Teaching as Believing: Faith in the University

4: The Confessions as a Model for the Academic Life

105 My second experience of the congruence of faith and reason takes place the next term, in winter, when I’m teaching Augustine’s Confessions. Teaching the Odyssey I had fallen in, experiencing the closeness of literature to the spiritual. What Augustine makes clear is that this plunging in and this immediacy of experience is what Christianity affirms, explicitly, what it describes as orthodoxy. Everything that Ricouer talks about—the primacy of the concrete, the multiplicity of interpretation, the notion of critical thinking and reading that I’ve been exploring so far—is exactly what Christianity professes, too. Truth is always incarnate for Augustine, always embodied, and such truth is forever beyond what we say about it. Our language is always inadequate, wonderfully so, blessedly so. This is the central dynamic in Augustine’s thought and in all Christian thought, even if eventually it must lead us further, to the making of specific commitments . And if this is true, Christianity and the university have the same agenda, at least at some primary level. If this is true, teaching is believing , because it’s exactly this insistence on multiplicity that I’ve said defines the university, too. Critical thinking is the work of the university. Christianity is grounded in just this kind of critical thinking. Therefore, Christianity does the work of the university. To develop this syllogism I spend most of the chapter recreating our class discussion of the Confessions, using Augustine’s conversion and his reading of the Bible to talk first not about the university but about faith itself, its necessary humility and playfulness. This is the harder and more c h a p t e r 4 The Confessions as a Model for the Academic Life Anderson.Teaching 9/30/04 4:21 PM Page 105 Teaching as Believing 106 controversial move, it seems to me, to establish the connection between Christianity and interpretive open-endedness. With that sense of the tradition in place, that understanding of orthodoxy, my concluding argument about education quickly follows, since I’ve already established in the first few chapters the university’s own commitments to interpretation . Where my reading of Augustine finally leads is to a figure and to an experience. The figure is the figure of Mary, the mother of God, who is also the mother of the reader and so in the end the mother of the university . The experience is an experience on the altar, a Sunday morning when the boundaries for a moment collapse again and I am discovered by one of my students, preaching in the Mass exactly what I professed in the classroom the week before. Confounded and Converted The second term of the Literature of Western Civilization. A gray, winter day. We are discussing Augustine’s Confessions, this difficult fifth century book that students always resist and misunderstand, when finally these misconceptions and this resistance call us all to a new and deeper insight. I write the word “Christian” on the board. Free associate, I say. Write whatever words first come to mind, as quickly as you can, not censoring. Here, God help us, are the first three phrases that students share: “close-minded,” “judgmental,” “exclusive.” Here, God help us, is the sense that so many students and faculty have of Christian tradition, whether through ignorance or prejudice or lived experience, of a faith narrow and hurtful, of a faith so sure of itself as to lead right away to the judgment of others. Close-minded, judgmental, exclusive. Other hands pop up, other words, from students anxious to insert the positive and hint at their own faith: “truth,” “the way,” “confidence,” “conviction.” Security. Love. The Right. The Moral. But these phrases share in the same assumptions, are more faithful expressions of the same contemporary sense of the religious life, that to live it is to walk in certainty, that to follow God is to exist in a state of blessed and convicted stasis. No one suggests the words and phrases that would naturally come to Augustine himself: humility, confusion, joy in complexity, awe before the greatness and subtlety of a God too loving to be reduced to any phrase at all. The way, yes, but the way of life, an ongoing life, a difficult life, a journey, a struggle. A little later in our discussion of the Confessions, as Augustine’s fifth century faith starts to come clearer, a twenty-first century student asks, Anderson.Teaching 9/30/04 4:21 PM Page 106 [18...