St Augustine explains the value of the inner teacher, which is God, the one whose grace is efficacious in imparting truth to the human soul that is possessed of reason, the reason that sets it apart from other animals. This inner teacher is the one that reveals to us what is truth, as opposed to untested opinion that is prone to error being as it were profligately free. In a person’s search for truth, it is not by looking to external reality that satisfaction derives, but in looking inwards within the recesses of the soul, where one can encounter the inner teacher.
In his work, The Teacher, St Augustine states: “After all, who is so foolishly curious as to send his son to school to learn what the teacher thinks? When the teachers have explained by means of words all the disciplines they profess to teach, even the disciplines of virtue and of wisdom, then those who are called ‘students’ consider within themselves whether truths have been stated” (Augustine, The Teacher 14.45). By this, Augustine is promoting truth as superior to mere opinion, correct knowledge and understanding as opposed to the fruits of unguided fantasy and undisciplined imagination, both of which are erroneous.
The foregoing is synonymous with the teachings of Neo-Platonists, most notably Plotinus, who espoused the concept of the One. For Plotinus, there is a supreme, totally transcendent One, with no division or multiplicity, existing beyond all categories of being and non-being. This One is the source of reality, and is unchangeable. The One cannot be any individual existing thing, nor is it merely the sum of all things, but is prior to all existence. More so, the One according to Plotinus can be reached only through introspection.
Even though St Augustine was arguably influenced by Neo-Platonism, he was a Christian, and in his writing he had to be clear on the fact. St Augustine arguably lived in an age when the Church was still trying to define itself, and heresy was met with furious sanction. He could borrow from pagan philosophy, but only to the extent that it tallied with Christian doctrine. According to St Thomas, as reported in Maurer (1982, 5), “Whenever Augustine, who was imbued with the doctrines of the Platonists, found in their writings anything consistent with the faith, he adopted it; and whatever he found contrary to the faith, he amended.”
This post is interested in discussing truth as divine illumination, in line with St Augustine’s view on the subject as expressed in his illustrious work, The Teacher. It will, after a brief historical background on Augustine himself, aim at first summarizing the main points contained in The Teacher; secondly, addressing the concept of truth from the point of view of The Teacher, and finally unpacking the relevant concepts that impinge on the subject and related concerns from a philosophical standpoint. A background of Augustine is here apt and proceeds directly in the subsequent.
To begin with, Augustine was born in 354 CE, to middle class parents, Patrick and Monica. Even though his parents were not exceptionally wealthy, they endeavored to have him properly educated. Consequently, Augustine studied vastly in the Humanities, especially in Rhetoric, which he ended up teaching for a period. He taught Rhetoric with admirable distinction and was given numerous honors, being remembered for his astuteness, skill, talent and voracious appetite for learning and the communication of knowledge to his eager students, many of whom felt privileged to study under his tutelage.
He made some moral errors in his life’s journey though, and he felt perennially restless in his search for truth: He had sexual affairs with women with whom he was not married, one of whom bore him his son Adeodatus. He also indulged in bodily pleasures at the expense of his soul. He tried becoming a Manichean for a while, but when he realized that Manicheanism could not answer some of the questions he had about human purpose and his teleological direction, he abandoned the tradition.
One of the greatest influences in Augustine’s life throughout his search for truth was his mother Monica. She desperately wanted him to become a Christian, and she was concerned about his moral life, trying consistently to point him in the way of morality in the quest to save his immortal soul. Eventually, Augustine befriended St Ambrose, who was able to serve as a mentor, and teach the young Augustine how to be a Christian. St Augustine would later go on to become a baptized Christian, priest and bishop, and write several works in such a fashion as to be held as a Doctor of the Church and one of the most outstanding thinkers of the Medieval era. No one it seems can study medieval philosophy without studying in part at least what St Augustine wrote and thought and taught. The Teacher was written about the year 389 CE and is a dialog between Augustine and his then sixteen year old son, Adeodatus. He would later boast in the Confessions about how brilliant his son was to have pursued such an intellectual discourse, and how thankful he was to have watched the mind of his young son become formed in the manner of scholastic discipline. The work investigates to begin with the function of language in human communication. The first line in the work runs thus: “When we speak, what does it seem we want to accomplish?” (Augustine, The Teacher 1.1). The subsequent lines point out that the objectives of human communication using language are teaching and remembering, which are related.
Another important theme of the dialog, which derives from the foregoing, is that of signs and how they either align themselves with what they refer to, in which case they are effective signs and symbols, or do not align themselves to what they refer to, in which case they are not effective. In other words, the value of signs is not the sounds they produce which we hear, but the meanings they express. These meanings are commonly shared, and bear epistemological resemblance to reality for them to hold as true.
Some of the points raised in the dialog taking place in Augustine’s The Teacher are broached again in his treatise on human free will, especially when he mentions the fact that if truth is commonly shared and certain individuals feel a need to deviate from the usual notion of truth by their own free choice they would be clearly in error, and for their own fault, since their willfully falling into intellectual error could not have been caused by God, the one who calls humanity to the reality that lies within the self, through his work of illumination. Indeed, the importance of truth, and the significance of how it is come by are no mean considerations for Augustine. Truth is essential, as it were, to right conduct especially as a Christian, because truth is what ultimately saves the soul.
In other words, therefore, the ideal value – notice my use of the word ‘ideal’ here, and compare with the concept of idealism as it relates to Plato in the general quality of discourses contained in his works, including but not limited to The Republic – of language and human communication is to share truth, the truth that is attained by an introspective correspondence with God that illumines the human soul with divine truth. So, if words just consist of sounds, they are valueless. Animals, beings without reason, can make sounds, and they do so all the time, but they cannot verbally express truth like human beings can. As a matter of fact, for Augustine, if truth can be conveyed in other ways than through sounding it out by means of vocal expressions via the use of words, then such ways would be more valuable than speaking. This is because communication is purposeful, and the teleological underpinning of human communication would render it as pertinent to human edification, with an unyielding slant toward productive education and recollection, without which communication itself is cacophony and tantamount to noise and dross.
In The Teacher, Adeodatus initially tries to dispute that the chief functions of linguistic expression are teaching and remembering by stating that prayer and singing are linguistic communication, which do not teach or call us to remember anything. He states thus: “I would seldom sing to remind myself; I do it only to please myself.” Augustine however counters with vigorous argument by stating thus: “But aren’t you aware that what pleases you in a song is its melody? Since this melody can be either added to or taken away from the words, speaking is one thing and singing is another.” Adeodatus further argues: “It would seem so were I not troubled by the fact that we certainly speak while we are praying, and yet it isn’t right to believe that we teach God or remind him of anything.” To this argument, Augustine responds thus: “I dare say you don’t know that we are instructed to pray ‘in closed chambers’ – a phrase that signifies the inner recesses of the mind – precisely because God does not seek to be taught or reminded by our speaking in order to provide us what we want.” So, it is clear from the foregoing that the use of words must be valued only for their expression of meaning in a didactic way and for the added purpose of reflection, in the philosophical view of St Augustine.
That signs point to things and therefrom derive their value is a point that was not overemphasized in the dialog. Augustine states in this regard: “You grant that knowledge of things is more valuable that the signs of things, and for this reason knowledge of the things signified should be preferable to knowledge of their signs.” The argument against the foregoing as posed by Adeodatus concerned whether knowledge of say, actual filth with all its concomitant unpleasantness was not less preferable to the mere letters that spell “filth.” Nonetheless, Augustine is able to perennially persuade Adeodatus that signs are valuable chiefly in affording meaning, and meaning in teaching and recollecting truth.
Augustine’s works are autobiographical in many ways, and if one understands the pain he encounters in trying to discover truth, one no longer wonders as to why he considers the utility of lingual communication in advancing truth as singularly crucial. Maurer (1982, 7) states thus: “According to Augustine, the act of knowing goes inward toward oneself, not outward toward material things. To discover truth, one must enter into himself and know himself.” Again, notice the resemblance with the proposition of the Neo-Platonism, even though Augustine is speaking essentially as a Christian.
For Augustine, “truth is in the mind, but also above the mind because it is public and open to the gaze of everyone, just as a sensible object can be seen by all who look at it” (Maurer, 1982, 7), and the going inward into oneself is perennially to be preferred to reaching out toward material things. Even Aristotle, the realist that saw the eternal forms of things to exist in the things themselves, still advocated abstraction from particular examples of things, for he realized that no one object external to the mind embodies the paragon of the thingness of that object. No one rose could suffice for the understanding of rosiness, and no one man could suffice for the conception of humanity. The mental construct of everything then becomes the true yardstick for the measuring of reality, for Aristotle, for Plato, and for Augustine.
The value of true knowledge for Plato is similar to what it is for Augustine as well because it is transcendent of matter, like God is, and this transcendent God is the agent and first principle of reality. It is through his divine illumination that truth is communicated to humanity. This truth enlightens the soul, by casting light on spiritual reality in a similar fashion that the sun casts rays on physical reality (Maurer, 1982). The soul as recipient of this illumination is responsible for guiding the body in seeking the higher goods, and calling the will away from itself to focus neither on itself nor on bodily pleasures, but the higher, spiritual goods, like justice, rectitude and knowledge.
Augustine in any case is not a dualist. The body is not an evil trapper of the soul, in his view. God made the body as well as the soul, and so the body is not inherently evil. The soul is inclusive of the body, not existing separately from it. In all of this, notice that Augustine is at pains to think like a Christian, because for Christians, proper thought is important in addition to right deeds. True thought, which leads to true knowledge, is divine, and sacred. Maurer (1982, 10) sees this as different from mere abstraction in the Aristotelian sense. Not even Plato’s idealism effectively captures what Augustine has in mind.
The crucial variable that separates Augustine’s conception of the acquisition of truth from other philosophical schools is faith. For Augustine, the starting point in the acquisition of knowledge is faith. Compare this with Anselm’s depiction in the Proslogion: “faith seeking understanding.” This faith is in the God that is capable of illuminating the soul, in the eternal teacher that is able in the recesses of the human soul to point the way to rectitude. This is not simply the entering through contemplation into the world of forms, as is the case with Plato and his idealism, or a disciplined abstraction from individual samples of reality as is the case for Aristotle, but an a priori reception by faith of the gift of God directly to the soul.
Not even the sophists come close to what Augustine is getting at. The sophists teach speech not because they see it as efficacious for the communication of truth by way of education and recollection, but simply for the purpose of winning arguments in the public forum. Indeed, Augustine appears to come directly confrontational to the sophists. Veritable speech should bear epistemological reality to being as commonly recognized; truth as commonly shared. This is the only way communication is at all valuable – in its recollective and didactic application.
In short, this post has dealt with Augustine’s The Teacher and his view of truth as the sanctioning value of human communication. Through its utility in the quest for truth as recollected and taught, it has noted that Augustine, even if influenced by Plato’s philosophy, is essentially Christian and is interested in expounding on the incidence of divine illumination in its imparting truth to the human soul, so as to collect human beings into a believing community under the tutelage of the all-knowing God.
In his work, The Teacher, St Augustine states: “After all, who is so foolishly curious as to send his son to school to learn what the teacher thinks? When the teachers have explained by means of words all the disciplines they profess to teach, even the disciplines of virtue and of wisdom, then those who are called ‘students’ consider within themselves whether truths have been stated” (Augustine, The Teacher 14.45). By this, Augustine is promoting truth as superior to mere opinion, correct knowledge and understanding as opposed to the fruits of unguided fantasy and undisciplined imagination, both of which are erroneous.
The foregoing is synonymous with the teachings of Neo-Platonists, most notably Plotinus, who espoused the concept of the One. For Plotinus, there is a supreme, totally transcendent One, with no division or multiplicity, existing beyond all categories of being and non-being. This One is the source of reality, and is unchangeable. The One cannot be any individual existing thing, nor is it merely the sum of all things, but is prior to all existence. More so, the One according to Plotinus can be reached only through introspection.
Even though St Augustine was arguably influenced by Neo-Platonism, he was a Christian, and in his writing he had to be clear on the fact. St Augustine arguably lived in an age when the Church was still trying to define itself, and heresy was met with furious sanction. He could borrow from pagan philosophy, but only to the extent that it tallied with Christian doctrine. According to St Thomas, as reported in Maurer (1982, 5), “Whenever Augustine, who was imbued with the doctrines of the Platonists, found in their writings anything consistent with the faith, he adopted it; and whatever he found contrary to the faith, he amended.”
This post is interested in discussing truth as divine illumination, in line with St Augustine’s view on the subject as expressed in his illustrious work, The Teacher. It will, after a brief historical background on Augustine himself, aim at first summarizing the main points contained in The Teacher; secondly, addressing the concept of truth from the point of view of The Teacher, and finally unpacking the relevant concepts that impinge on the subject and related concerns from a philosophical standpoint. A background of Augustine is here apt and proceeds directly in the subsequent.
To begin with, Augustine was born in 354 CE, to middle class parents, Patrick and Monica. Even though his parents were not exceptionally wealthy, they endeavored to have him properly educated. Consequently, Augustine studied vastly in the Humanities, especially in Rhetoric, which he ended up teaching for a period. He taught Rhetoric with admirable distinction and was given numerous honors, being remembered for his astuteness, skill, talent and voracious appetite for learning and the communication of knowledge to his eager students, many of whom felt privileged to study under his tutelage.
He made some moral errors in his life’s journey though, and he felt perennially restless in his search for truth: He had sexual affairs with women with whom he was not married, one of whom bore him his son Adeodatus. He also indulged in bodily pleasures at the expense of his soul. He tried becoming a Manichean for a while, but when he realized that Manicheanism could not answer some of the questions he had about human purpose and his teleological direction, he abandoned the tradition.
One of the greatest influences in Augustine’s life throughout his search for truth was his mother Monica. She desperately wanted him to become a Christian, and she was concerned about his moral life, trying consistently to point him in the way of morality in the quest to save his immortal soul. Eventually, Augustine befriended St Ambrose, who was able to serve as a mentor, and teach the young Augustine how to be a Christian. St Augustine would later go on to become a baptized Christian, priest and bishop, and write several works in such a fashion as to be held as a Doctor of the Church and one of the most outstanding thinkers of the Medieval era. No one it seems can study medieval philosophy without studying in part at least what St Augustine wrote and thought and taught. The Teacher was written about the year 389 CE and is a dialog between Augustine and his then sixteen year old son, Adeodatus. He would later boast in the Confessions about how brilliant his son was to have pursued such an intellectual discourse, and how thankful he was to have watched the mind of his young son become formed in the manner of scholastic discipline. The work investigates to begin with the function of language in human communication. The first line in the work runs thus: “When we speak, what does it seem we want to accomplish?” (Augustine, The Teacher 1.1). The subsequent lines point out that the objectives of human communication using language are teaching and remembering, which are related.
Another important theme of the dialog, which derives from the foregoing, is that of signs and how they either align themselves with what they refer to, in which case they are effective signs and symbols, or do not align themselves to what they refer to, in which case they are not effective. In other words, the value of signs is not the sounds they produce which we hear, but the meanings they express. These meanings are commonly shared, and bear epistemological resemblance to reality for them to hold as true.
Some of the points raised in the dialog taking place in Augustine’s The Teacher are broached again in his treatise on human free will, especially when he mentions the fact that if truth is commonly shared and certain individuals feel a need to deviate from the usual notion of truth by their own free choice they would be clearly in error, and for their own fault, since their willfully falling into intellectual error could not have been caused by God, the one who calls humanity to the reality that lies within the self, through his work of illumination. Indeed, the importance of truth, and the significance of how it is come by are no mean considerations for Augustine. Truth is essential, as it were, to right conduct especially as a Christian, because truth is what ultimately saves the soul.
In other words, therefore, the ideal value – notice my use of the word ‘ideal’ here, and compare with the concept of idealism as it relates to Plato in the general quality of discourses contained in his works, including but not limited to The Republic – of language and human communication is to share truth, the truth that is attained by an introspective correspondence with God that illumines the human soul with divine truth. So, if words just consist of sounds, they are valueless. Animals, beings without reason, can make sounds, and they do so all the time, but they cannot verbally express truth like human beings can. As a matter of fact, for Augustine, if truth can be conveyed in other ways than through sounding it out by means of vocal expressions via the use of words, then such ways would be more valuable than speaking. This is because communication is purposeful, and the teleological underpinning of human communication would render it as pertinent to human edification, with an unyielding slant toward productive education and recollection, without which communication itself is cacophony and tantamount to noise and dross.
In The Teacher, Adeodatus initially tries to dispute that the chief functions of linguistic expression are teaching and remembering by stating that prayer and singing are linguistic communication, which do not teach or call us to remember anything. He states thus: “I would seldom sing to remind myself; I do it only to please myself.” Augustine however counters with vigorous argument by stating thus: “But aren’t you aware that what pleases you in a song is its melody? Since this melody can be either added to or taken away from the words, speaking is one thing and singing is another.” Adeodatus further argues: “It would seem so were I not troubled by the fact that we certainly speak while we are praying, and yet it isn’t right to believe that we teach God or remind him of anything.” To this argument, Augustine responds thus: “I dare say you don’t know that we are instructed to pray ‘in closed chambers’ – a phrase that signifies the inner recesses of the mind – precisely because God does not seek to be taught or reminded by our speaking in order to provide us what we want.” So, it is clear from the foregoing that the use of words must be valued only for their expression of meaning in a didactic way and for the added purpose of reflection, in the philosophical view of St Augustine.
That signs point to things and therefrom derive their value is a point that was not overemphasized in the dialog. Augustine states in this regard: “You grant that knowledge of things is more valuable that the signs of things, and for this reason knowledge of the things signified should be preferable to knowledge of their signs.” The argument against the foregoing as posed by Adeodatus concerned whether knowledge of say, actual filth with all its concomitant unpleasantness was not less preferable to the mere letters that spell “filth.” Nonetheless, Augustine is able to perennially persuade Adeodatus that signs are valuable chiefly in affording meaning, and meaning in teaching and recollecting truth.
Augustine’s works are autobiographical in many ways, and if one understands the pain he encounters in trying to discover truth, one no longer wonders as to why he considers the utility of lingual communication in advancing truth as singularly crucial. Maurer (1982, 7) states thus: “According to Augustine, the act of knowing goes inward toward oneself, not outward toward material things. To discover truth, one must enter into himself and know himself.” Again, notice the resemblance with the proposition of the Neo-Platonism, even though Augustine is speaking essentially as a Christian.
For Augustine, “truth is in the mind, but also above the mind because it is public and open to the gaze of everyone, just as a sensible object can be seen by all who look at it” (Maurer, 1982, 7), and the going inward into oneself is perennially to be preferred to reaching out toward material things. Even Aristotle, the realist that saw the eternal forms of things to exist in the things themselves, still advocated abstraction from particular examples of things, for he realized that no one object external to the mind embodies the paragon of the thingness of that object. No one rose could suffice for the understanding of rosiness, and no one man could suffice for the conception of humanity. The mental construct of everything then becomes the true yardstick for the measuring of reality, for Aristotle, for Plato, and for Augustine.
The value of true knowledge for Plato is similar to what it is for Augustine as well because it is transcendent of matter, like God is, and this transcendent God is the agent and first principle of reality. It is through his divine illumination that truth is communicated to humanity. This truth enlightens the soul, by casting light on spiritual reality in a similar fashion that the sun casts rays on physical reality (Maurer, 1982). The soul as recipient of this illumination is responsible for guiding the body in seeking the higher goods, and calling the will away from itself to focus neither on itself nor on bodily pleasures, but the higher, spiritual goods, like justice, rectitude and knowledge.
Augustine in any case is not a dualist. The body is not an evil trapper of the soul, in his view. God made the body as well as the soul, and so the body is not inherently evil. The soul is inclusive of the body, not existing separately from it. In all of this, notice that Augustine is at pains to think like a Christian, because for Christians, proper thought is important in addition to right deeds. True thought, which leads to true knowledge, is divine, and sacred. Maurer (1982, 10) sees this as different from mere abstraction in the Aristotelian sense. Not even Plato’s idealism effectively captures what Augustine has in mind.
The crucial variable that separates Augustine’s conception of the acquisition of truth from other philosophical schools is faith. For Augustine, the starting point in the acquisition of knowledge is faith. Compare this with Anselm’s depiction in the Proslogion: “faith seeking understanding.” This faith is in the God that is capable of illuminating the soul, in the eternal teacher that is able in the recesses of the human soul to point the way to rectitude. This is not simply the entering through contemplation into the world of forms, as is the case with Plato and his idealism, or a disciplined abstraction from individual samples of reality as is the case for Aristotle, but an a priori reception by faith of the gift of God directly to the soul.
Not even the sophists come close to what Augustine is getting at. The sophists teach speech not because they see it as efficacious for the communication of truth by way of education and recollection, but simply for the purpose of winning arguments in the public forum. Indeed, Augustine appears to come directly confrontational to the sophists. Veritable speech should bear epistemological reality to being as commonly recognized; truth as commonly shared. This is the only way communication is at all valuable – in its recollective and didactic application.
In short, this post has dealt with Augustine’s The Teacher and his view of truth as the sanctioning value of human communication. Through its utility in the quest for truth as recollected and taught, it has noted that Augustine, even if influenced by Plato’s philosophy, is essentially Christian and is interested in expounding on the incidence of divine illumination in its imparting truth to the human soul, so as to collect human beings into a believing community under the tutelage of the all-knowing God.
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