Augustine and Liberal Education

Kim Paffenroth, Kevin L. Hughes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351761635
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This title was first published in 2000: Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE) - Bishop, theologian, philosopher, and rhetorician - has left a rich legacy for reflection upon relationships between Christianity and culture, between Christian catechesis and liberal education, and between faith and reason. Contemporary educational institutions have begun to explore their roots, digging into their intellectual traditions for the resources for renewal of liberal education. Augustine and Liberal Education sheds light on liberal education past and present, from an Augustinian point of view. Ranging from historical investigations of particular themes and issues in the thought of Saint Augustine, to reflections on the role of tradition and community and the challenges and opportunities facing universities in the next century, the contributors return to the sources of traditional reflection whilst exploring contemporary issues of education and 'the good life'. Essays on Augustinian inquiry in medieval and modern eras address critical questions on the role of rhetoric, reading, and authority in education, on the social context of learning, and on the relationship between liberal education and properly Christian catechesis. Contemporary questions on liberal education from philosophical, political, theological, and ethical perspectives are then explored in the essays which move from the past to the present. This book offers a valuable contribution to the growing scholarship on Catholic universities and on Augustine of Hippo, engaging in 'Augustinian inquiry' and pointing to possibilities for renewal in liberal education in the twenty-first century.

PART I

EDUCATION IN THE CONFESSIONS

Chapter One

Bad Habits and Bad Company: Education and Evil in the Confessions

Kim Paffenroth

Introduction

As I have indicated formally and informally to my colleagues, readers, and students, many of my ideas for research and publication stem from my teaching of undergraduates, and this paper is no exception, as it comes directly from the questions raised in discussions with freshmen at the University of Notre Dame and at Villanova University. It therefore seems especially appropriate to include this essay here, in a collection intended to explore and elaborate the implications for modern education of the thought of Augustine, one of the greatest practitioners and theorists of pedagogy. It is also a perfect example of the benefits of learner based, active education, as I have learned more in my seminars than I could ever hope to in a lecture course.

In class discussions of the pear tree incident in Book 2 of Augustine’s Confessions, students have in my experience consistently focused on the role of peer pressure in driving Augustine to commit the theft. And try as I might to steer them towards the real point of the story — to show the innate evil of humanity and to prove that Plato was wrong, that a person can and does commit evil actions knowing and loving them for their evil — the students always come back to the peer pressure: “Well, yes, he loved evil for its own sake and that makes him feel worse, but he wouldn’t have done it if it weren’t for his friends egging him on.” I seldom mistake student intractability for insight, but this time they have the text on their side: “Yet alone, by myself, I would not have done it — such, I remember, was my state of mind at the time—alone I would never have done it.”¹ Why does Augustine distract from his main point by bringing up the seemingly ancillary issue of peer pressure or bad influences from outside? This has led me to a more general consideration of the dynamics between good and evil, individuals and groups in the Confessions. The relation is especially important in the case of education, and I believe it has important implications for modern pedagogy.

Bad Company: The Pear Tree

Let us first look at the pear tree incident in Book 2, to see how the issue of peer pressure is raised. When Augustine first describes the theft, his companions are barely mentioned: “Late night — to which hour, according to our pestilential custom, we had kept up our street games — a group of very bad youngsters set out to shake down and rob this tree” (Conf.2.4.9). The influence of Augustine’s companions is clearly negative — they inculcate “pestilential custom[s]” in one another — but hardly crucial. Augustine does not say whose idea the theft was, and the companions’ influence at first seems confined only to encouraging Augustine to stay out late; they do not seem to encourage him to steal. And when in the next paragraph Augustine turns to analyze the act, the companions disappear completely:

Behold my heart, O Lord, behold my heart upon which you had mercy in the depths of the pit. Behold, now let my heart tell you what it looked for there, that I should be evil without purpose and that there should be no cause for my evil but evil itself. Foul was the evil, and I loved it. I loved to go down to death. I loved my fault, not that for which I did the fault, but I loved my fault itself. Base in soul was I, and I leaped down from your firm clasp even towards complete destruction, and I sought nothing from the shameful deed but shame itself! (Conf.2.4.9)

From this description, a reader would surely not expect the subsequent statement that the companions were instrumental to Augustine’s act of theft. In this description, they seem to be mere bystanders to the real drama, which is a confrontation between Augustine and evil.

That Augustine chose evil for its own sake in this case is clearly the central problem for him, but its exact implications for him are harder to elaborate. I have already characterized the point of the story as anti-Platonic, but this requires some nuance. On the one hand, Augustine later invokes Platonic ideas of the non-existence of evil as a solution to his problems with evil: “…evil is only the privation of a good, even to the point of complete nonentity…. Therefore, whatsoever things exist are good” (Conf.3.7.12; 7.12.18).² But on the other hand, in his description of the pear tree incident, he insists that he knowingly chose evil for its own sake, and this would clearly seem to go against Platonic doctrine that all evil is chosen because some good is sought in it. From a Platonic point of view, evil actions are only misguided: “With regard to all these things, and others of like nature, sins are committed when, out of an immoderate liking for them, since they are the least goods, we desert the best and highest goods” (Conf.2.5.10). While this may explain almost all sins, Augustine knows that if he can find one exception, then the system falls apart, and he thinks he has just such an exception with the pear tree. By insisting that he chose evil knowing it to be evil, Augustine has described it in a way that goes beyond a Platonic explanation. He insists that evil can be knowingly embraced with a kind of simultaneous attraction and revulsion that cannot be reduced to a mere mistake, but indicates a real and fundamental perversion in human beings.³

This points to the fundamental paradox of evil for Augustine: evil is at one and the same time non-existent, yet extremely powerful.⁴ This paradox provided the basis of my Core Humanities course this spring, as it has been a powerful influence in literature dealing with evil: it is a measure of their greatness that authors like Milton, Dostoevsky, and Flannery O’Connor can simultaneously depict evil as utterly empty, yet terrifying in its power. For Augustine, this paradox arises in part from combining Platonic and Manichaean descriptions of evil, in order to create what he hopes is an adequate (if not always wholly satisfying) Christian account of evil. From the Platonic description of evil, Augustine takes the idea that evil is not a thing, a nothing, a lack, only a privation of the good, and has no separate existence on its own; and from the Manichaean description, he takes the idea that evil does exist, that it is actively and powerfully opposed to the good, and although it may not be as material as he once thought,⁵ it is very real. But furthering the paradox is the fact that both the Platonic and Manichaean descriptions of evil are finally deficient for Augustine because neither adequately reckons with the power of evil, for both of them depict it as ultimately powerless and inconsequential. This is clearest for the Platonic view,⁶ but it is equally so for the Manichaean: “I still thought that it was not ourselves who sin, but that some sort of different nature within us commits the sin. It gave joy to my pride to be above all guilt” (Conf.5.10.18).⁷ Any description of evil that regards it as not essentially part of the human person — either because it is only a mistake or because it is a substance wholly different and other from the human person — is inadequate and untrue for Augustine. If the Platonists are right, then all we need is education and guidance so as not to mistake evil for good, or lesser goods for greater ones; if the Manichees are right, then all we need is to divorce ourselves from the evil that has accidentally (and not essentially) become associated with us in our present incarnation. If either is correct, then we do not need the sacrifice of Christ or the grace of God, and “Christ died to no purpose” (Gal 2:21).

I take it then that the pear tree episode is the epitome of this paradox of evil. Augustine knowingly chooses nothingness instead of the infinity of God’s goodness and love; he does not do this as a mistake, but with complete knowledge of what he is doing, even if he cannot say why he is doing it. (All of this, it must be understood, is from the point of view of Augustine’s later telling of the story.) What can we now say about the part his companions play in this story that illustrates the paradoxical nature of evil? Their role has sometimes been taken as resolving the paradox. This could be done in one of two ways. Either the friendship is the lesser good that Augustine sought in the theft, and therefore the theft is understandable in Platonic terms: “Therefore, I also loved in it my association with the others with whom I did the deed” (Conf. 2.8.16).⁸ Augustine did love “something,” not “nothing”; even if that “something” is small and petty, it is not “nothing.” But since the point of the story is to discredit (or at least move beyond) the Platonic description of evil, this interpretation clearly seems unacceptable. Augustine is equally adamant that he did love “nothing”: “What fruit had I… from that theft in which I loved the theft itself and nothing else? For the theft itself was nothing” (Conf.2.8.16). On the other hand, the companionship could resolve the paradox by being the final example of Augustine loving “nothing”: “…my association with the others was itself nothing” (Conf.2.8.16).⁹ Although this seems closer to Augustine’s thought, in that it does not reduce the scene to a Platonic explanation, the role of the friends seems again to be exaggerated. Augustine says he would not have committed the theft without his companions; he does not say that he committed it for the sake of their companionship. The companionship is at most a facilitation or enabling of his evil, not its goal or cause.

I think that the evil companionship is essentially another element of the paradox of evil, not a resolution to it, as indicated with Augustine’s oxymoronic cry, “O friendship too unfriendly!” (Conf.2.8.17). It is perhaps best seen as parallel to the pear tree story, not part of it. Loving the emptiness and uselessness of the theft is analogous to loving the emptiness and uselessness of his relationship with these friends, and neither admits of an explanation or reduction, except that both are powerful manifestations of evil. Empty, useless relationships are just as symptomatic of evil as empty, useless acts, and both are equally destructive. Both are strands of the confusing “knot” of sin that ends Book 2: “Who can untie this most twisted and intricate mass of knots? It is a filthy thing: I do not wish to think about it; I do not wish to look upon it” (Conf.2.10.18).¹⁰

Although the “knot” imagery is prevalent at the end of Book 2, it is the imagery of “itching” that seems most relevant to Augustine’s experience with his companions in theft. Augustine begins both Books 2 and 3 by indicating that his attachments to other people were the source of his problems: “What was there to bring me delight except to love and be loved?… I came to Carthage, where a caldron of shameful loves seethed and sounded me about on every side. I was not yet in love, but I was in love with love” (Conf.2.2.2; 3.1.1). Augustine seems never to have been guilty of a deficiency of love, but rather always a surfeit. And these loves make Augustine “burn” and “itch”: “Hence came my love for such sorrows… I was scratched lightly, as it were. As a result, as though from scratches made by fingernails, there followed a burning tumor and horrid pus and wasting away” (Conf.3.2.4). The companionship of his fellow thieves is also described as “itching”:

If I had then merely liked the pears that I stole, and merely wished to eat them, I could have done so by myself, were doing that wrong deed enough to lead me to my pleasure. Nor would I have needed to arouse the itch of my desires by a rubbing together of guilty minds. But my pleasure lay not in the pears: it lay in the evil deed itself, which a group of us joined in sin to do. (Conf.2.8.16)

Again, this quotation makes clear that Augustine did not find in the companionship the object of his love or pleasure. The choice of the “itching” imagery seems to fit Augustine’s purposes particularly well here. An itch is not a cause of disease, but rather a symptom, just as the friends are not the cause of sin, but just another symptom. Likewise, scratching only makes something itch worse, just as the sinful friendship, the “rubbing together of guilty minds,” only leads to more sinful behavior. Augustine’s image brings out both the diseased nature of sin itself, as well as the compounding of it by the addictiveness of its symptoms.

Augustine did not commit the theft for the sake of this sinful friendship, but it is clear that this friendship exacerbated the pride, vanity, selfishness, and love of “deformed liberty” (Conf.2.6.14), that are part of sin. While the group may not cause sin, it clearly leads to more sinfulness on Augustine’s part. This seems to be part of an overall pattern in the Confessions of depicting group activities or human society in general as leading to greater evil and sin,¹¹ without removing the blame from the individual and placing it on the group. Indeed, the acquisitio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Foreword by John Immerwahr, Kim Paffenroth, and Kevin L. Hughes
• PART I: EDUCATION IN THE CONFESSIONS
• PART II: EDUCATION IN AUGUSTINE’S OTHER WORKS
• PART III: TEACHING AND AUTHORITY IN AUGUSTINE
• PART IV: LIBERAL EDUCATION SINCE AUGUSTINE