On the Teacher

Overview

On the Teacher is fifty pages and it is a real conversation. Augustine and his son Adeodatus talk, the boy argues back, is sometimes right, is led along, and at the end is told what the exercise was for. In the Confessions Augustine says the words attributed to his son in this book were genuinely his, that the boy was sixteen, that his intelligence frightened his father, and that he died soon afterwards.

It was written around 389, shortly after their return to Thagaste from Italy, and it belongs to the group of dialogues Augustine produced in the first years after his conversion, before he became a bishop and before the great works. The manner is Ciceronian and the method is Socratic: the argument proceeds by questions, and the reader is meant to feel the ground shifting.

The subject looks narrow, what happens when we use words, and the conclusion is very wide. The dialogue is the earliest sustained treatment of signs in the Western tradition and it is the foundation on which Augustine later builds the hermeneutics of On Christian Doctrine.

The argument

The opening move. Augustine asks what we intend when we speak, and Adeodatus answers that we intend either to teach or to remind. Augustine accepts it provisionally and starts testing. What about prayer, where God needs no informing? What about speaking to ourselves? A long stretch follows on words as signs, including a genuinely funny sequence in which they take the first line of the Aeneid and try to say what each word signifies, and get stuck on nothing.

Can anything be shown without signs? Adeodatus proposes that some things can be displayed directly: if asked what walking is, you walk. Augustine presses: how does the questioner know you are showing him walking rather than hurrying, or the distance, or the act of demonstrating? A gesture is itself a sign and is open to the same ambiguity. Adeodatus concedes.

The dilemma. Now the argument that gives the dialogue its force. Consider a word you do not understand. Someone explains it with other words. Either you understand those, in which case they were not what taught you the thing, or you do not, in which case you have made no progress. And consider a word you do understand. Then you already know the thing it names, and the word adds nothing to your knowledge of it; it merely calls it up.

So in neither case does the sign teach. We do not learn things from words. We learn words from things.

Augustine presses the point through an example that mattered enormously to his readers: the three young men in the fiery furnace in the book of Daniel. Do we know what happened because we heard the words? No, he says. Those who believe it believe it on the authority of the narrator, which is a different thing from knowing it; those who know something of this kind know it by seeing it, inwardly or outwardly. The distinction between believing on testimony and knowing by acquaintance is drawn here with unusual clarity, and Augustine is not dismissive of belief, since he says elsewhere that most of what we live by is held that way.

The inner teacher. If words do not teach, what does? Augustine’s answer is that when we understand anything, we are not attending to the sound outside but consulting a truth presiding within the mind, and that this truth is Christ, the unchangeable wisdom that every rational soul consults and that answers each according to what it can receive.

The role of the human teacher is then reduced, precisely and deliberately. He prompts. He directs attention. He may arrange the words so that the pupil looks in the right place. Whether the pupil then sees is not in his power, and when the pupil does see, what he has learned he has learned from the truth itself and not from the man in front of him. Augustine adds the observation that teachers who are honest will recognise this, and that the ones who claim otherwise are claiming a power they do not have.

The last pages turn back to Adeodatus, and Augustine tells him what he has been doing: exercising him, so that he should not take words for knowledge, and so that he should know where to look. The boy replies that he has learned by these words that words do nothing more than prompt a man to learn, and that he has learned the rest from the teacher within.

How to read it

Read Plato’s Meno first, or at least the slave-boy passage. Augustine is working the same territory, that learning looks impossible because you must already know what you are looking for, and his answer replaces recollection of a former life with illumination in this one.

Read chapters 10 to 12 most carefully. The first nine are patient groundwork on signs and can be taken at speed; the dilemma and its resolution are at the end.

Notice how much is conceded to the teacher even in the negative conclusion. Augustine does not say teaching is pointless; he says that what it accomplishes is not transmission. Anyone who has taught will recognise the distinction.

Read Aquinas’ own On the Teacher afterwards if you can. He takes Augustine seriously, agrees that the pupil must see for himself, and argues that the teacher is nevertheless a genuine cause, in the way a physician is a cause of healing that the body does. It is one of the better philosophical disagreements across eight hundred years.

Then read the opening pages of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, which begin by quoting Augustine on how he learned words as a child and dismantling the picture of language as a system of names for things. The two Augustines, the one quoted there and the one arguing here, are not quite the same, which is itself worth noticing.

Questions it raises

• If words cannot teach, what exactly is a book doing? Augustine wrote a great many.
• The dilemma seems to prove too much. Does it apply to learning a first language, and if not, why not?
• Augustine distinguishes believing on authority from knowing. How much of what anyone knows survives that distinction?
• The inner teacher is identified with Christ. Could the epistemology stand without the theology, and what would take its place?
• If understanding is seeing for yourself, what makes one teacher better than another?
• Adeodatus agrees at the end. Is he convinced, or has he been led? The dialogue form makes that question part of the argument.