By Maureen McKew

". . . who is so foolishly curious that he would send his son to school in order to learn what the teacher thinks? But all those disciplines that teachers claim to teach, even those of virtue and wisdom, they explain with words. Then those who are called students consider within themselves whether what was said is true, each consulting that inner truth according tho his own ability. Thus they learn.

St. Augustine, De magistro

(Translated by Kim Paffenroth)

As much as anything else he wrote, these few sentences from De Magistro (The Teacher) illustrate the role St. Augustine carves out for professional educators and how they teach. Written in about the year 389, they continue to inspire educators and fuel scholarly debate in the Core Humanities Seminar for first year Villanovans, and on countless campuses - secular and religious - worldwide.

Augustine was well qualified to write on the subject of teaching and learning. And write he did in his Confessions, in De magistro, and in De doctrina Christiana (on Christian Teaching), to mention just three of his works. In De doctrina Christiana, he pretty much takes the liberal arts, as they were taught in his time, to the woodshed. He castigates the liberal arts, whose chief purpose was to bring praise to the teacher and the student, and considers them to be a serious impediment to the search for the divine. For Augustine, everything must lead to God.

Many Augustine scholars of our time, including Henri Marrou, Eugene Kavane and Frederick van Fleteren, have characterized De doctrina Christiana as a blueprint or charter for a Christian culture, turning the purpose of classical education toward Christianity. Others think that Augustine wanted to drop the liberal arts completely from education.

This debate among scholars on just how Augustine saw the value of the liberal arts – or if he did at all - is one of many topics addressed in a slender but intellectually power-packed collections of essays, titled Augustine and Liberal Education,(2000, Ashgate Publishing Company, Burlington, Vt., 215 pp., $69.95), edited by Dr. Kim Paffenroth and Dr. Kevin L. Hughes ‘91A&S. Both scholars have been among the University’s Arthur. M. Ennis Post-Doctoral Fellows, whose mission is to teach in the Core Humanities Program. After completing a three-year term as an Ennis Fellow, Paffenroth went on to become a Rocco A. Barbieri Fellow. This fall, he will join thet at Villanova.

The book was conceived in 1998 as a festschrift (German for gift book) to honor Dr. John A. Doody, assistant dean, Core Humanities, College of Arts and Sciences, upon his appointment to the Robert M. Birmingham Endowed Chair in Core Humanities, and to celebrate two Villanova achievements in which Doody played a pivotal role: the development of the Core Humanities Program and the institution of the Ennis Fellows. Traditionally, these books are given for scholars who are about to retire or celebrate milestone birthdays, and contain essays by that scholars most dstinguished students.

Doody, it should be noted, is far from retirement age and fitted recently with a new hip, he’s more energetic than ever. Moreover, he views the fest schrift as a tribute to the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, to Core Humanities and to the Ennis Fellows rather than simply to himself.

Paffenroth explained the reason for Doody’s festschrift. "Many of these books are written not very sincerely; they’re often written for scholars by people who may not necessarily feel any affection or gratitude, but not this one. All of us in the Core feel tremendous gratitude to Jack but because he doesn’t teach graduate students, he would not necessarily have students who go on to academic careers. Therefore he would not receive one of these books. So I thought that we, his colleagues in the Core, should fix that.

"Then, in terms of content, I thought, what better unifies us as a group than our love and commitment to undergraduate liberal arts education, the Augustinian vision of that, and the way Augustine himself informs that practice."

Kevin Hughes, interestingly, is a Villanova graduate/academic who owes his career to St. Augustine and to one of the world’s foremost authorities on Augustine. When he arrived at Villanova as a freshman in the fall of 1987, he had already mapped a career path. He would graduate from Villanova, earn a master’s from a top foreign service school, and then head for the U.S. State Department.

Hughes enrolled in the Honors Interdisciplinary Sequence, from which the Core Humanities Program was derived and encountered Augustine’s The City of God for the first time, under the tutelage of Dr. John Cavadini, who was teaching theology at Villanova at the time. Cavadini is now on the faculty of Notre Dame University, South Bend, Ind.

"All of sudden, things made sense in a way they hadn’t made sense before," Hughes recalled recently. "Of course, there many decisions between that encounter and a Ph.D., but that was the spark. Something happened to me in that first semester of freshman year that made me look at my plans and say ‘Is that really what I want?’ Lord knows, I never left Augustine since. I’m still teaching The City of God and I still use the same text I used at the age of 18."

Jack Doody remembers that the experience of Hughes and others in Cavadini’s classes led him to a closer examination of Augustine.

"I got Inter-Disc students as sophomores and I had to come to grips with what Augustine was saying because students like Kevin Hughes arrived in my class with the message of Augustine under their belts and were using what they had learned to ask questions about what I was teaching in philosophy. So II would be talking about people like Marx, Freud, Weber and people like them, people who were part of the nineteenth century Enlightenment Project. The Enlightenment was about freedom and rationality, the demise of authority, the unfettering of traditional conventions. Kevin and the others brought the Augustine concern for humility and lack of pride. If the Enlightenment Project is about anything, it’s about pride in human progress, in a human’s ability to be resourceful in solving problems they see as existing in this world. So, through the concerns of the Kevin and others who had studied The City of God with Cavadini, my first serious thought of Augustine was to see him as a critic of the Enlightenment."

Doody’s interest in Augustine has continued to flower through his work with the Ennis Fellows and the Core Humanities. He was happily surprised when he learned he was to be honored with the fest schrift, Augustine and Liberal Education. "It might just be the nicest thing anyone ever did for me in academics," Doody said.

In his essay, "The ‘Arts Reputed Liberal,’" Kevin Hughes addresses "a certain irony in holding up Augustine as an icon for the Christian teacher-scholar." He describes Augustine’s early, pre-conversion career as an academic on a career fast track, as he moved from Thagaste to Carthage to Rome and finally to Milan and the court of the Roman emperor. If tenure had existed in Augustine’s time, he no doubt would have focused on it the way a jockey eyes the finish line at the Kentucky Derby.

After his conversion in 386, he and a few like-minded associates moved to Cassiciacum, believed to be a villa about 21 miles northeast of Milan, to live humbly; to unlearn what Kim Paffenroth describes in his essay as "bad habits" of learning and teaching, and to avoid the "bad company" of his younger days. Augustine, of course, was destined for a more public life.

Paffenroth, whose essay is titled, "Bad Habits and Bad Company, Education and Evil," writes eloquently of Augustine as a model for teachers, reminding them - and himself - that they must be humble. They are not in a classroom to indoctrinate students or dazzle them with their intellectual prowess, but rather to facilitate students in the search for their own truth.

Writes Paffenroth: "For Augustine, learning, like conversion, is ultimately an inner, solitary act, an encounter between the learner and the truth. The occasions provided by the teacher may be a crucial one indeed . . . but the teacher must ultimately acknowledge his or her limited role, as well as acknowledging the primacy of the learner."

Another essay in Augustine and Liberal Education, "Augustine’s Confessions as Pedagogy," the Rev. Thomas F. Martin, O.S.A., explores the motives behind Augustine’s Confessions. Most obvious is his profession of his own faith. However, Father Martin argues, Augustine was also concerned with the reader. "While the Confessions may initially appear to be all about Augustine, this itself is perhaps (ironically) a device to draw his audience in for a closer look at themselves," Father Martin writes and goes on to uncover a "subtle pedagogy in the narrative and its unfolding."

Dr. Phillip Cary, one of the first Ennis Fellows, now directs the philosophy program of Eastern College in St. Davids, Pa. His essay addresses "Study as Love: Augustinian Vision and Catholic Education." Cary writes: "In his treatise, On the Trinity, Augustine treats study as a form of love, the desire to learn what one does not yet know. . . . The basic idea is that the inquiring mind desires to pass from (sensible) words to (intelligible) things, and this desire is nothing other than the love of truth." Cary describes learning and teaching as two expression of love in Augustine’s philosophy "While study is the love of truth, and therefore falls under the first and greatest commandment (‘You shall love the Lord your God . . . ’), teaching demands love of another human being, and therefore falls under the second great commandment (‘Love your neighbor as yourself.)."

Other essays examine Augustine as a bishop exercising his responsibility as chief teacher in his diocese of Hippo, Augustine’s pedagogy of intellectual liberation, the effect of modern liberalism on liberal education, and more.

A particularly appealing piece by Dr. Marylu Hill examines the value which Augustine placed on the experience of solitary reading, and the need for it in today’s higher education. She worries that the popular discussion format may not sufficiently emphasize the need for reading the material to be discussed. How often, she asks, have teachers reading papers on a particular text found themselves and their comments as footnotes instead the text itself? How often has a student’s comprehension of a text not included insights from personal reading, but instead relied on a class discussion? Her suggestions for countering such practices, if adopted, might revolutionize higher education.

Augustine and Liberal Education is an important resource for anyone thinking about or thinking back on an experience of higher education. It is a superb guide for conscientious teachers at all levels of education, and allows all readers a look at Augustine’s own philosophy of teaching and learning.

This book also opens a window for alumni and other readers into the classrooms of Villanova, where the Ennis Fellows and other educators teaching in the Core Humanities have been opening the eyes, the ears and the minds of first year students, and inspiring discover for themselves the splendor of truth through the liberal arts.

Augustine would certainly be pleased.