Education, history of philosophy of

4. Augustine and Aquinas

Augustine is regarded, with justice, as not only the primary architect of the synthesis of Christianity and Platonism on which Christian theology was built, but also the foremost philosopher of education of late antiquity and of Catholicism generally. He was trained as an orator and held teaching posts in rhetoric for twelve years, but upon his conversion to Christianity in 386 he renounced the shallow worldliness of the oratorical ideal, setting himself and the philosophy of education upon a new course. Fundamental to Augustine’s view of education is the idea that its proper goals are first of all conversion and repentance, or the acceptance on faith of Christian beliefs and a commitment and effort of will to live without sin; and secondly, for the few who can achieve it, a wisdom consisting of direct knowledge of the soul and God through reason, or the insight of an intellect directed inwardly.

Augustine’s view of the course of higher studies preparatory for the attainment of this wisdom, and for its use by the Christian teacher, underwent a marked development between the educational works written in the first years after his conversion and those finished after he was consecrated bishop of Hippo in 395. The mainsprings of this development were a dramatic growth in his respect for biblical Scriptures as the word of God, which led him to revise his view of the role and value of liberal studies, and an appreciation for the value of rhetoric which grew with his responsibilities in the Church.

In his De ordine (On Order), Augustine affirms the existence of an all-embracing Divine order, knowable through liberal studies which allow one to grasp the pervasive reasonableness in things emanating from God’s intellect or Logos. It is dialectic or philosophical reasoning which teaches one how to learn and how to teach, he says, and this is compatible both with his view that the soul must prepare itself to see God through the exercise of its own reason, and his view in De magistro (The Teacher) that knowledge of a thing is achieved in seeing it, not in hearing someone name or describe it. He argues there through a theory of signs and language that teaching through words cannot enable us to know things by displaying them, but can only remind or prompt us to consult our own divinely illuminated reason, or else induce us to believe things on trust without understanding or knowledge.

Augustine’s De catechizandis rudibus (Catechizing the Uninstructed) develops a curriculum for the uneducated which is intended to induce moral behaviour and faith in God sufficient for salvation. His De doctrina christiana (Christian Instruction) explicates the training and methods through which Christian teachers may properly interpret biblical Scripture and teach the truths discovered in them. He prescribes a course of studies encompassing languages, history, geography, natural science, technology, logic and mathematics, all as an aid to understanding scripture, and offers canons of interpretation by which the Christian teacher may distinguish the literal from the allegorical, and find the hidden meaning in the latter. Rhetoric returns in the service of faith and love of God and neighbour, in the training of the Christian teacher and in detailed guidance on how the truths discovered in scripture are best presented.

The embrace of Aristotle by Thomas Aquinas produced a second major synthesis of classical and Christian thought, and a philosophy of teaching which owes much to both Aristotle and Augustine. Aquinas argues that acquiring knowledge by discovery and by instruction are alike in that a teacher can only lead a student to knowledge by making manifest to them the discursive reasoning through which discoveries are made. ‘Outward’ teaching may thus produce knowledge by aiding the student in reasoning through the application of self-evident general principles to particular matters, though it is God who teaches ‘inwardly’ by endowing the mind with the ‘light of reason’ and a knowledge of these first principles.