Thomas Aquinas: On the Teacher, Disputed Questions on Truth. Question 11, Articles 3 and 4 of Questiones Disputatae de Veritate. Ralph McInerny translation. London: Penguin, 1998.

 

Why raise the question of whether angels can teach? Augustine never mentions them in his dialogue on teaching. Why does Aquinas do so?

Unlike Augustine, Aquinas aspires to produce not only a comprehensive account of the creator-God and His creation, insofar as that is humanly possible, but a systematic account. Augustine is capable of writing a treatise (as André Malraux remarked, his Confessions end with a treatise on metaphysics), but he is no systematizer. Augustine is a ‘personalist’ avant la lettre. Aquinas seldom writes about himself or other particular human persons; his Disputations are disputes between arguments alone, impersonal, centered on logic with no concern for portraying human beings in dialogue with one another. When a commentator writes, “the objector argues….” he exercises poetic license.

But Aquinas is nonetheless supremely interested in the nature, the ‘species characteristics,’ of persons—the nature of human beings as such, the ‘nature’ of God as the Person sui generis, and the nature of angels, persons whose nature rests in between human nature and God. Further, angelic nature has a characteristic that is of considerable interest for teaching, discovery, and learning: angels are incorporeal by nature, purely intellectual creatures, with no knowledge that is derived from the senses—that is, both free of all physical characteristics and created, not creators. They can “assume” bodies, when that assists human beings, but they do not have them by nature. As incorporeal beings, they have no sensual knowledge of things; “they first and principally understand immaterial things.” They understand those things actually, not as we do, potentially. “The intellectual power of the angels extends to understanding all things: because the object of the intellectual is universal being or universal truth.” Unlike human beings, who must ‘get at’ universal being through sense perceptions of material things, ‘abstracting’ the universals from those particulars, laboriously reasoning toward noetic perception, angels receive knowledge of the species, forms, ideas directly from God, knowledge of events from God’s revelation. Thus, they are not gods; their intellects know because God endowed them with knowledge of the forms when He created them. God, by contrast, doesn’t receive knowledge from anyone or anything. He already knows all, by His “essence,” not having been created, caused by some prior being or beings.

Angels have self-knowledge and they know God. They know material things because they know the forms, the ideas of those things. But “the difference between heavenly and earthly bodies is this, that earthly bodies obtain their last perfection by change and movement: while heavenly bodies have their last perfection at once from their very nature.” Human beings discover and learn things they do not know; angels already know. Accordingly, in the Summa Theologica Aquinas devotes the first 49 questions to God, with the subsequent fifteen questions, devoted to angels. Although free of corporeal limitations, their intellects perfect, needing no teaching, they cannot fully comprehend the essence of God because they are still created intellects. “Nature does not transcend its limits”—an aphorism that expresses both the Aristotelianism and the Christianity of Aquinas. 

In the Summa‘s “Treatise on Angels,” Aquinas goes on to say that “all cognition takes place through an assimilation of the knower to the known” via the form, the idea, of the thing known. “Man knows things which he has not made only by means of forms received from things. The case is different with angels, however, because they have the forms of things given them from the moment of their creation.” Angels have “Morning Knowledge”—knowledge of the primordial being of things as spoken by the Word of God “in the Beginning.” They also have “Evening Knowledge”—knowledge of the being of the things created, as created being and the beings within it stand in their own nature, their forms or ideas, knowledge of all God created by the end of His sixth “day” of creation. They do not, however, know the future, nor do they know the will of man, which is free. God, being eternal, comprehends all the events of time at once, essentially.

So, although angels don’t know as much as God knows, they know a lot, more than we do. But can they teach any of that to us? This is the question Aquinas raises in the third Article of the Disputatio “On the Teacher.” What, if any, educational worth have angels? They are the second most important beings, the most important created beings, and the Bible shows them in their proper role as messengers between God and men, but can they teach us ‘in their own right’? 

Aquinas lists seventeen objections to any such claim. First, as he has stated in the first two Articles of Question 11, human beings can be taught “either inwardly or outwardly.” God alone teaches inwardly; human beings teach outwardly. If angels could teach us, the objector now argues, they would need to use “sensible signs” to do so, as human teachers do. But angels are not material beings, so if they did use “such signs,” they would need to perform a miracle, to appear before our senses, “which is outside the common course” of events—a miracle, “as it were.” In response to this, Aquinas locates angels midway between God and man, saying that they do teach us invisibly and inwardly “by comparison to man’s teaching,” but not as God does, by “infusing light” into the mind. Angelic teaching is therefore “reputed” to be outward. This less-than-illuminating reply might mean that angels teach by means of the imagination, a mode that does indeed lie between intellection and sense perception. But Aquinas has a more complex explanation, involving but not limited to the imagination, as he will show in subsequent answers.

The second objection hones in on the possibility that angels do teach by means of the imagination. “If it be said that the angels teach us in a certain way outwardly, insofar as they make an impression on our imagination,” this cannot be. “Species impressed on the imagination do not suffice for actual imagining, unless an intention be present,” but “an angel cannot induce an intention in us, since intention is an act of will, on which God alone can act.” In Thomistic vocabulary, an intention means a tendency toward something, some end. When we daydream, for example, we do so willingly. An angel cannot make us imagine. Aquinas concurs with the objector’s claim that intentions of the will cannot be forced, as human beings have free will, but “the intention of the sensitive part” of the soul can be forced, as when I feel the pain of a wound, which makes me tend toward tending to it. In this sense, an image presented to us by an angel impresses our senses and thereby impels us toward some end.

The third objection reinforces the claim that angels, although purely intellectual beings themselves, cannot communicate with us, and therefore cannot teach us, in an intellectual way. Only God can “give the natural light,” and only God can give us “the light of grace.” This reprises several objections in the first two Articles, which denied that human beings can teach because they cannot communicate with one another on a purely intellectual plane, with no sensible intermediaries, such as verbal or visual signs. And Aquinas answers similarly: While “the angel infuses neither the light of grace nor the light of nature,” he does “strengthen the light of nature which is divinely infused, as has been said.”

But to teach anything, the objector observes, “it is necessary that the learner see the concept of the teacher,” so that the student’s mind can move towards knowledge. “But a man cannot see the concept of an angel, for he neither sees [those concepts] in themselves, any more than he could those of another man,” if the teacher did not employ signs. Aquinas replies that human beings can be brought to understand the concepts angels have, but not in the same way angels understand them. “Man teaches man as a univocal agent, and in this way passes on to another the knowledge as he himself has it, namely by deducing from causes to the caused.” By “univocal” Aquinas mean a word that always means the same thing. If I say the sky is blue and the crab is blue, I mean the same thing (even if the sky and the crab are different shades of blue). This is why human teachers need to use signs, using words precisely, without equivocation. An equivocal word is a word that means different and indeed unrelated things. If I say ‘square’ in relation to a figure I’ve drawn on the blackboard I mean one thing; if (back in the 1950s) I called you a square, or (back in the 1940s) I praised a square deal, I would mean something entirely different in all three instances. Unlike a human teacher, an angel must teach “like an equivocal agent,” since he needs no reasoning to reach the truth, which is already implanted in him by God, naturally. To convey his knowledge to man, the angel needs to present it in a manner different from the manner in which the angel has it, not intuitively but via imagery or reasoning.

All right, but since “it is the prerogative of him who illumines every man coming in this world to teach” (as in Matthew 23:8) that there is only one Master, one Teacher, Christ, and angels are not Christ, angels are not Christ. This is at best a paradoxical argument, since it clearly states that beings other than Christ can teach. Aquinas addresses it simply by pointing out that Jesus was speaking of the mode of teaching God employs—direct, inward illumination of the intellect—not of teaching generally.

“But only God has causality over the truth, because truth is an intelligible light and a simple form,” produced only by creation.” “Angels are not creators,” and so “cannot teach.” Aquinas answers, easily, that teaching doesn’t cause truth; it “causes knowledge of the truth, in the learner.” And “truth does not depend on our knowledge, but on the existence of things,” which pre-exist our knowledge of them.

The objector accordingly shifts from the object known to the light by which it is known. “An unfailing illumination can only come from an unfailing light because, when the light is taken away, the subject is no longer illumined”; since “science is of the necessary which always is,” it requires “some unfailing light” to illumine it. Since angelic light lasts only so long as God preserves it, it isn’t in principle unfailing and angels cannot teach. Aquinas answers by distinguishing the light by which a thing is illumined from the thing illumined, saying that while science is indeed of the necessary which always is, knowledge of it can fail, and so may the light that illumines it. The teacher or the student may forget what he knew, but that doesn’t change the truth of what he knew.

Returning to the Bible, the objector cites John 1:38, which, according to Jerome’s Gloss, demonstrates that “the merit of faith” consists in “confess[ing] Christ to be a divine person.” Since Christ is the Teacher, only God can teach. Aquinas offers his own Gloss on this passage, not contradicting Jerome but pointing to the context. Initially, some of Christ’s disciples “venerated him as a wise man and teacher,” (rather as Thomas Jefferson did, centuries later), recognizing him as “God teaching” only later on. This means that one can learn from a person who does not seem to you to be God. Aquinas doesn’t the claim that only God can teach; he has already refuted this claim, repeatedly.

This brings Aquinas’ reader to the ninth, central objection. “Whoever teaches must manifest the truth”—which, being “an intelligible light,” is more known to human beings, reasoners, than to angels, who simply intuit it. In this argument, the objector temporarily gives up his acknowledgement of the superiority of angelic knowledge by claiming we know better than they do, since we can not only know the truth but how to get to it when we don’t know it. But Aquinas sees that if angels can intuit the truth, they can intuit the truth about human beings and the way they discover and learn. Therefore, they can teach them in the way humans attain knowledge, either by reasoning with them or “by strengthening the light of intellect” in them. Human beings do not learn from angels in the sense that they somehow become conjoined to them, partaking of their nature. They remain inferior to them in the sense that they do not consist of pure intellect. They can nonetheless be taught by them.

The objector appeals to the authority of Augustine in On the Trinity, where he writes that the human mind is formed by God without any intermediary. Since angels are intermediary creatures, they cannot teach human beings. Aquinas clarifies Augustine’s meaning, which isn’t that human minds are formed by angels but that both human beings and angels know and find their happiness when “conjoined by God.” This does not preclude angelic teaching of their natural inferiors, men.

Recurring to a variation on the second objection, the objector contends that since God forms our will by the infusion of grace, with “no angel mediating,” so he forms our intellect. Aquinas answers in much the same way he did before: The will is not the intellect, and while human will is free, influenced only by divine grace, “both man and angel can, in a certain way, act on intellect, by representing objects by which the intellect is forced” to acknowledge, by logic.

“All teaching is through some species,” the objector remarks. That is, we learn when we know the form, the idea of a thing, as biologists do when they ‘classify’ animals and plants. There are two ways of doing this: either by “creating the species” (one knows what one creates) or by illuminating, ‘shedding light’ on an existing species which exists potentially in the human intellect in the form of a “phantasm”—an image acquired through the external senses, then lodged in the imagination, which is one of the internal senses. Angels don’t create anything, nor can their pure intellects shed light on phantasms for the benefit of the duller, plodding human intellect, which operates by the more ponderous process of reasoning about sense perceptions and phantasms. Aquinas of course agrees that angels are not creators and is willing to go so far as to say that angels cannot illuminate the “phantasms” or images they conceive directly within the human intellect. But they can establish a continuity between the light of their intellects and the light of human intellects by means of those phantasms, which the human mind then perceives through its imagination and can reason about, once they are perceived.

But “there is a greater difference between the intellect of the angel and man’s intellect than between man’s intellect and his imagination.” Since imagination gives us only particular forms, whereas intellect gives us general forms, ideas, there is little communication between the two. “Therefore, much less is the human intellect capable of what is in the angelic mind,” and angels can teach us nothing. On the contrary, Aquinas replies. True, human intellect and human imagination are similar in that they are both characteristics of the human soul, intellect as such, whether human or angelic, is univocal, different in operation but not so absolutely different as to make the knowledge of angels incommunicable to humans. The human mind “can grasp what is in the angelic intellect, in its own way.”

Isn’t the difference in kind between angels and men still too great? Any light by which a thing is illumined “must be proportioned to what is illumined, as bodily light to colors.” But any phantasm produced by an angelic intellect would be purely spiritual, “not proportioned to phantasms which are in a way corporeal,” in the sense that they can be “contained in a bodily organ,” such as the human eye. Aquinas disagrees, saying that “there is nothing to prevent the spiritual from being proportionate” to human sense perception, since in general “nothing prevents the inferior from being acted on by the superior.”

Yet, the difference is still too great, in another way. We know things “either through its essence or its likeness.” Angels cannot teach essences to human beings because that would require them to enter into the human mind, which is impossible for any created being. Aquinas concurs. But he dissents from the objector’s claim that angels cannot teach likenesses to human beings because the angel “causes the likenesses of things in the mind, either by moving the imagination or by strengthening the light of intellect,” as mentioned before.

The objector then observes that a farmer is no creator but a person who “incites nature to natural effects.” By analogy, then, “neither can angels be called teachers and masters.” Aquinas rejects the analogy, inasmuch as teaching isn’t creation but rather the natural ‘incitement’ to a natural effect, namely, the perfection of the intellect. Indeed, as he states later on, “inferior spirits, that is, the human, achieve the perfection of science by the causality of superior spirits, that is, the angels”—angelic intellects being “more actual than the human intellect.”

The final objection in effect responds to Aquinas’ immediately preceding refutation. Angels are superior to man and therefore their teaching “must excel human teaching.” But if angels are only teaching man about “definite causes in nature,” then they aren’t doing anything more excellent than what human teachers do. The problem with this argument is that although angels do indeed teach the same kind of knowledge man can teach man, they know more. And they teach “in a more noble manner,” as well.

Aquinas takes this last point from the Christian Platonist Dionysius the Areopagite in his book On Celestial Hierarchy. Dionysius writes, “I see that the divine mystery of Christ’s humanity was first taught to the angels and then through the grace of knowledge descends to us.” As our superiors in intellect, angels “can do more and more nobly” than we can do, when it comes to teaching; their knowledge is broader and higher than ours, and so is their ability to teach. Aquinas adds Augustine’s observation in On the Good of Perseverance, that there is not only a hierarchy in divine teaching but a certain diversity, inasmuch as (as Aquinas summarizes) “some receive the teaching of salvation immediately from God, some from an angel, some from men.” That is, genuine Christian teaching emanates from God, but God may choose any of those three pathways to convey it. Additionally, while the light of God’s truth enters the human intellect by God’s intention alone, angels and men “can remove an impediment to perceiving the light,” refute errors—an important task teachers perform. 

More generally, “an angel can act on man in two ways”: in the human manner, appearing to our senses visually or auditorily, just as human beings act upon one another; and in the angelic manner, invisibly. How do angels teach men in the angelic manner? 

As mentioned in Augustine’s answer to the twelfth objection in Article 1, intellect differs from bodily sight in that “sense is not a collating power.” The mind’s eye sees self-evident truths the way the eye sees an object, but it also compares, contrasts, thinks logically in order to arrive at truths that are not self-evident, which the intellect sees “only through others already seen,” whether self-evident or rational “habits” established previously by reasoning from the self-evident. Now, “God is the cause of man’s knowledge in the most excellent manner, because he both seals the soul itself with intellectual light and impresses on it knowledge of first principles which are as it were the seeds of the sciences, just as he impresses on natural things the seminal reasons for producing all their effects.” Human beings don’t teach that way, because they can’t; they cannot create their own intellect or implant self-evident truths in it. But they can teach one another “by bringing into actuality what is implicitly and in a certain manner potentially contained in the principles through certain sensible signs shown to exterior sense,” as Augustine and Aquinas agree. 

Located in the natural order between God and man, the angel, whose “intellectual light” is “more perfect than man’s,” can cause human beings to know in both ways, although he cannot do so as well as God can do it. He “cannot infuse intellectual light as God does,” as he is not a creator, but “he can strengthen the infused light for more perfect seeing” better than a human teacher can do, precisely because his intellect is purer, unimpeded by passions. Moreover, “the angel can also teach man, not indeed by conferring on him knowledge of these principles, as God does, nor by the deduction of conclusions from the principles by proposing sensible signs, as a man does, but by fashioning certain forms in the imagination which can be formed by the movement of the bodily organ.” “What the angels know is shown as conjoined with such images,” as Augustine teaches in his commentary on the Book of Genesis. There, Augustine suggests that the account of the six “days” of Creation is an accommodation to the human intellect, which thinks in temporal sequence. The paradox, famously, is that the Genesis account says that God separated light from darkness before creating the sun and stars that emit light. He explains this by arguing that God in fact created light and dark and the heavenly bodies all at once; the angels understand this as one act of God, not as a series of events in time. Their intellects have the power of “conjoining” what human intellects understand in segments.

In his fourth and final Article, Aquinas asks, “Is teaching an act of the active or contemplative life?”—politics or philosophy? The question is roughly analogous to the contrast between human beings and angels, inasmuch as angels, as persons of pure intellect, are better adapted to contemplation than humans are, and they do indeed teach. The question itself is a major theme of Plato’s dialogues. In Christianity, the matter is complicated by the fact that neither God nor the angels (who hold a similar place to that of the guardian daemon Socrates claims to have) take action as well as think. The Biblical God is not pure thought thinking itself and, indeed, is not an ‘it’ at all, but a three-Personed Person). 

The initial set of arguments, which Aquinas will refute, take the classical view of teaching, however, classifying it as an act of the contemplative life. First of all, since (to paraphrase Gregory the Great) “the active life fails when the body does” but “to teach does not fail with the body”—the teacher’s teachings may live on, in his students, after the teacher dies—and since angels teach but have no bodies, teaching goes with the contemplative life. Aquinas remarks that when Gregory writes of the active life, he means not politics but physical labor, “sweaty work,” whereas Dionysius refers to the “hierarchical action in the celestial spirit,” which is obviously “of a higher mode than the active life of which we are teaching.” Gregory also says that action in his sense precedes contemplation, whereas teaching follows contemplation, and therefore “to teach does not pertain to the active life.” But Gregory continues, Aquinas remarks, arguing that the soul can bring “what is drawn from” contemplation to activity, that “when the mind is kindled by the contemplative the active is more perfectly lived.” It all depends, Aquinas writes, on whether the action is indeed sweaty work, which might benefit from prudential reasoning but hardly from contemplation, or for an activity like teaching, which “must follow the contemplative.” In that case, theory precedes practice, but teaching is the practice.

The objector cites Gregory a third time, in remarking that the active life, preoccupied with sweaty work, “sees less” than a teacher does; at the same time, the teacher “sees more” than “one who simply contemplates.” Teaching therefore lies on the contemplative side. Against this, Aquinas concedes that “the vision of the teacher is the beginning of teaching,” and so contemplation precedes teaching, but “the teaching itself consists rather in the transmission of knowledge of the things seen than in the vision of them,” which makes it active. 

Nonetheless, the objector rejoins, just as fire passes the same heat as it progresses, so too does the perfection of the teacher’s mind perfect the mind of the student. Since “to be perfect in himself in the consideration of divine things pertains to the contemplative life,” so does teaching, as does heat from fire. Aquinas regards this argument as proof that “the contemplative life is the principle of teaching,” even as “heat is not the heating but the principle of heating.” Yet while contemplation proposes, teaching disposes; contemplation directs the active, which then acts in accordance with the results of discoveries contemplation reveals. 

For his last attempt, the objector rightly claims that “the active life turns on temporal things” whereas “teaching turns on the eternal, teaching about that which is more excellent and perfect.” But he draws the false conclusion that teaching does not “pertain” to the active life. But of course it does, Aquinas replies, even though one must contemplate before one teaches, just as one must more generally think (whether prudentially or theoretically) before one acts.

In his general remarks, Aquinas begins with a crucial point, quoting Gregory as saying that the active life gives bread to the hungry an teaches “the word of wisdom to those who do not know it,” that just as works of agapic love are works, are actions, so is teaching inasmuch as teaching is among the “spiritual alms.” For the philosophers of classical antiquity, discovery, learning, and teaching are the highest of erotic quests, a “passion of the head,” as Karl Marx (that scholar of things ‘ancient’) put it, albeit in mockery. It is highly unlikely that Plato (for example) expects the Ideas to be brought down to earth. Christian love is another sort of thing. Given the divine power behind divine wisdom, contemplation for Christians is animated by agape or caritas, charity—leading more directly and effectively to action than philosophic contemplation can (or should) do. It is the refusal of ancient philosophers to do that irritates Christians; it is the alleged failure of Christians to do effectively that irritates the moderns, beginning with Machiavelli. 

Aquinas meets Plato and Aristotle partway. Temporal things, the things “on which human acts bear,” pertain to the active life; “the matter of the contemplative,” by contrast, “is the notions of knowable things on which the contemplator dwells.” The active life and the contemplative life differ in their ends, a point that teleological Aristotle would also endorse. But for Aquinas the contemplator dwells not on created things, including nature, so much as “uncreated truth,” the things of God, “to the degree possible for the one contemplating.” Admittedly, human beings at best see uncreated truth imperfectly in this life and must wait for “the future life” to see them “perfectly.” This is why, Aquinas remarks, “Gregory also says that the contemplative life begins here, that it might be perfected in the heavenly fatherland.” Meanwhile, “the end of the active life,” in this life, “is action,” aiming at “usefulness to neighbors.” That is, in Christian terms, God’s love for human beings is active, agapic, man’s love for God erotic, contemplative, man’s love for man agapic, active. God need not contemplate man, since He already knows him; man must contemplate God, because he knows Him imperfectly, regarding Him with philosophic eros, not only with fear but with wonder; man knows another man as he knows himself, and therefore need not so much contemplate him as act to help him. In teaching, this act of man helping man needs contemplation as its background, as the teacher needs to know what he’s talking about. But teaching itself is an interaction (as later writers would say) between teacher and student. Teaching has this “double object,” first of learning by the teacher, contemplation of the topic to be taught, then of transmitting knowledge to the student. “By reason of the first matter, the act of teaching pertains to the contemplative life, but by reason of the second to the active.” Teaching in itself belongs to the active life, “although in a certain way [it] pertains to the contemplative life.”

 

 

 

Thomas Aquinas: On the Teacher, Disputed Question on Truth. Question 11, Articles 1 and 2 of Questiones Disputatae de Veritate. Ralph McInerny translation. London: Penguin Books, 1998.

 

Here, Aquinas replies to Augustine’s dialogue, On the Teacher, presenting the topic in the manner he would perfect in the Summa Theologica: raising questions, articulating answers with which he will disagree, then refuting the arguments supporting those answers—the ‘disputation’ form of Scholastic teaching. This genre retains one characteristic of Platonic dialogues, the dialectical clash of opinions, while removing the personal drama. One need not think of a main character and his interlocutors, the ways in which those persons speak to one another, how they shape their speeches mindful of the characters and political standing of those they are speaking with, and those who are listening. One need only follow the argument.

Within the eleventh Disputatio, “On the Teacher,” Aquinas poses four questions: Can a man teach and be called a master or God alone? Can someone be called his own teacher? Can man be taught by an angel? Is teaching an act of the active or the contemplative life? Of these questions, the one on angels is the only one not addressed by Augustine in his dialogue. Why is it here?

Aquinas lists eighteen reasons for denying that a man can teach, for believing that only God can teach. In Matthew 23, Jesus condemns the scribes and Pharisees, who teach one thing and do another, loving “the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogue, and to have people call them rabbi.” But you, the “crowds and disciples” whom I am teaching, “are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher,” the Messiah, “and you are all students.” That is, the issue is humility: “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.” Jerome’s marginal note to his Latin translation of his passage in the Bible warns against “attribut[ing] to men divine honor” or “usurp[ing] what is God’s.” Aquinas replies to the objection by clarifying “how this prohibition should be understood.” As Jerome’s gloss goes on to say that we are not to call a man ‘master’ in the sense that he plays “the principal role in teaching.” That “belongs to God.” We must not rely on “the wisdom of men” but rather “in what we hear from a man, consulting the divine truth, which speaks in us through the impress of His likeness.” Aquinas, who is teaching would-be teachers, ignores the majority of Jesus’ listeners, the “crowds,” mentioning only the would-be teachers of Jesus’ day, the disciples. In this sense, he is less ‘democratic’ than Jesus. His main point is sound, however. Obviously, Aquinas himself is a teacher, a teacher teaching the next generation of teachers. He does not deny that human beings can teach, only that they are the truest Teacher. Teachers should keep an eye on themselves, since it is easy to ‘master’ students in knowledge.

The second objection directly addresses one of Augustine’s arguments, distorting it. [1] Man teaches through signs because merely acting in answer to a question leaves too much room for ambiguity. In Augustine’s dialogue, if someone asks me what the sign ‘walking’ means, and I get up and walk, he may think walking is getting up, or moving from one place to another, or some other thing. In the vocabulary of Scholasticism, one does not know from observing an action whether the meaning of the action is to be denoted from the “substance” of it (e.g., the act of walking) or “some accident of it” (e.g., walking fast, making haste). Yet, signs are also inadequate “because knowledge of things is more important than knowledge of signs.” Therefore, “no one can pass on knowledge of things to another and thus he cannot teach him.” God is the only teacher because teaching itself is humanly impossible—miraculous, an act of divine intervention. To this, Augustine replies that the knowledge of signs doesn’t give us knowledge of things; as Augustine argues, I learn nothing if I ask what a word means, and you answer with a synonym. I only learn if I tell you what the word means according to its “principle.” If you ask me what a human being is and I say, ‘Man,’ that is unhelpful, but if I say, ‘an animal capable of reason,’ that gets to the principle of the thing. “The knowledge of principles, not knowledge of signs, causes in us knowledge of conclusions.”

The closely related third objection also originates in Augustine’s dialogue. If I propose a sign to designate something, either you know the thing I’m talking about or you don’t. If I say, ‘human being,’ you will only know what I’m talking about if you already know what I’m talking about, not through the word-sign I have used. “If all a man does in teaching is to propose signs, it seems that one man cannot be taught by another man,” at all. To this, Aquinas offers not a refutation but a distinction. “The things of which we are taught by means of signs we indeed know in one respect but do not know in another.” If I try to teach you something about what man is,” you must indeed “know something of him beforehand”—that he is an animal, for example. In a syllogism, to learn a conclusion “we must previously know what the predicate and subject are.” “All learning comes from previously existing knowledge,” as Aristotle says in his Posterior Analytics. 

But what is teaching? It is “nothing other than causing knowledge in another in some way,” as the next objection defines it, and since knowledge is in the intellect, and signs merely strike the senses, they cannot teach. Teachers attempt to teach by the use of signs, and “therefore, a man cannot be taught by a man.” This is congruent with the first objection, which is that only God can teach because only God can communicate with his creature without physical signs but spiritually. No, that isn’t what happens, Aquinas replies. We do indeed receive sensible signs through the “sense power,” initially. But by those physically sensed signs “the intellect receives intelligible intentions, which it uses for bringing about science [knowledge] in itself.” An intelligible intention is rational, free of contradictions; it is one’s reason, “moving discursively from principles to conclusions,” that learns—as argued both in Augustine’s dialogue and Plato’s Meno.

Very well, “if science is caused in one man by another, either the knowledge was in the learner, or it was not.” If it wasn’t in him, it would need to be created out of nothing, as no human being can do. If it was in him, fully, then he has learned nothing; if it was in him potentially, “as a kind of rational seed,” such seeds are “inserted in nature by God alone.” However knowledge comes to be in the human mind, no man put it there. Aquinas concurs with the concept of the rational seed, “naturally put in us.” God creates man, man does not create himself. But this seed is only a seed, not fully “actualized.” What a human teacher can do is to bring it to actuality, nourish it and induce it to grow.

Yet, given that science is an “accident”—a characteristic of a thing that does not alter its “substance,” as, for example, greenness does not alter a leaf’s ‘leafness’—and given that “an accident cannot pass from its subject”—a green leaf does not transfer its greenness to a brown leaf, or vice-versa—and “since teaching seems to be the transfer of the master’s knowledge to the student,” then “one man cannot be taught by another.” But, answers Aquinas, “the teacher does not transfer knowledge into the learner” as a bank might transfer money to another bank. Rather, “through teaching there comes to be in the pupil knowledge similar to that which is in the master, brought forth from potency,” the rational seed, brought “to act,” i.e., to actuality. The rational seed, the potential to know, already exists in the pupil in the form of reason. The teacher causes an attentive student to discover or learn by stimulating that innate capacity.

The objector returns to Scripture, specifically, to Romans 10:17: “Faith comes from hearing.” Jerome’s gloss elaborates, saying that while “an outward herald proclaims” but “God teaches within.” Because “science is caused in the interior of the mind and not outside in the senses,” only God teaches, not men. In answering, Aquinas has recourse to an analogy. A physician acts externally, nature internally; together, they cause health. Similarly, a teacher who teaches truth states the truth outside the mind of the student, while “God teach[es] within,” having implanted the rational seed that actualizes itself when truth is brought to it from outside.

Quoting Augustine in The Teacher, the eighth objection notes that just as a farmer does not make the tree he cultivates, so a man does not make knowledge occur in the student’s mind but only “disposes” the student’s mind for knowledge. Only God can truly make knowledge occur. Aquinas objects to the objection by remarking that Augustine does not “deny that a man teaches from without when he proves that God alone teaches, because God alone teaches within.” The ‘external’ teachings enunciated by human beings have real content, and they do reach inside the human intellect, although God alone has planted the rational seed that enables that content to be understood, known.

The objector then switches to a new metaphor. To teach truth is to illuminate the mind, “since truth is the light of the mind.” But according to John 1:9, John the Baptist, “sent from God,” came in order to “testify about the light, in order that all may believe through him.” John himself “was not the light, but he came in order that he might testify about the light—the light, the true one, who enlightens every man, was coming into the world.” God Himself is the light and therefore the enlightener, not any man, even if that man’s testimony is given him by God. This is another reason why “no man can truly teach another.” But on the contrary, Aquinas insists, John the Baptist was indeed “a true teacher and a teacher of the truth and enlightener of the mind,” not in the sense that he “infus[ed] light to reason,” but as one who “aid[ed] the light of reason to the perfection of science through what he externally proposes.” That is why Paul writes in Ephesians 3:8-9, “Although I am the very least of the saints, this grace was given to me to bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ and to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things.” 

Very well then, but if a teacher brings a potential knower “to the state of actually knowing” then the potential knower has changed. This changes science or wisdom itself, contradicting Augustine’s observation in his book, Eighty-three Questions, “where he says that when wisdom comes to man, it is the man who changes, not wisdom.” Aquinas asks his reader to consider that there are two kinds of wisdom, created and uncreated. Both kinds of wisdom “are said to be infused in man,” making him “changed for the better.” Uncreated wisdom is unchangeable. In one sense, created wisdom is also unchangeable, existing in God, eternally. Wisdom created in the human intellect is also unchangeable “with respect to the eternal things.” But, in another sense, created wisdom is changeable “according to the existence it has in its subject,” by which Aquinas means that the subject himself “is changed from having it potentially to having it actually.” Wisdom is knowledge of “the intelligible forms; these are “both likenesses of things,” unchangeable, and “forms perfecting the intellect,” agents of change which themselves change in the sense that they have become something they were not before: agents of change. 

But if “science seems to be nothing else than the inscription of things in the soul,” the “assimilation of the knower to the known,” no human being can “inscribe in another’s soul the likenesses of things,” inasmuch as only God can “work within” a human soul.” This makes teaching is impossible. No, Aquinas replies, since “intelligible forms” are already “inscribed in the learner,” and “it is through them the knowledge acquired through teaching is constituted.” God’s work within the human intellect has already been done, at least insofar as human teaching is concerned. “For the teacher proposes signs of intelligible things from which the agent intellect receives intelligible intentions and inscribes them” in an intellect God made capable of receiving them. The intellect has no difficulty in receiving impressions of things outside of itself—physical objects—so, how much more it can receive impressions formed with intention by another human being. The intellect’s own intentionality makes it receptive to intentions from other persons.

At this point, the objector brings in the authority of Boethius. Admittedly, as the observer paraphrases him, “through teaching the mind is summoned to know, but one who summons the intellect to know does not cause it to know, any more than he who summons another to bodily seeing causes him to see.” Plato’s Socrates does this, as does Augustine in On the Teacher. This criticism requires a more elaborate reply than any other. Aquinas begins by observing that “intellect and bodily sight are not wholly alike”; the objects we see are visible as soon as we direct our eyes toward them; we need no one outside ourselves to “incite” us in order to see, except when someone points something out to the person who isn’t looking at it. (Or, it might be added, if some other sense prompts the eyes to look, as when a sound attracts attention.) But the act of seeing itself needs no intermediaries.  This is true of ‘the mind’s eye’ with regard to self-evident truths, but self-evident truths may lead the intellect to wonder about things that are not self-evident, things that it “cannot understand save through the office of reason by explicating.” To understand those things, the intellect “needs a mover which actualizes it by way of teaching.” “The teacher stirs the intellect to knowing what he teaches, as an essential mover brings actuality from potency.” To show something to someone by bodily sight is only an accidental cause of the knowledge of the one directed to look; the looker sees without any further assistance. Self-evident truths known to the intellect operate the same way, but knowledge founded on those truths may require guidance from outside the student’s mind, in the form of an argument, a set of deductions based upon the self-evident truths. Aquinas takes the ideas of essential and accidental causes, actuality and potentiality, from Aristotle’s Physics Book 8, in which Aristotle addresses the problem of motion. Motion occurs when an object that has the potential to be moved has that potential actualized by something intrinsic to it and/or something extrinsic to it. Growth is an intrinsic principle of motion; a brick being pried out of the pavement is subject to an extrinsic principle of motion. The teacher is an extrinsic cause of knowledge, but only because the intellect he seeks to instruct has the intrinsic potential to change, to receive and incorporate what he teaches.

The objector persists. If, as Augustine says in The Teacher, knowledge/science differs from opinion or belief in being certain, then this makes teaching impossible. Teachers attempt to teach through the senses of the learner; since “what is in the senses is always oblique to what is in the intellect,” there can be no certainty in what is conveyed through them. Teaching is impossible. Aquinas replies that scientific certainty derives not from the senses but from the principles, as “conclusions are known when they are resolved into the principles” by reason. “The light of reason” has already been “divinely inserted within” the intellect; this is how “God speaks in us.” When a human teacher speaks to us, he does indeed communicate through our senses, but it is reason that resolves what we would now call “sense data” into principles.

If so, if “an intelligible light and species are required for science, but neither can be caused in man by another man” because only God causes them, then “a man would have to create something” in order to teach, which is manifestly impossible for a mere human. Aquinas agrees that “the man teaching externally does not infuse the intelligible light” but although it doesn’t ‘create’ species it does “cause” them to exist in the intellect of others “in some way,” having “propos[ed] to us certain signs of intelligible intentions, which our intellect receives from the signs and stores in itself.”  

The objector reaches for a bit of sophistry in his fifteenth try. “Only God can form the mind of man”; “science is a kind of form of mind”; “therefore, God alone causes science in the soul.” Aquinas bats that away by remarking that while “only God can form the mind, this should be understood of its ultimate form,” not of the “many” other forms that the mind stores within itself. God forms only man’s “rational nature.”

Another dubious effort is the false analogy that follows. Both ignorance and guilt are in the mind. Only God can purge the mind of guilt. Therefore, only God purges the mind of ignorance. Once again, Aquinas pounces. Guilt is in the affection, not in the intellect. Only God can “make an impression” on the affection. But ignorance, which is indeed in the intellect, can be diminished by “a created power,” as previously shown.

Back to the certainty of true knowledge, then. Merely to hear someone speaking hardly causes certainty; if it did, “whatever is said to him by a man would hold certain for him.” Certainty occurs “by hearing the truth speak within,” and since only God can make that happen, a man cannot bring another to certainty. Aquinas is beginning to lose his patience: “As has been remarked,” he emphasizes, “the certainty of science is in God alone, who instils in us the light of reason, through which we know the principles from which the certainty of science derives; yet science is caused in us in some way be man as well, as has been said.”

The objector tries one final time. If I could have given the correct response to a question before it was asked, I could not be said to have learned that response from anything my would-be teacher tells me. Yes, but potentiality isn’t actuality. My teacher doesn’t instill the intellectual principles that enable me to reach a conclusion, but he does lead me to the conclusion itself.

As always, the core of Aquinas’ answer consists first of an interpretation of several authoritative texts, usually the Bible. Two citations from 2 Timothy clearly show that human beings are entitled to teach Scripture, so long as they avoid false doctrine. He also essays an extraordinarily far-fetched argument derived from an image from Augustine’s Against the Manicheans. Before sin, Augustine writes, the earth was watered by a spring, but, after sin, the earth needed “rain descending from the clouds.” Aquinas claims that the earth represents the human mind, “made fruitful by the spring of truth, but after sin needed the teaching of others, like rain descending from the clouds.” This supposedly shows that “at least after sin, a man can be taught by another man.” It might as easily be said that it shows that after sin, a man must be taught by God and/or by angels.

Can a man teach and be called a master, or God alone? Aquinas begins his substantive response by observing that there are three dimensions to the question: 

1. Bringing forms into existence.
2. The acquisition of virtue.
3. The acquisition of knowledge.

He canvasses several opinions that he will refute. Avicenna and others claim that forms, virtues, and knowledge all come to the human mind from “an external agent,” whether it is “a giver of forms,” a “substance perfecting the souls of men,” or an “agent intelligence.” Others make the opposite claim, that forms, virtues, and knowledge are all latent within us, and that a “natural agent does nothing other than to bring them from a hidden to a manifest condition.” This includes the apparent claim of Socrates in the Meno that teaching merely leads the soul to “the remembrance or consideration of what it previously knew.”

Avicenna’s error is to assume that first causes are the only ones, that there are no “proximate causes.” It is one thing to say that God is the first cause of an effect, quite another to say that He doesn’t act through human or angelic agents. But “the first cause out of the eminence of his goodness not only makes things to be but also to be causes.” The Creator-God has so articulated His creation so that parts of it can cause things to happen. The Muslim claim that God causes all things and all events directly ignores this. This goes for teaching, also: The claim that forms, virtues, and knowledge are latent within us, that the proximate causes or lesser agents do nothing but “make the hidden manifest by removing impediments whereby forms and the habits of virtue and the sciences were obscured,” derogates from the importance of those causes and agents.

Aristotle’s “middle way” is more accurate. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle emphasizes the importance of “habit,” a term whose root means “to have,” Aquinas remarks. A habit is a disposition whereby someone is inclined by his acts, to good or bad, in relation to the passions—good and bad defined as the fulfillment or non-fulfillment of human nature, which exists in every person but in large measure only ‘in potential.’ Here, Aquinas extends this understanding of habit to teaching, discovering, and learning. “Natural forms do indeed pre-exist in matter, but not actually,” not in action, as Avicenna says and Plato’s Socrates seems to say, “but only potentially, from which they are brought into act by the proximate external agent, not only the first cause.” The same goes for the virtues, which “pre-exist in us in certain natural inclinations” but must be “brought to their fitting completion” by instruction, example, discipline, and, finally, habituation.  And when it comes to knowledge, “the seeds of the sciences pre-exist in us”; they are “the first conceptions of the intellect which are known right away by the light of the agent intellect through species abstracted from sensible things, whether these be complex, like axioms, or incomplex, like the notions of being and one and the like, which the intellect apprehends straightaway.” The teacher then leads the mind of the student “from this universal knowledge to the actual knowing of particulars.” This contrasts noticeably not only with Avicenna and Plato’s Socrates, but with the later ‘epistemology’ of Locke, for whom knowledge of the particulars comes first, in the form of ‘simple ideas’ or sense perceptions; the intellect ‘constructs’ complex ideas out of the sense perceptions. Exaggerated, Locke’s claim can lead to the impasses of subjectivism, relativism, ‘postmodernism,’ and so on.

Aquinas takes care to observe that natural potentiality can be either “complete active potency, namely, when an intrinsic principle is sufficient to bring about a perfect act” (e.g., healing) or “passive potency,” when the intrinsic principle does not so suffice (e.g., fire, which needs air). This is not always a sharp dichotomy. The body can heal itself, possessing complete active potency, but the physician’s art works with the body’s nature, his medicines hastening the natural healing; this is still an example of active potency because the physician “ministers to” the body.

Teaching can actualize both kinds of potential. In the case of complete active potency, the teacher (or other “extrinsic agent”) supplies the “intrinsic agent” with whatever it needs to “come forth to actuality” (e.g., the physician who prescribes a medicine that helps the wound to heal). A student may acquire “knowledge of the unknown” by way of discovery, yet that discovery may be guided by the teacher who assigns a book to read. In the case of passive potency, the extrinsic agent really takes the lead (“this way is called learning“), as when the teacher lectures, or when he shows the student exactly how to make bread. The first instance is knowledge by nature, the second knowledge by art.

“The process of coming to knowledge of the unknown by discovery is to apply the common self-evident principles to determinate matters and then to proceed to particular conclusions, and from those to others.” The teacher “show[s] signs” to the student “so that the natural reason of the pupil, through what is proposed, as through certain instruments, comes to the knowledge of the unknown.” Aquinas cites Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics: “demonstration is a syllogism that causes one to know.” This is very different from telling someone something that is not based upon self-evident principles, a process that “will not cause knowledge, but perhaps opinion or belief,” which may be true or false. Because “the light of reason by which” self-evident principles “are known is placed in us by God,” and “all human teaching is only efficacious because of the power of this light, it follows that it is God alone who teaches within and principally, just as nature principally and within heals.” Human beings teach in proximate or secondary ways—an important function, because they can lead or mislead.

The second question Aquinas raises—Can someone be called his own teacher?—has an important implication. If no one can be self-taught, then what is taught would be comprehensive, leaving no possibility of discovery or innovation, no possibility of philosophizing. The objector presents six reasons for affirming that a human being can indeed teach himself.

First, because “the principal cause of the science caused in us is the agent intellect,” which is “more of a teacher than the man outside” who is only “an instrumental cause.” To this, Aquinas answers that although the agent is a more principal cause than the teacher “in a certain respect,” science or knowledge “does not exist completely” in the agent intellect, as it does in the teacher. Insofar as he teaches truth, insofar as he really knows his stuff, his knowledge is perfect, superior to the knowledge of the learner. Second, the objector argues that learning entails “certainty of knowledge,” which occurs “in us through principles naturally known in the light of the agent intellect,” not via instruction from outside that intellect. Aquinas simply refers the objector to his answer to the first objection, which equally refutes the second one.

Third, citing Matthew 23:8, the objector recalls that there is only one true teacher, God, who “teaches us insofar as he gives us the light of reason by which we judge all things.” That light, not the light brought by a human teacher, brings us knowledge. Aquinas replies that although the student may indeed be “more equipped to know” than his teacher (Aquinas himself being a notable example), the teacher’s knowledge is more perfect. And while the brilliant student may discover a science on his own, the teacher, “who explicitly knows the whole science, can lead us to science more expeditiously than anyone can be brought to it on his own because he foreknows the principles of the science in some generality.”

The objector then cites Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, who teaches that “to know something by way of discovery is more perfect than to learn from another”; does this not imply that self-teaching ranks much higher than any teaching from without? The same goes for virtue, as “those who come to the works of virtue without an external instructor or legislator are said to be a law unto themselves.” The objector cites Romans 2:14, the middle verse in the passage where the Apostle Paul says, “For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but the doers of the law who will be justified. When Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires these though not having the law, are a law to themselves. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness; and their conflicting thoughts will accuse or perhaps excuse them on the day when, according to my gospel, God, through Jesus Christ, will judge the secret thought of all.” Aquinas replies that what law is to practice, principle is to theory. To know the law is not necessarily to ‘have’ it in the fullest sense, to act according to it, to have it as a habit. Similarly, to know the fundamental principles, such as the principle of non-contradiction, to possess the capacity to reason, is not to think rationally on all matters. That is what a teacher can stir one to do. 

Finally, since proverbially “the physician heals himself,” one can teach himself. Jesus cites this saying in Luke 4. There, described as having been “full of the Holy Spirit,” Jesus is tempted by the devil for forty days in the wilderness, challenged to prove that He is the Son of God. Jesus refuses, commanding, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” Returning to Galilee, he teaches in the synagogues, “praised by all,” but upon teaching at the synagogue in his home, Nazareth, he read from Isaiah 61, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” anointing me “to bring good news to the poor,” to “proclaim release to the captives,” to “bring sight to the blind,” to “let the oppressed go free,” and to “proclaim the year of the Lord’ favor.” This day is the day of the Messiah, and Jesus announces that “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Knowing, or supposing that they know, that Jesus is merely the son of Joseph, not of God, the Nazarenes are indignant. This is when Jesus says, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Physician, cure yourself!'” That is, if you are who you say you are, prove it by performing miracles—exactly the same temptation the devil had essayed. If you cannot, then you are lying, mad, demon-infested. To which Jesus calmly continues, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown,” proceeding to enrage the congregation further in citing the story of the prophets Elijah and Elisha, miracle-workers, thereby implying that He is Elijah. The Nazarenes drive him out of town, intending not to tempt him to jump off a cliff but to throw him off one, in vain. They have proved unteachable, even by the supreme Teacher. A raging soul is unteachable, as is its opposite, the soul which takes nothing seriously, jesting Pilate. The context of the phrase the objector cites itself indicates the error, indeed the serious fault, behind the phrase.

But Aquinas explains the matter in terms of a rational distinction rather than in terms of narrative implication. Yes, the physician heals “insofar as he has health, not actually, but in the knowledge of art.” Thus, he really can heal himself, even when his own body is unhealthy. by applying the knowledge of his art to himself. But the teacher teaches “insofar as he actually has science.” He conveys that science/knowledge to the student by his signs, in contradistinction to the physician, who does not convey his own health to his patient by his art. The physician is part of a process of active potency, while the teacher, in bringing the student to learn, is part of a process of passive potency. Put simply, “the teacher must have knowledge where the learner does not”; “therefore, no one can teach himself or be called his own teacher” insofar as he is a learner and not a discoverer.

For “it should be said without any doubt that one can, through the light of natural reason placed within him and without any external aid, come to the knowledge of many unknown things, as is evident in all who acquired science by way of discovery.” Aristotle is right, as far as that goes, and of course the Apostle Paul and Jesus are also right; by nature, innately, one may know come to know many things and physicians can indeed heal themselves. Aquinas identifies two “agent principles” in natural things, as per Aristotle’s Metaphysics. The first is the “perfect agent,” which “has within itself everything that it causes in the effect.” The other is what might be termed a contributing or partial cause, necessary but not sufficient to effect something. “In the primary agents there is action in the fullest sense, but not in agents of the secondary sort, because a thing acts insofar as it is actual.” A secondary agent is not a “perfect agent.” Teaching “implies the perfect act of knowing in the teacher or master”; he must really know what he’s talking about. If not, he’s not really teaching. “When someone acquires knowledge by himself through an intrinsic principle, what in the agent cause of science does not possess the science to be acquired, save in part, namely with respect to the seminal causes of science, which are common principles.” That is, before I discover a truth, I do not have it and therefore am not perfectly knowledgeable with respect to it. In Aquinas’ sense, I haven’t truly taught it to myself, even though I have come to it ‘unaided’ except for the “seminal reasons of science” God implanted in me, by nature.

In these two questions, then, Aquinas considers teaching first with regard to the teacher, second in regard to the one taught. Knowledge in a rational animal can lead that animal either to pride or to humiliation. As an Aristotelian, Aquinas rejects the extremes, seeking the middle, readiness to teach and to discover and to learn. As a Christian, he must establish the ground of humility by distinguishing what God can teach from what man can teach, what man can learn by exercising his God-given nature and what he can learn only by God’s revelation. Teaching is humanly possible because a man can lead another man from self-evident truths to particulars. To be taught is humanly possible because human beings have been endowed by God, acting through nature, with reason, the capacity to discover and to learn the particulars, especially once reason has been “stirred” by the signs the teacher transmits through the senses to the intellect. 

 

Note

1. On Augustine’s dialogue, see “Who Is the Teacher?” on this website under the category, “Philosophers.”

 

Augustine: The Teacher: A Dialogue between Augustine and his son Adeodatus. In Augustine: Earlier Writings. Edited and translated by John H. S. Burleigh. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1953.

 

The son of Romanized Berbers, Augustine’s name derives from Augustus, denoting ‘venerable,’ a name that reflects the civil status of his family, who numbered among the honestiores or ‘honorable men,’ the aristocratic class. His own son’s name, Adeodatus, means ‘gift from God.’ If one were given to symbolism, the difference between the two names might be taken to register conversion to Christianity and the moral consequence of moving away from pride of family in the City of Man to humility before God in the City of God, the transfer of citizenship from one regime to another. Citizenship must be passed down from father to son or, for Christians, from the Father to the sons of God. But thoughtful citizenship in the City of God still requires education on earth. Augustine knew that the would-be teacher of virtue, Christian or other, faced serious problems, as shown in Plato’s Meno. The Teacher is in some ways a Christian reply to the Meno. Unlike Plato, Augustine makes himself a character in his own dialogue, along with his son; Anytus in the Meno assumed that fathers could readily teach virtue to their sons, and Augustine may think that Christians, unlike pagan aristocrats, can succeed. Jesus had recommended that sons break with their pagan families, but now that ruling families are Christians, families themselves need to be re-founded along the lines of the new Christian regime. To do so, the classical education that linked the generations also needed to be re-founded. Hence The Teacher.

Augustine begins with a teleological question: “What do you suppose is our purpose when we use words?” We want “to let people know something, or we want to learn something”—making a statement or asking a question—Adeodatus replies. Augustine corrects him, saying that a question also lets people know something, namely, that we do not know and want to know—thereby suggesting a limit to the desire to learn, one that will vary from student to student. We are telling someone that we want to be told, we want to be taught. It might be that if Christians consider the Bible to set down what virtue is, that they need only to consult it, learn God’s words, in order to know virtue. Plato would reply that learning moral principles is not the same as being virtuous, and of course Augustine, that eminent chronicler of sin, knows that.

But, Adeodatus objects, we use words to sing, often singing alone, not telling anyone anything. Yes, Augustine replies, “there is a kind of teaching, and a most important kind, which consists in reminding people of something”—a major theme of the Meno. [1] Augustine thereby broadens the purpose of words to include reminding. Music, Plato knows, gets into the soul; it is not mere knowledge but morally influential, setting the rhythm of the soul, causing harmony or disharmony among the ‘parts’ of the soul. But “I very rarely sing to remind myself of anything, almost always simply to give myself pleasure,” his son replies, giving his father a glimpse into his soul. Yes, but “what pleases you in singing is the melody”; we sing in words set to music, which isn’t the same thing as speaking. Birds sing, but do not speak (unless they are parrots, but parrots don’t tell us anything, that way, communicating in earnest only by squawks and shrieks). “You agree, then, that there is no other reason for the use of words than either to teach or to call something to mind?”

Very well, then, Adeodatus says, but what about prayer? When we pray, we use words but not to “teach God anything or remind him of anything.” God is the supreme Knower. Augustine agrees, remarking that we speak to God in “our inmost mind”—the Christian answer to the problem of outer appearance and inner reality seen in the Meno is that God does not need to guess or to inquire into the true nature of any human soul. “God is to be sought and prayed to in the secret place of the rational soul, which is called ‘the inner man.'” And God is very close by, indeed, because his Spirit dwells in you, as the Apostle Paul testifies in First Corinthians. For a Christian, as distinguished from Socrates, the Logos is the Jesus, Son of God, accessible to the soul thanks to the Holy Spirit, residing in “the inner man.” The mind is the temple where God dwells, where we sacrifice passions and false beliefs to God, to Reason.

There is also public prayer, prayer by a priest in front of congregants. One might expect Augustine to say that prayer is speech, talking to God, telling Him what we want or telling him that we fear and love Him. But by using words, Augustine means audible speech, and prayer is inaudible, except when a priest prays in a religious service, “not that God may hear, but that men may hear and, being put in remembrance, may with some consent be brought into dependence on God.” The audible prayer of priests tells the hearers what the priests want them to hear, and to believe. In the Meno, remembrance really means thinking—at best, ratiocination—but for Christians it is a re-centering of the mind on the presence of the Holy Spirit within them, consenting to his guidance; for a Christian priest, speech extends to both Christians and to non-Christians, the latter to be ‘reminded’ of their consciences, that element within their souls which is receptive to the Holy Spirit. “Such speech is nothing but a calling to remembrance of the realities of which the words are but the signs, for the memory which retains the words and turns them over and over, cause the realities to come to mind.” Public prayer calls up the “memory” of the Holy Spirit and His teachings. This is the kind of memory a Christian will cultivate, a memory of words, of the Word, not so much a ‘memory’ or set of logical deductions concerning geometric figures, as in the Meno.

But more generally, “speech is nothing but a calling to remembrance of the realities of which the words are but the signs, for the memory.” As Adeodatus will later say, we use speech “in order to teach or to call to mind.” This shifts the dialogue (itself obviously an exchange of words, by definition) back from the purpose of speech, logos, to the elements of speech, words, logoi—from teleology to analysis. The men agree that words are signs, and that signs signify, that is, they mean something. “Things which do not signify something beyond themselves cannot be signs.” To consider this more carefully, Augustine then quotes Virgil’s Aeneid, Book II, line 659: Si nihil ex tanta superis placet urbe relinqui (“If it pleases the gods that nothing be left of so great a city,” namely, Troy). The sentence has a purpose but analytically considered, do the words composing it have a purpose, a meaning? Do they refer to anything beyond themselves? If not, can a sentence, a thing composed of words, really mean something? Can we learn anything, know anything, by means of words? 

There are eight words, thus eight signs, in the verse. “I suppose you understand the meaning of the verse.” Yes, says Adeodatus, by which he may mean the whole verse, the phrase. But Augustine wants him to analyze the verse, break it down into its elements. The first word, Si signifies not a thing but a “state of mind,” doubt, an answer Augustine accepts “in the meantime.” As for nihil, it seems to Adeodatus to signify “that which is not,” but Augustine raises an objection: if words signify something, how can any word signify nothing? Augustine suggests a tentative solution to this aporia in saying that nihil may also signify “a state of mind rather than a thing which is nothing,” joking that we should not let ‘nothing’ detain us. “At the proper time we shall understand more clearly this kind of difficulty, if God will.” In the Aeneid verse, nothing evidently means absence, the end of a war in which something, Troy, is reduced to nothing, a destruction approved by the pagan gods, the gods of the ‘City of Man’; in the Bible, God does the opposite, creating the heavens and the earth out of “nothing.” And in the beginning was not merely a set of words but the Word, the Logos. The Christian teacher needs to understand and to use the power of that Word, and of the words that compose the Bible. In the Meno, Socrates associates ‘memory’ or learning with geometry; in The Teacher, Augustine associates it with words because he is a Christian. Some of the moderns (notably Hobbes and Descartes) would attempt to undermine the Word by reconnecting reason with mathematics. Others, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, would undermine not only the Word but all words by deeming them mere conventions.

On to ex, a preposition, which means either ‘of’ or ‘out of.’ What the gods may want is for the Greeks to bring nothingness out of Troy, reduce it to rubble, although some Trojans might (and indeed did) survive, one of them going on to found Rome, the new “great city,” the one that would be conquered spiritually by Christians, re-founded in a manner pleasing the one God, not the gods to whom Virgil’s hero prayed, false gods—nothings that would make bring Troy to nothing. Augustine demurs: “I want you to show me, if you can, what are the things of which these [words] are the signs.” But Father, “what you ask cannot be done in conversation, where we cannot answer questions except by means of words.” Admittedly so, but can you not say a word and point to the thing it signifies, the reality it signifies? Only with “names signifying corporeal objects.” Really? What about color? It isn’t a corporeal object but “rather a quality of a corporeal object.” True, but by “corporeal objects” I mean “all the qualities of bodies which are susceptible to sense-perception,” or, more exactly, all visible objects. After all, I cannot show the corporeal object I mean to signify by a word if that object is out of sight. It is true, however, his father remarks, that one can point out invisible things, as deaf people do by the gestures of ‘sign language’ and as dancers “unfold and set forth whole stories” on stage? All right, Adeodatus concedes, but that doesn’t solve the problem of how to understand the word ex, which “neither I nor your dancing actor will ever be able to point out” the meaning of. 

“But suppose he could,” Augustine says, persisting. Whatever that gesture was, the actor would still be using a sign, not the thing signified. He would still be “explain[ing] a sign by a sign.” In that case, what I just said, that is there “nothing”—that word again—which “can be shown without signs”? Yes, there is, because if—that word, again—I asked you what walking is, you could get up and walk, “using the thing itself to show me, not words or any other signs.” Embarrassed for the first time in the dialogue, Adeodatus admits that he overlooked this. At the same time, Augustine continues, not everything could be signified clearly without signs, since if I asked you what “hastening” means, and you walked fast, I might “conclude that walking was the same thing as hastening.” They soon agree that “there are two classes of things that can be demonstrated without signs: those which we are not engaged in doing when we are asked” and those we can immediately start doing, such as walking when asked what walking is, “and those in which the action consists in simply giving signs,” in the manner of deaf persons and dancers. Signs can be used to signify other signs, but only if “the question concerns signs merely.” To put the matter more generally, if words are only signs of signs, no one can learn, since in explaining one sign I am only substituting another sign for it. And if I point or gesture at something in an attempt to show you what the sign signifies, I need to know what the thing is that I’m pointing at, before I understand the sign. 

To address this aporia, Augustine first directs his son’s attention to signs demonstrated by signs. Verbal signs come to us by the sense of hearing, gestural signs by sight. “A word is a meaningful articulate sound, and sound is perceived by no other sense than hearing,” but when “a word is written, a sign is given to the eyes whereby something that properly belongs to the ears is brought to mind.” Socrates precedes Plato, God precedes Moses, Jesus precedes the Apostle John. A “name” signifies “something or somebody”—Rome, Romulus, Virtue, a River—which Augustine calls “significables.” But the word “name” itself signifies not a significable but a sign, “the audible sign of audible signs.” “A name, therefore, is a word when it is pronounced articulately with a meaning.” Thus, for example, such words as “if” and “from” are words but not names; “just as every horse is an animal but every animal is not a horse, so every word is a sign but every sign is not a word.” And “all names are words, but all words are not names,” since a word is “the sign of a sign which signifies no other signs,” a sign that refers to a significable. Whereas a name is “the sign of a sign that points to other signs.” This notwithstanding, “in a general sense verbum [word] and nomen [word] have the same range of application” because “all the parts of speech have names”—nouns, verbs, conjunctions—”because pronouns can be substituted or added to them”; any part of speech can be referred to as “it,” any word or name referred to with one or another conjunction, none that “cannot be made the subject of a verb to form a complete sentence.” 

Augustine then makes another distinction, this one directly relevant to teaching. Insofar as it is an articulate significant sound, a word “smites the ear.” But it does so for a telos, a purpose, namely, “that it may be perceived, remembered and known.” A word is “something that happens to the ear,” a name “something that happens in the mind,” in the “inner man,” as he had said near the beginning of the dialogue. The relation between word and name is no simple thing, however. “To use words to treat of words is as complicated as to rub fingers together and expect someone else to distinguish which fingers tingle with warmth and which help others to tingle.” What happens to your ear may register differently in your mind than in mine. If we say of Christ, “In Him was virtue,” we don’t mean that the word the word “virtue” is in Him but that the thing we name virtue is in Him. This raises a serious question about the authority of religious teaching. What if Paul was right—wielding God-given authority with respect to “realities,” the thing we name virtue in Christ—but not with respect to the word which he used to signify that reality, “especially when he himself confesses that he was unskilled in speech”? Adeodatus cannot think of a way out of this aporia. “You think that without authorities reason itself is hardly sufficient, but reason itself demonstrates that all the parts of speech may signify some thing”; if reason did not have the power to generalize, no word in Latin could be equivalent to any word in Greek. It may be that “some man, from greater stupidity or impudence, may not agree, but on the contrary may assert that he will give way only to those authorities who with universal consent are allowed to lay down the law in regard to words,” but reason tells us otherwise. Nature refutes thoroughgoing conventionalism because it can find contradictions, impossibilities, in some conventions. Words are understood not by redundant self-reference but by the ability of the soul to learn, by the logos within the soul, which ‘decodes’ the sign that would otherwise be only a noise rattling in one’s ear. In this, the teaching of The Teacher resembles the teaching of the Meno. Augustine departs from Plato and Plato’s Socrates in taking logos as the gift of the Logos, of God. But no less than Plato and Plato’s Socrates does he insist that we learn by logos working within us, not by thoughtlessly following what supposed authorities tell us.

Augustine then proceeds to show this by asking what “the goal” we have striven “to reach by all these round-about paths.” Conventionally speaking, sons should simply go along with the authority of fathers, but if fathers engage sons in pointless tasks, does paternal authority really consist of, other than their own stupidity and imprudence? Conversely, many people, and not only sons in front of their fathers, become impatient with reasoning and simply want to be told. But if the teacher gives in to this, can he truly be said to have taught his student?

Augustine’s son having demonstrated his capacity to learn, to reason, “You will pardon me, therefore, if I play with you to begin with, not for the sake of playing, but in order to exercise and sharpen our mental powers”—both of ours, not only yours—for the purpose of being able “not merely to endure the heat and light of the region where lies the blessed life, but also to love them.” In Plato’s dialogue, Meno had no such endurance, no such love. Adeodatus does: “Go on as you have begun, for I shall never think unworthy of attention anything you may think it necessary to say or to do.” That is, Adeodatus accepts his father’s authority because, just as he has proven his philosophic mettle to his father, so his father has proven the goodness of philosophy to his son, by bringing him to philosophize, to experience the good effects of philosophizing. Consideration of words, of logoi, entails philosophizing, and philosophizing orients souls away from the conventional dimension of words and towards logos. Sifting out the contradictions now seen in conventions can bring the soul to nature, to what is as it were above the conventions.

Accordingly, Augustine turns from consideration of signs signifying other signs to signs signifying significables. Augustine quickly establishes to Adeodatus’ satisfaction that “we cannot carry on a conversation at all unless the words we hear carry the mind to the things of which they are the signs.” But there is a distinction to be made. If I use the word ‘lion,’ the word ‘lion’ has come out of my mouth, but a lion hasn’t. Adeodatus understands that “our words are signs merely of things”: “it is the sign and not the thing signified which comes out of the mouth of the speaker.” Augustine compliments him, again by invoking reason: “The very law of reason,” the principle of non-contradiction, the capacity to make distinctions, which is “stamped on our minds,” has “awakened your vigilance.” Logos is in us. Thus, one can see that the word ‘man’ is “both a noun and an animal” (in fact, a “rational and mortal animal”). “It is a noun when it is regarded as a sign, and an animal when regard is had to the thing signified by the sign.” “The rule, which naturally carries the greatest weight, is that, as soon as signs are heard, the attention is directed to the things they signify,” and that we should consider “that things signified are of greater importance than their signs,” inasmuch as “whatever exists on account of something else must necessarily be of less value than that on account of which it exists.” It is noteworthy that Augustine places his discussion of the word ‘man’ in the central paragraphs of The Teacher. It is man, not God or beasts, who can learn by reasoning.

Adeodatus demurs. The Latin word for filth is lovelier than what it signifies: “Change one letter and caenum [filth] becomes caelum [heaven]”! Witty lad, he likes puns, but “importance” is not the same as “preferable.” If words signify things, Augustine replies, then they can increase our knowledge. “The knowledge conveyed by this word” from one person to another is “more valuable than the word itself” because, as Adeodatus says, when I use a word “I want to give a sign to the man with whom I am speaking, by means of which I may let him know what I think he ought to know”—that is, I want to teach him something.

Nonetheless, Adeodatus insists, “this does not mean that the thing signified is better than its sign.” Yes, but “knowledge of filth is more important than the name”; the names, ‘filth’ and ‘heaven’ could be reversed but the things signified could not be; some word is necessary to indicate the thing, which is the more important thing to know. Augustine aims at eradicating any tendency in his son toward rhetorical ornamentation. He also would have had little patience for what would be called estheticism, l’art pour l’art, centuries later. 

Hierarchy implies teleology. For example, “the advice to eat in order to live rather than to live in order to eat, is justly praised simply because it shows understanding of what is means and what is end, that is to say, of what should be subordinate to what.” If a rhetorician, “some loquacious lover of verbiage,” some glutton of words, were to say he teaches for the sake of talking, he could be corrected by saying he should talk for the sake of teaching. Generally, “the use to which words are put is superior to the words; for words exist in order to be used, and used to teach”; “knowledge is better than words.”

But if the name, ‘filth,’ is preferable to filth itself, would not the knowledge of the name be preferable to knowledge of the thing? Adeodatus identifies “four terms here: the name, the thing, knowledge of the name, knowledge of the thing,” and just as the thing is “better” (in the sense of more important to know) than the name, so knowledge of the thing is better than knowledge of the name.” Augustine disagrees: knowledge of the word “vice” is “much inferior to knowledge of the vices.”

Yet, squeamish Adeodatus objects, “Do you think that knowledge is preferable even when it makes us more miserable?” Yes, because without the knowledge, we will not know, and thus not be able to correct, the underlying evil. This points to a serious problem that teachers face: the resistance of students to obtaining knowledge of unpleasant things, realities they would rather not think about. But just as physicians need to tell patients what their illness is, in order to get them to take their medicine, and patients should not blame physicians for their illnesses, so student should not blame their teachers for the students’ ignorance or for the wrongly ordered souls that resist corrections.

But there is a “greater problem,” mentioned earlier: Can “all actions which we can perform on being interrogated…be demonstrated without a sign?” The difficulty, as Adeodatus sees, is that if someone asks me, What is walking? and I get up and walk, without any explanation, he might imagine that “walking” means the distance I have walked, not the movement itself. He might suppose that “anyone who walked further or less than I had walked, had not in fact walked at all.” I need to speak or teach, to supplement the visual sign.

Granted, but “don’t you think speaking and teaching are different things?” If all speaking is telling, and we “do not teach in order that we give signs,” merely to swap words, then they must differ. Whether you teach solely with words or with words and actions, “we give signs in order to teach,” do we not? It seems that our conversation has shown that nothing can be taught without signs; that some signs are to be preferred to the things they signify; and that the knowledge of things is better than the knowledge of their signs. If “we give signs in order that we may teach, and do not teach that we may give sings,” then “teaching and giving signs are different things.” But “do you think our results now stand beyond all doubt,” Adeodatus?  “I should dearly like to think that after all these turnings and twisting we have indeed reached certainty,” Father, but since you’ve asked the question, I am “anxious” that there might be more difficulties to come. Augustine commends his son’s fear of aporia as an indication of caution, as “a cautious mind” is “the best guard of tranquility.”

Adeodatus’ caution turns out to be well-founded. To reach a hasty conclusion and hold fast to it will lead to trouble. Giving a fuller answer to the question of whether knowledge is preferable even when it makes us more miserable, Augustine observes that “it is the most difficult thing in the world not to be upset when opinions which we hold, and to which we have given to ready and too willful approval, are shattered by contrary arguments and are, as it were, weapons torn from our hands.” (This may well be the cause of Anytus’ anger in the Meno, an anger that contributed to the execution of Socrates; he fears defenseless, personally and politically.) We should resist the sentiment. Rather, “it is a good thing to give in calmly to arguments that are well considered and grasped, just as it is dangerous to hold as known what in fact we do not know,” falling “into such hatred or fear of reason that we think we cannot trust even the most clearly manifest truth.” That is, misology leads to radical skepticism, the refusal to learn based not on the principle of I know that I do not know but on the self-contradictory principle, I know that I cannot know. In Christian terms, misology would readily lead to hostility toward the Word of God, indeed toward God Himself. Just as Socrates died because he had offended the Athenians with his logical challenges to their opinions, so Christ died because He had offended Jews and Romans alike, as the Logos.

It is true that some men can be taught some things by observing another’s actions, without signs. Natural objects are exhibited by God, and we can learn about them without any instruction from their Creator. Conversely, one often learns little or nothing by signs alone; a verbal description of a cat is hardly more instructive than seeing a cat. The word ‘cat’ is otherwise scarcely more than a sound to me. “We perceive the sound when it strikes our ear, while the meaning becomes clear when we look at the thing signified,” learning “the force of the word, that is the meaning which lies in the sound of the word, when we come to know the object signified by the word.” Whether we are Adam in the Garden or a child at home, typically we see something and then either assign a name to it or ask for the name that has been assigned. Teaching, then, is not simply a matter of talking, even if the aim of the talking is teaching. But the true learning goes on in the mind of the learner. In learning a thing, I do “not trust the words of another but my own eyes,” a fact that Groucho Marx plays with in his celebrated joke. A genuine teacher “bid[s] us look for things,” but does “not show them to us so that we may know them.” “He alone teaches me anything who sets before my eyes, or one of my other bodily senses, or my mind, the things which I desire to know,” inasmuch as “from words we can learn only words.” In passing, one notes that the ‘moderns’ who complained that the ‘Churchmen’ thought only in terms of words hadn’t paid attention to Augustine’s words: “Knowledge of words is completed by knowledge of things, and by the hearing of words not even words are learned,” since we do not yet know what the words mean. When we already know something, a word may remind us of it; in that sense, the teaching of the Meno, that knowledge is memory, is correct; if, however, “we do not know, we are not even reminded, but are perhaps urged to inquire.” That is, if someone uses an unfamiliar word, I know that I don’t know something, and I may ask what it means, preliminary to learning something.

What about another kind of claim, the claims of historians and, most pointedly, of sacred historians? When it comes to names, “What about those young men of whom we have heard,” Ananias, Azarias, and Missel,” who passed through the furnace fire? “All that we read of in that story happened at that time and was written down, so that I have to confess that I must believe rather than know,” a distinction understood by the Prophet Isaiah himself, who said “Unless you believe you shall not know.” “What I know I also believe, but I do not know everything that I believe.” It is “useful” to believe “many things which I do not know, among them this story about the three youths,” which teaches readers to trust God. “I know how useful it is to believe many things of which knowledge is not possible,” including any historical information, sacred or secular, which did not occur in my lifetime, or, for that matter, information presented by reporters of the ‘news.’ Near the end of the dialogue, Augustine promises a further inquiry into “the whole problem of the usefulness of words, for their usefulness properly considered is not slight.” In this dialogue, he is concerned that “we must not attribute to them a greater importance than they ought to have.”

It is different with “universals of which we can have knowledge,” ideas that we can discover through our own reasoning and need “not listen to anyone speaking and making sounds outside ourselves” to arrive at.  True, “our real Teacher is He who is so listened to,” but he is “said”—said—to “dwell in the inner man,” speaking to us of “the unchangeable power and eternal wisdom of God” not from outside of ourselves but providing us “wisdom [to which] every rational soul gives heed,” although “to each is given only so much as he is able to receive, according to his own good or evil will.” That is likely to be Augustine’s explanation of Isaiah’s monition, “Unless you believe you shall not know”; your soul must be ready to receive the truth, as indeed it must be ready to reason about theoretical or practical matters. Meno and Anytus will not philosophize; atheists refuse the invitation of God. “If anyone is ever deceived it is not the fault of Truth, any more than it is the fault of the common light of day that the bodily eyes are often deceived.”

We need light to see colors, other “elements of the world and sentient bodies,” along with the senses themselves, to “perceive things of sense”—what Christian authors call “carnal things.” The mind then “uses” all of these material things “as interpreters in its search for sense-knowledge.” If I hear words relating someone else’s sense perception, I may believe what he says but I do not know it. The same goes for sense perceptions remembered by others as images in their minds. I may believe their words but I cannot know them to be true. As to “intelligible things,” what Christian authors call “spiritual things,” it is reason that enables us to pay attention to the “inner light of truth.” Put more expansively, regarding the things of sense, words suffice to teach the student that we say we perceive them, but “he learns nothing unless he himself sees what is asking about,” learning “not from words uttered but from the objects seen and his sense of sight.” These sense impressions then imprint themselves on his memory. It is in “the halls of memory [that] we bear the images of things once perceived as memorial which we can contemplate mentally and can speak of with a good conscience and without lying.” We can report them truthfully, but our listener “believes my words”—or not—rather than “learning from them.” The same goes with “the things which we behold with the mind,” with “the intelligence” in the act of noēsis and “with reason,” logos governed by the principle of non-contradiction. The “inner light of truth which illumines the inner man and is inwardly enjoyed” may be reported to another, but “if my hearer sees these things himself with his inward eye, he comes to know what I say, not as a result of my words but as a result of his own contemplation.” Strictly speaking, “it is not I who teach him,” as “he is taught not by my words but by the things themselves which inwardly God has made manifest to him.” Augustine is careful to acknowledge that such contemplation does not typically come as a result of the person’s own efforts. “It often happens that a man, when asked a question, gives a negative answer, but by further questioning can be brought to answer in the affirmative.” That is, Augustine remains a ‘Socratic,’ acknowledging the merit of dialogue and the rational dialectic it entails. Dialogue is necessary, given the “weakness” of human beings, “unable to behold the whole all at once,” but “when questioned about the parts which compose the whole,” can be “induced to bring them one by one into the light.” This of course is what Augustine has done in this dialogue with his son. In a philosophic dialogue, the words “do not make statements, but merely ask such questions as to put [the student] who is questioned in a position to learn inwardly.” (This contrasts with a police interrogation, in which questions are asked in order to force truthful answers out of the one questioned, so that the inquirer, or rather the inquisitor, may learn.) As a teacher, “I must put my question in a way suited to your ability to hear the inward teacher.” 

To teach and to learn, then, both require a degree of humility as well as a degree of confidence. Christianity commends both humility and faith, and so can adapt itself to teaching. If a student hears what I say but does not know whether it’s true, he may believe it, suppose it, or doubt it. If knows that it is false, he “must oppose it and deny it.” If he knows it is true “he must testify to its truth.” But in none of these cases will he learn because he must, as the saying goes, see for himself. I can tell you all about Augustine’s dialogue, “The Teacher,” but you have learned nothing about it from my words unless you read the dialogue and see for yourself. It may be “useful to believe such things so long as ignorance lasts.” But unless some compelling reason prevents it, don’t let your ignorance last. You don’t even know if my words give you a good account of my own mind, since I might be ignorant or a liar. “A speech committed to memory and frequently conned,” as rhetoricians are wont to do, “may be spoken when we are thinking of something else entirely.” (Augustine then goes in for the kill: “This often happens when we are singing a hymn.”) Or the intended meaning of the speaker may be distorted in the minds of the listeners, as when, for example, the speaker has “simply called the thing he has in mind by a different name from the one we are accustomed to use.” This may be remedied by careful definition of the word, as Augustine has done in his own discussion of words, “but how often is a man to be found who is good at definition?”

Even if the teacher’s words are understood according to the teacher’s intention, the student does not learn from those words whether “the words spoken are true.” “Who is so foolishly curious as to send his son to school to learn what the teacher thinks?” he asks, rhetorically but reasonably. “When the teachers have expounded by means of words all the disciples which they profess”—profess—to “teach, the disciples also of virtue and wisdom”—the theme of the Meno—then their pupils take thought within themselves whether what they have been told is true, looking to the inward truth, that is to say, also far as they are able. In this way they learn.” If, as educators once loved to say, educare means to lead out or to draw out, this is what the leading consists of.

This goes for revelation and reason, both, including the revelation of truths perceived rationally within the framework of belief in revelation. Adeodatus has learned that “by means of words a man is simply put on the alert in order that he may learn,” and that “in order to know the truth of what is spoken, I must be taught by Him who dwells within and give me counsel about words spoken externally in the ear.” The philosopher loves wisdom, and by Christ’s “favor I shall love him the more ardently the more I advance in learning.”

 

Note

1. On the Meno see “Teaching Virtue?” on this website under the category, “Philosophers.”