I. PRELIMINARIES
Topic: ST. AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO
II. OUTLINE
- Profile of St. Augustine
1.Personal
2. Education
3. Family, Work & Religion
B. Context
C. The Educational Significance of St. Augustine Aims of Education
- Principles of Education
1. Opposes sense experience
2. Truth is absolute.
3. Authoritarian.
4. Discipline.
5. Curriculum
E. The Importance of Augustinian Educational Thought
1. Universal Influence
2. Moral Strength
3. Retarded Scientific Growth
III. INTRODUCTION
One of the significant developments in the western philosophical tradition was the eventually widespread merging of the Greek philosophical tradition and the Judeo-Christian religious and scriptural traditions. Augustine is one of the main figures through and by whom this merging was accomplished. He is, as well, one of the towering figures of medieval philosophy whose authority and thought came to exert a pervasive and enduring influence well into the modern period and even up to the present day, especially among those sympathetic to the religious tradition which he helped to shape. But even for those who do not share this sympathy, there is much in Augustine's thought that is worthy of serious philosophical attention. Augustine is not only one of the major sources whereby classical philosophy in general and Neo-Platonism in particular enter into the mainstream of early and subsequent medieval philosophy, but there are significant contributions of his own that emerge from his modification of that Greco-Roman inheritance, e.g., his subtle accounts of belief and authority, his account of knowledge and illumination, his emphasis upon the importance and centrality of the will, and his focus upon a new way of conceptualizing the phenomena of human history
Saint Augustine was the greatest of the Christian writers. He exerted immense influence on the Church and his educational views were adopted and followed for many centuries.
IV. DISCUSSION
A. Profile
1. Personal
Aurelius Augustinus, more known as “St. Augustine of Hippo,” or simply “Augustine” was born on November 13, 354 A.D. in Thagaste, North Africa (now, Algeria) by parents, Patricius and Monica. Their family belongs to the comfortable middle class.
2. Education
He was educated in Thagaste, Madauros, and Carthage.
3. Family, Work & Religion
Sometime around 370, he began a thirteen-year, monogamous relationship with the mother of his son, Adeodatus (born 372). He subsequently taught rhetoric in Thagaste and Carthage, and in 383 he made the risk-laden journey from Northern Africa to Rome, seeking the better sort of students that was rumored to be there. Disappointed by the moral quality of those students (academically superior to his previous students, they nonetheless had an annoying tendency to disappear without paying their fees), he successfully applied for a professorship of rhetoric in Milan. Augustine's professional ambitions pointed in the direction of an arranged marriage, and this in turn entailed a separation from his long-time companion and mother of his son. After this separation, however, Augustine abruptly resigned his professorship in 386 claiming ill health and renounced his professional ambitions.
Although his father was a Pagan and his mother was a Devout Christian, Augustine, adopted the Manichean faith until he was baptized to Christianity with his son, Adeodatus by Bishop Ambrose of Milan on Easter Sunday, 387, after spending four months at Cassiciacum where he composed his earliest extant works. Shortly thereafter, Augustine began his return to Northern Africa, but not before his mother died at Ostia, a seaport outside Rome, while awaiting the voyage across the Mediterranean. Not too long after this, Augustine, now back in Thagaste, also lost his son (389).
The remainder of his years would be spent immersed in the affairs and controversies of the Church into which he had been recently baptized, a Church that henceforth provided for Augustine the crucial nexus of relations that his family and friends had once been. In 391, Augustine was reluctantly ordained as a priest by the congregation of Hippo Regius (a not uncommon practice in Northern Africa), in 395 he was made Bishop, and he died August 430 in Hippo, thirty-five years later, as the Vandals were besieging the gates of the city.
- E. Context
Born on 354 and died in 430 A.D, Augustine lived his life for seventy-five years, of which only four years were spent outside North Africa. Of the seventy-one remaining, fifty-seven were spent in far-flung places like Thagaste and Hippo Regius. These places belong to Roman provinces, neither notable for either cultural or commercial prominence.
However, the few years Augustine spent away from Northern Africa made an incalculable influence upon his thought, and his geographical distance from the major intellectual and political capitals of the Later Roman Empire should not obscure the tremendous influence he came to exert even in his own lifetime. He was a long time resident and, eventually, Bishop in Northern Africa whose thought was changed during the short time he stayed in Rome and Milan, far away from the provincial context where he was born and died and spent almost all of the years in between.
From his own account, he was a precocious and able student, who loves Latin classics, Virgil in particular. However, when he was nineteen, he happened upon Cicero's Hortensius, and he found himself suddenly imbued with a passion for philosophy. It is clear from his account of Cicero's effect upon him that his passion was not for philosophy as often understood today, but rather as the paradigmatically Hellenistic pursuit of wisdom. In particular, philosophy for Augustine was centered on what is sometimes misleadingly referred to as “the problem of evil.” This problem was not the sort of analytic, largely logical problem of theodicy that later came to preoccupy philosophers of religion. For Augustine, the problem was of a more general and visceral sort: it was the concern with the issue of how to make sense of and live within a world that seemed so adversarial and fraught with danger, a world in which so much of what matters most to us is so easily lost. In this sense, the wisdom that Augustine sought was a common denominator uniting the conflicting views of such Hellenistic philosophical sects as the Epicureans, Stoics, Skeptics, and Neoplatonists (though this is a later title) such as Plotinus and Porphyry, as well as many Christians of varying degrees of orthodoxy, including very unorthodox gnostic sects such as the Manicheans.
Augustine had a philosophical framework far more pliable and enduring than he himself is willing to admit in his later works. Moreover, this framework itself forms an important part of the philosophical legacy that Augustine bequeathed to both the medieval and modern periods.
- F. The Educational Importance of St. Augustine Aims of Education
Augustine continued the Christian emphasis upon the future life of man, stressing that this life is merely a preparation for the life to come. A man is educated when his moral character and understanding of his faith are developed to their fullest potential
D. Principles of Education
The following concepts describe Augustinian thought regarding education:
1. Opposes sense experience.
Man, must realize that the senses deceive him. Truth and goodness exist only in God. Man arrives at genuine knowledge and virtue after he controls his senses and frees his spirit to intuit God by reason of the supernatural life. This life is given to man when he is baptized.
2. Truth is absolute.
Truth is not discovered through experimentation. It is found within the Catholic Church alone. This truth is eternal and unchanging.
3. Authoritarian.
Truth is, defined by the Church. The individual must accept obediently whatever the Church declares as truth. The individual is not free to follow whatever direction his reason takes him.
4. Discipline.
Although Augustine deplored cruelty, he asserted that punishment is necessary for the child to learn. Because of original sin, the pupil is inclined toward evil. He must be restrained and punished physically when it becomes apparent that his evil inclinations are not subdued.
5. Curriculum.
The content of the child's education should include the secular learning of the pagans, in order to enrich the student's appreciation of sacred scripture. The study of rhetoric, grammar, logic, mathematics, science and philosophy provide a background for the student who intends to arrive at genuine knowledge in the study of theology. Augustine was in favor of censoring strictly the literary content of the child's reading, lest the child be turned away from virtue.
E. The Importance of Augustinian Educational Thought
1. Universal influence.
The writings of Augustine were accepted by the Church and, through the Church, influenced subsequent educational theory for over a thousand years.
2. Moral Strength.
The moral education of a Europe over-run by barbarians, demanded a rigorous ethical foundation in which a civilization could grow and prosper. Augustine contributed to this moral improvement.
3. Retarded scientific growth.
Passive acceptance of absolute truths retarded the free inquiry necessary for scientific growth. Furthermore, the subordination of secular sciences and philosophy to theology inhibited the freedom of inquiry and exploration necessary to higher education.
VI. Summary
Saint Augustine of Hippo was one of the fathers of the Christian church. Augustine piety established norms for Christian devotional life, spiritual growth, systematic theology, and patterns of morality.
VII. Sources
http://www.suite101.com/content/st-augustine-and-philosophy-a203041 July 14 6:23pm
http://www.examiner.com/catholic-in-st-petersburg/st-augustine-poverty-and-simplicity-and-the-great-local-treasure July 14, 2011 6:27
http://www.newfoundations.com/GALLERY/Augustine.html July 14, 2011 6:18pm
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/ July 3, 2011 11:25pm
http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/agexed/aee501/augustine.html July 3, 2011 11:30pm
Grolier Encyclopedia of Knowledge, Vol. 2. p. 260-261
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