The fourth in a series of podcasts has been published on the Spreaker channel of the Press Office of the Royal Commission for Italy of the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of Saint George. Following the podcasts marking the 60th anniversary of the publication of the principal documents of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, the Director of Formation of the Delegation of Rome and Vatican City, Prof. Enzo Cantarano, Knight of Merit with Silver Star, draws attention to the importance of the educational sphere for all of us with a series of podcasts on Christian paideia in Saint Augustine.
This podcast is especially timely in the light of the visit of His Holiness Pope Leo XIV to Annaba, formerly Hippo, on 14 April 2026. Hippo was where Saint Augustine served as bishop, beginning in the late fourth century A.D. The Holy Father is the first member of the Augustinian Order to be called to the Throne of Peter.
Augustine’s pedagogy is a journey that leads from external knowledge to interior Wisdom, guided by pedagogical love. It is an educational path aimed at the conversion of the heart and the salvation of the soul, transforming the “old man” into the “new man” through grace and divine truth. It places Christ as the only true interior Teacher, going beyond classical pagan instruction to integrate Faith and reason, with the goal of knowing God. The Interior Teacher and Truth: Augustine maintains that human teaching is limited; true knowledge is not transmitted from the outside but illuminated by God directly within the soul. Pedagogical purpose: the objective is not merely erudition, but spiritual formation, religious instruction, and love for God, overcoming instrumental curiositas. Method: a modern approach attentive to psychology, avoiding boredom, favoring pedagogical love, and adapting to individual abilities, with instruction based on Sacred Scripture. Integrated formation: it values the liberal arts and pagan culture as auxiliary instruments but subordinates them to knowledge of Scripture. Introspection: education passes through self-examination and the narration of one’s own life in order to encounter God, uniting Faith and reason.
Podcast 3–44 – Christian Paideia in Saint Augustine – Part Four
Augustine and Christian Pedagogy
Part Four
It has seemed that, with advancing age, Augustine’s position regarding the value and function of classical culture became more intolerant and exclusivist, based certainly on the text of Letter 118, written in 410 and addressed to the Greek man of letters Dioscorus, whom Augustine had met in Milan when he was teaching rhetoric. Augustine was fifty-six years old. Thirteen years earlier he had written the Confessions, and he maintains coherence with the judgments expressed there concerning the value of knowledge and study. Augustine reproaches Dioscorus not for love of learning, but for the superficiality and impropriety he demonstrated in thinking that intricate, numerous, often trivial and far-fetched questions could be examined and resolved quickly and merely in order “not to appear ignorant and foolish” in the eyes of certain friends. The dignity of culture cannot be confused with literary vanity and demands very different motivations.
In Augustine’s reply, the philosophical excursus is broad and penetrating, because it concerns fundamental problems and not idle trifles. He certainly refuses to enter into erudite details or to venture interpretative hypotheses, because at his age he prefers “to treat and resolve a problem by considering it in itself” (5,34). Unfortunately, he observes, “no error now dares raise its head to drag crowds of the ignorant behind it without covering itself with the Christian name” (5,32), and he invites one to fight with all the forces of reason in defense of that truth to which Faith has raised us, once the weak and wavering have been protected.
The ethical-pedagogical theme that emerges from Letter 118 recurs in the Confessions, as in other works of Augustine and particularly in De Trinitate, and it is that of curiositas. Curiosity tends to present itself as if it were one and the same with the desire for knowledge and with the act of knowing itself (Confessions II,6,13), the characteristic that best attests the singular specificity of man in the world.
The human capacity to marvel and to question is something very beautiful and great and, like all that is properly human, involves a constitutive ambivalence, the possibility of a positive use and perfective development or their opposite. When the negative possibility occurs, the original, sincere desire for knowledge is no longer an expression of free curiosity, having turned into a moral vice of intelligence and reason, into vana sed peritura curiositas. Forms of the latter include pure experimentation that abolishes in principle any distinction between good and evil, the disordered craving to try and know anything whatsoever (Confessions IX,35,55), attraction toward the pathological and the bizarre, recourse to superstition and pseudo-science (for example, astrology).
Conversely, manifestations of the human need to know things and situations and to orient oneself among them are not in themselves reducible to curiosity; they become so when certain forms of knowledge tend to close themselves in deceptive self-sufficiency, in an absurd process of excluding what is other and absolutizing their own field of research. In exercising his rationality, man first applies himself to achieving particular knowledge, about determined objects and for practical ends. This is the activity proper to instrumental reason, or ratio inferior, which exercises its function in temporalibus rebus (De Trinitate XII,2,2 and 3,3), such as human institutions.
These, marvelous and changeable from people to people and within each people, are multiple, embracing very diverse fields, from the structure of a language to artistic production, from economic and social arrangements to popular traditions, from types of legislation to the use of one or another technique. Any attitude of closure or disinterest toward this human world would be absurd. “The Christian has no reason to avoid human institutions that are useful to the exercise of living. On the contrary, to the extent of human needs, he must make them the object of his thought and appropriate the related knowledge” (De doctrina christiana II,25,40).
The functions of the ratio inferior may be of very different nature and quality; yet even useful, fascinating, and precious achievements—if sought only for the practical domination of things—must recall the ambivalence always lurking. Whoever does not recognize the intrinsic limit of his own achievements risks not making the best use of them. Lacking a higher and more human integration, they risk mutilating man, becoming the entirety of his experience, his very horizon. To stop at particular knowledge or at the laws of phenomena, even tending toward a legitimate methodological certainty, and not to ascend to the nature and original conditions of the exercise of intelligence (Confessions V,3,4), means losing that sense of the originality of the knowing subject with respect to what is experienced, without which no process of interior unification is possible.
And since living influences thinking, allowing oneself to be absorbed by those objects one considers and to which one clings with such solicitude, the spirit becomes alienated and represents itself as an object among objects, forgetting its essential destiny, its constitutive link with itself and with God.
Certainly man can say “many true things about creatures” (Confessions V,3,5); but he no longer seeks, and therefore does not find, either himself or the Truth that authors creation and illuminates the mind, if he does not exercise the other dimension of his spirit, the deeper one: the properly noetic reason, the ratio superior, which “unites us and subjects us to intelligible and immutable truth,” the intellect that allows us to intuit the highest truths and the most universal values. The proper use of ratio inferior builds science; that of ratio superior builds wisdom. “The sciences serve to avoid superstition; they make us know objective aspects of created reality and what has been acquired over time by the uninterrupted research of mankind” (De doctrina christiana II,27,41).
However, science without wisdom is not enough and can become dangerous and misleading; it is beneficial in its own way only if governed by love that builds (De Trinitate XII,14,21). Undoubtedly “a part of our rational attention, that is, of the spirit itself, must be directed toward the use of mutable and corporeal things, without which this life cannot be lived” (De Trinitate XII,13,22) and one cannot orient oneself within it.
The error lies in transforming an instrument into an exclusive horizon, a part into the whole, placing our sole end in finite and instrumental goods, “diverting onto them our need for happiness” (De Trinitate XII,13,21). “In God, science is identical with wisdom, in the marvelous simplicity of His nature” (De Trinitate XV,13,22); for us, it is not the same thing to be, to know, and to be wise. The harmony—better still, the symbiosis—of science and wisdom is a task, a duty, a goal for every historical epoch and for every person.
Augustine insists with particular force in recalling both the distinction and the desired “marriage” between reason directed to the domination of phenomena and noetic reason (De Trinitate XII,12,19), so that misunderstanding one or the other function does not compromise the unity of the person.
Man is the only animal that must continually become what he is, continually conquer anew his interior unity and his proper role in the world. The educational ideal does not require exclusion or conflict of values, but their logical and vigorous integration, because the human spirit is one in the distinct multiplicity of its acts and activities; harmony is the supreme law of spiritual life, and there is a natural hierarchy of levels and degrees of beings and of the activities of the spirit itself. The unity toward which one must tend is never unrelated, without articulations, connections, and dialectical tensions in a thinker like Augustine, so attentive to the complexity of human life.
Having dispelled the misunderstandings that nourish the interpretation of Augustinian paideia as a “cultural monocentrism” characteristic of an age of decline, it is good to recall that, in criticizing curiositas, Augustine had illustrious predecessors. It suffices to recall here the brilliant Heraclitean critique of polymathy, that is, an erudition both pedantic and idle, consisting in accumulating numerous and disparate notions not reduced to that organic unity or systematic character that constitutes authentic culture.
In Augustine, however, this aspect of his conception has exceptional importance, because it serves to express the open break with the illusions and errors that parasitized classical culture.
The rigorous acquisition of what had to be condemned and overcome in the Greco-Roman cultural tradition simultaneously facilitated the grateful, broad, and generous recognition of the positive heritage that Christian consciousness received from the past, to refashion it and give it new life.
Thus, in Christian culture and in education itself during the patristic age, there occurred a dynamic fusion—without loss of their original identities—between classical culture and Christian culture; so that with Christianity the irruption of the new is real, and real too is historical continuity, the persistence of the structures of classical culture.
Moreover, by denouncing errors and illusions of ancient culture, Augustine identified the recurring temptations of every culture: aestheticism, the cult of art for art’s sake, dilettantism, erudition for its own sake detached from the pulse of life, the tendency to transform culture into a kind of “religion of culture,” and the idolatry of the past.
Augustine, when read carefully, clearly expresses the dynamic balance of the Christian between science and wisdom, between active reason and contemplative reason (De Trinitate XII,12,19), between knowledge and the practical mastery of things in this world and the values that constitute the very goal of the human spirit, which makes them its own in the act of loving and realizing them, without ever exhausting their infinite essence.
“Whatever we do rationally in the use of temporal goods, we do without ceasing to contemplate the eternal goods to be attained, passing through the former and uniting ourselves to the latter” (De Trinitate XII,13,21).
