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The year after Augustine died, Pope Celestine I pronounced him “one of the best teachers of the church.” That assessment, Pope John Paul II said recently, “has been present ever since in the life of the church and in the mind and culture of the whole Western world.” Evidence that Augustine deserves such plaudits is abundantly present throughout his works, as well as through all the works he engendered by other authors. He was a teacher’s teacher; his life was permeated with education; he drastically influenced much of subsequent education structures.

His life-long vocation was that of a teacher. Before his conversion he was a teacher of rhetoric, and after it he became a teaching bishop. Comments on education appear everywhere in his writings, but are most fully set out in his work On Christian Doctrine. However, to better appreciate this work, one should also read some of his other philosophical and theological works, especially On the Teacher.

He began On Christian Doctrine in 396, around the time he became bishop of Hippo, some 10 years after his conversion. He completed it in 427, more than 30 years later. Yet the work, even though composed over such an extended period, is remarkably coherent and flowing—indicating the extraordinary discipline of Augustine’s educational thought and practice.

In it, Augustine outlines the preparations that will equip the would-be interpreter of scriptural truth to properly understand and communicate the message of the Christian church. The purpose of the work is to discuss “the kind of man he ought to be who seeks to labor in sound doctrine, which is Christian doctrine, not only for himself, but also for others.” The work defines a methodology for scriptural exposition and catechetical instruction, and establishes the curricular foundation that stood beneath virtually all theological education for centuries to come.

The treatise is in four books, but has two main divisions. The first three books deal with the discovery of the meaning of Scripture; the fourth treats the teaching of what has been discovered. For Augustine, the communication of Christian truth was based on analysis of the meaning of the written records of Scripture.

For Martin Luther (an Augustinian monk), the principle sola scriptura led to an emphasis on the clarity of Scripture. But Augustine’ s approach focused more on the educational and spiritual preparation that enables the interpreter to deal with the obscurities of Scripture, to discover the meanings hidden within its ambiguity.

The Christian message, says Augustine, was originally set forth in a language that encouraged it to spread throughout the world. But biblical language is sometimes figurative and ambiguous, he says, and this places special demands on the learning and imagination of the reader. “Against unknown literal signs the sovereign remedy is a knowledge of languages,” he writes. And against the obscurity of artfully ambiguous or figurative language, he says, a “knowledge of things” is also required.

According to Augustine, students of Scripture must have knowledge of the natural world, of mathematics, and of music. They must have scientific educations in order to defend against superstitious or magical interpretations of scriptural narratives. A knowledge of history is particularly useful in helping them understand the biblical books, and mastery of the “science of disputation” (dialectics) is indispensable for following scriptural and theological arguments.

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