies. As Henri Marrou puts it, There is quite a bursary-scholar side to Augustine s character, something of the cultured nouveau riche, the upstart, the self-made m an. 12 Augustine had gone to primary school in his native town of Thagaste, not exactly liking his years of learning reading, writing and arithm etic; he began his secondary studies, principally in Grammar, but making a start in Rhetoric at Madauros, a neighbouring, goodsized university town about fifteen miles to the south, and now he was to finish his studies in Rhetoric at Carthage, the intellectual capital of Roman Africa and the greatest city of the Latin West after Rome. It was here in this busy, rich city, where as Henri Daniel- R o p s13 describes it so racily using Augustine s own words, the surge of shameful love seethes like boiling oil - men called Carthage the city of Venus, that Augustine spent three extremely formative 72

3 years amid the bustle of the merchants and the rhetoricians, the harlots and the theologians. Between the ages of seven and nineteen he com pleted the whole of what was considered the normal course of studies, and w hat is more, for he was studious and well brought up, he excelled in them, except at Greek which, as he tells us, he was forced to continue studying by cruel threats and punishm ents. The nature of this basic education deserves careful attention,for from these schoolday experiences stem, later on in his life, some of his thoughts concerning m ethods of instruction. More im portantly, the education which he received and made his own is clearly literary in essence, and Latin in particular. It was a Latin education beginning with Grammar and the closely applied, meticulous study of the great Latin classics. First, the poets, Virgil, Terence, Horace and Ovid, then the historians such as Sallust and Varro,and finally the orators and prose writers, especially Cicero, the great Cicero, the unchallenged Master. Augustine was steeped in classical literature and he is noted as one of the most significant transm itters of Roman culture and educational practices to succeeding generations.on practically every occasion there flows from Augustine s pen, consciously or not, some quotation from Cicero or Virgil or some other Latin source, for The Key to his character and his influence on future ages is his catholicity: the catholicity of a tenadous m em ory,a mighty understanding,and an all-embracing will. He forgot nothing: he ignored nothing: he despised nothing. 14 Through his education, he had developed a phenomenal memory, a tenacious attention to detail, the ability to love what he was learning and the art of expressing himself, of opening the heart, of making others weep as he had been encouraged to weep. In 375, Augustine returned from Carthage to teach literature at his home town, Thagaste, because he was now head of his family, his father having died soon after the move to Carthage, and he had to find a profession. Like many good scholars of his age, he turned naturally to that of a teacher which he was to follow for over a decade, first in Africa and then in Rome and finally in Milan. At Carthage, whence he returned after a year s teaching in his home town, he held the municipal chair of Rhetoric until 383 when, tired of being ragged by rowdy young bloods sent by their wealthy families from all over Africa to acquire a proper education, that is, a smattering of Cicero,and on a promise of better opportunities,he went to Rome. Yet he was not w ithout success as a teacher during this period, as we know from the close affection bestowed on him by his serious-minded 73

4 pupils such as Favonius Eulogius, and Augustine s alter ego, Alypius, and Nebridius. After a miserable year in Rome as a teacher of Rhetoric, miserable because of a dangerous illness and because the students, whilst better behaved, were in the habit of cheating their teachers by abandoning them when the time came to pay their fees, Augustine was chosen in 384 by Symmachus, Prefect of Rome to be professor of Rhetoric at Milan. The way was now clear for him to advance to the top, for Milan was already the imperial residence, the capital of the Western Empire. A provincial governorship was well within the bounds o f possibility when his conversion in 386 made him renounce both his teaching and his administrative prospects. These years in the world of teaching left their mark on Augustine in so far as he drew on his experiences as a teacher, not only when considering his philosophical position, but also when, as a bishop,his ideas on the methodology of teaching were put to practical use in the instruction of native Numidian priests in the Latin necessary for church services and in the rudiments of church music. The writings of Augustine that are most specifically concerned with teaching and methods of teaching are his De Ordine, the De Catechizandis Rudibus, the De Doctrina Christiana and his Confessions. In September, 386, Augustine retired on a plea of impaired health to Cassiciacum near Milan, to enter upon a life of creative leisure, dedicated to serious pursuits. The ancient ideal of Otium Liberale, of a cultured retirem ent, had taken on a new lease of life in the fourth century, and Augustine, needing a quieter,less complicated approach, settled into the peaceful stability of such retirem ent quite readily with a rather ill-assorted company for a life of philosophical otium, his m other Monica, his son Adeodatus, his young star pupil Licentius,his eldest brother Navigius, another pupil Trygetius and two cousins. The De Ordine (in two books) is one of the Dialogues of Cassiciacum, written in December 386, and has as its theme the order existing in the universe and the position and significance of evil therein. The existence of order and m ethod throughout the universe is illustrated incidentally from many human examples, amongst others from the liberal arts, and in fact, the De Ordine is an im portant source for his theory of the liberal a r ts 15. It is in the second book that the discussions veer towards the nature of the literary and the scientific disciplines constituting the liberal arts which for Augustine are seven in number grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithm etic, music,geom 74

5 etry, and philosophy which he substitutes for the more traditional astronomy because of. the latter s unhealthy partnership with astrology. There is order, even in language, for solecisms and barbarisms grate on the ears, being out of order. The beauty of speech, the sequence of conclusions, the laws of numbers, the movements of the stars, music, geometry are all ruled by order and as a soldier is trained to good order, so these disciplines contain the secret of order. It is the function of the liberal arts to give the order of learning: This is the order of learning or there is none. A uthority and reason are the two ways leading to learning, but it is reason which is first in importance and which excels in the cultured. The lover of wisdom will esteem liberal studies, and such studies are the way to the highest things, the way of reason which chooses for itself ordered steps lest it fall from the height. The steps are the various liberal arts. This is particularly seen in the literary disciplines where the meaning of words, their persuasive power, the truth and falsity of thoughts and sensation are all necessary steps on the road to learning. The sciences have their order too, though Augustine is not above his age in paucity of material in mathem atics and the natural sciences. Although these philosophical observations on the nature and necessity of order in learning do not spell out any specific principles concerning teaching m ethod, they do emphasize Augustine s concern for the necessity of an exacting preliminary training. Indeed, he emerges as one of the many thinkers who have chosen to express their ideals as part of a programme of moral education. He urged his pupils not to spend their whole day among books, but to leave time to be with themselves, just thinking. In this way, they would learn to prize their own powers of thought, their ingenium; it is the first sign of Augustine s great respect for the faculty of sheer, hard ratiocination. In 387, Augustine conceived the plan and began the writing of an encyclopaedia of the liberal arts (disciplinarum libri), but his De Musica 16 was the only discipline that was treated by him, though there are spurious works which claim to be those which, although planned, do not seem to have been written. The De Musica was finished in 389, and is in the form of a dialogue between a master and a pupil thought to be Licentius. It is in six books and its subject is metre, which to the ancients was a branch of music. Augustine intended these six books to be an introduction to a sequel which would deal with melody (de melo), but Augustine was too busy with 75

6 his ecclesiastical duties to get around to writing it. The work itself is technical, with some philosophical overtones. In 388, Augustine returned to Africa and the following year, two years after his baptism, he wrote De Magistro (The Teacher), 17 a short work that, far from passing unnoticed, became one of the most influential of his earlier writings. Even today, it has been studied rather extensively in the fields of philosophy and pedagogy and in the discussion of problems regarding the meaning and value of language. The Teacher is cast in the form of a dialogue with Augustine s son, Adeodatus, who, though only sixteen years of age, and soon to die,showed talent like that of his father: he was intelligent and far better equipped than Licentius had been to see through the dialectical traps prepared for him by his father. Like most conversations. The Teacher is spontaneous in expression, full of interruptions, corrections and some obvious misleading by Augustine to train and sharpen his son, and shows that the centre of gravity had begun to shift in Augustine s thought from a kind of philosophical secularity to a religious philosophy. The thesis of The Teacher is that it is only God who is the ultimate cause and reason for the acquisition of truth by man when he learns, according to the Gospel of St Matthew, O ne is your teacher, Christ ; even the conclusions of this dialogue were immediately applied, in his defence of the Church, to the dogma of the Incarnation, for this dogma was to form the pivot of a philosopher s religion. It is not intended to analyse the educational and philosophical argument advanced by Augustine that man cannot teach man, as presented in his theory' of the divine illumination of the intellect, so hard of comprehension and explanation, as this has been so thoroughly and comprehensively done by Curtis and Boultwood, by Pearl Kibre and especially by G. Howie,but the following observations seem to be of param ount importance in any consideration of Augustine s approach to teaching. Augustine is first and foremost stressing that the vital principle in all learning is activity of the individual mind, that all learning resides in the learner, and that the best and wisest thing that a teacher can do is to stimulate the pupil to bring to life the knowledge that is within the pupil s mind. This assertion of the self-knowledge possessed by each individual human being, and of the self-activity of the individual mind is, as David Knowles points out, 18 one of Augustine s original and significant contributions to thought. His picture of education as a long, painstaking spiritual journey, 76

7 inspired by love and hope,is one of the m ost compelling in the history of education down the ages. Whilst it is true that he has most appeal to those stressing the centrality of supernatural religion, yet he has an equally strong appeal to those who, valuing love of knowledge and of mankind, com bined with intellectual enthusiasm and integrity, stress an attitude of critical thinking, for there is in Augustine s approach no lack of encouragement of critical thought. He is a good example of the student-cum-teacher who, by a personal effort of rational enquiries over a long period, stressing both credibility and understanding, established his own beliefs and his com m itm ent to a value system, and desires to encourage a similar effect in his pupils. His advice obtains realism from his perceptive understanding of human nature, from his psychological approach to m en s problems, and from his attem pt to work out a balance between freedom (man must necessarily be free) and authority (man must always be subject to authority) in the area of learning and of education as much as in other areas. From these things, there arises his interest in methodology. Finally, for Augustine, the task of teaching is one of basic human significance, even allowing for his philosophical distinction between teaching and learning, as he does set the general function of the teacher above his specialized task. As Howie 19puts it so well, Augustine owes his allegiance, (as all good teachers should) to truth, to the imparting of wisdom and not to a particular subject. He educates not for examinations but for the great advantage and intellectual pleasure of understanding the reasons of things. Augustine is saying that education is an absolutely good thing and of supreme value; by contrast, ignorance is always bad. 20 To be concluded in the next issue 77

8 78 NOTES 1. See his contribution to A M onum ent to Saint Augustine (Sheed and Ward, 1945) pp See the excellent treatment by Jean Guitton in his The M odernity o f St Augustine (Geoffrey Chapman, 1959). 3. Eugene Portalie, A Guide to the Thought o f S t Augustine (Henry Regnery Co., 1960). 4. F. Van der Meer, Augustine the Bishop (Sheed and Ward, 1961), translated by Brian Battershaw and G.R. Lamb. 5. Augustinus Magistert Congres International Augustinien, Paris Septembre, (Etudes Augustiniennes). 6. S.J. Curtis and M.E.H. Boultwood, A Short History o f Educational Ideas (University Tutorial Press, 1953) Chapter IV pp Paul Nash, Andreas M. Kazamias, Henry J. Perkinson, The Educated Man (John Wiley & Sons, Inc) pp E. Kevane, Augustine the Educator (Newman Press, 1964). 9. G. Howie, Educational Theory and Practice in St. Augustine (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969). 10. The best contemporary biography by far is that of Peter Brown, Augustine o f Hippo (Faber & Faber, 1967) from which most of the biographical details in this article have been taken. 11. There are many translations of The Confessions. One of the best is that of Frank Sheed (Sheed & Ward, 1943), regularly reprinted. 12. Henri Marrou, Men o f Wisdom, S t Augustine (Longmans, 1957) p See the translation of his L Eglise des Temps Barbares under the title The Church in the Dark Ages (J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1959) Chapter 1, pp. 1-53, the second volume of his monumental work Histoire de L Eglise du Christ. 14. Contribution by Father John-Baptist Reeves, O.P. to A M onument to Saint Augustine on St Augustine and Humanism, p Much of the description of De Ordine is taken from John E. Wise, The Nature o f the Liberal A rts (The Bruce Publishing Company, 1947) pp See St A ugustine s De Musica by W.F. Jackson Knight, (The Orthological Institute, London, no date) for a translation of the six books.

9 17. For a translation, see No. 9 in the Ancient Christian Writers, St Augustine, The Greatness o f the Soul and The Teacher (Newman Press, 1950), translated by Joseph M. Colleran. 18. In his The Evolution of Medieval Thought (Longman s 1962) p See particularly his fine concluding chapter on the educational influence o St Augustine in his Educational Theory and Practice in S t Augustine pp Ibid. p