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7. The Purposes of Liberal Education
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227 Chapter 7 The Purposes of Liberal Education We began with Augustine’s observation that just as no one lacking what he wants can be happy, so also not everyone who has what he wants is happy either. For Augustine, like Cicero, Plato, and Aristotle, moral philosophy is born of the double desire to know what good we should want and to know how best to obtain it. The early Latin and Greek fathers benefited immensely from the classical tradition of liberal education they inherited. And yet, as we discovered in our opening chapter, few attempts were made to relate that education to the goals embedded within Catholic theology. Augustine is the first Church father to enlist that tradition into the service of a distinctively Christian paedeia. His early writings on liberal education attempt to substantiate the bold claim that by an ordered sequence of contemplation the believer can move through the disciplines “from corporeal realities to incorporeal ones,” up to the mind of God himself. In his earliest writings Augustine explicitly identified God with the supreme good and the knowledge and love of God as the proper cause of our happiness. Thus: while Augustine adopted the eudaimonism he found in Cicero’s Hortensius, already by 386 he had learned how to adapt this to Christian ends. From the point of view of its highest aim, Augustine’s liberal educa- 228 The Purposes of Liberal Education tion shares with his moral theology happiness as the final purpose of human activity. If the purpose of study is beatitude, the matter is specified in the curriculum of the arts. As we saw in the De ordine, training in grammar , rhetoric, music, arithmetic, astronomy, and especially dialectic can aid the mind in its ascent to the first cause. Liberal education is valuable because it can raise us to God; the arts are the rungs on the ladder. The arts contribute to human excellence in more specific ways as well. Beyond the final aim of happiness (achieved through the knowledge and love of God), our study of Augustine’s pedagogy in chapter 5 identified further, immediate and proximate, purposes for education. Though happiness is the properly basic end, virtue is the first aim of Augustine’s teaching. As we saw in his interaction with his students Licentius and Evodius, the acquisition of intellectual and moral habits such as humility, determination, patience, no less than curiosity, attentiveness, and dialectical virtuosity, are the first skills Augustine teaches. If Cassiciacum is a school, then Augustine’s preferred pedagogy is Socratic. He prepares pupils for the independent discovery of truth. But independent discovery is not equivalent to an autonomous search. And here we come upon a tension in his thought. As I argued in chapters 5 and 6 Augustine’s pedagogy joins together two potentially contrary ideas. He establishes both our need for authority and the priority of independent rational discovery. This paradox is summed up nicely in his descriptions of pious study and in his exegesis of Isaiah 7:9, nisi credideritis non intellegetis: without belief it is impossible to understand. Augustine does not set dialectic against authority. We are not free to ascribe to Augustine a merely “intellectualist” view of education. Much more than the intellect is involved. From the teacher’s structuring of advantageous conditions, to our need for friendship, to the function of prayer, in Augustine’s earliest educational theory [184.73.56.98] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:53 GMT) The Purposes of Liberal Education 229 and practice independent discovery is the ideal that never factually renders authority obsolete. Indeed, the need for friendship and Christian community signals yet another purpose of Augustine’s course of liberal learning, and an additional sense that education may be said to contribute to happiness. Since this enculturation, emphasized particularly at Cassiciacum, is less immediate and appears a more comprehensive purpose than the achievement of any one particular set of virtues, we named this Augustine’s proximate purpose for education. How do the liberal arts fit within Augustine’s view of the good life? I conclude that liberal education contributes to the aim of Augustine ’s moral theology by adopting the same final purpose, happiness , as well as by establishing the cultivation of virtue and the formation of a Christian community as means accompanying and supporting that final goal. These secondary purposes are manifest in Augustine’s curriculum, his pedagogy, and in his emphasis on authority as the proper condition of rational enquiry. A secondary aim...