Lenten Programme I: Reading Augustine
“All men are seeking for thee”: A brief digest of Augustine’s de doctrina Christiana
Lenten Programme 2026: Christ Church, Windsor, NS
Fr. David Curry
Augustine’s de doctrina Christiana, On Christian Doctrine, is fundamentally a treatise on teaching the Christian Faith as revealed in the Scriptures. Doctrine is teaching and that presupposes two things right from the outset: first, a kind of faith that there are things to be known, and, second, a capacity, willingness or desire, to learn. Thus the preface touches on the problem of the unteachable for various reasons: 1) those who just don’t get or understand the teaching, it seems, 2) those who are unable to apply the teaching to obtain the meaning of obscure parts of Scripture, and 3) those who think they know and understand the Scriptures without any need of instruction or rules about learning.
He employs the language of signs and things. Those who don’t get it fail to see the finger which is pointing to what is to be known while those who can’t apply the instruction fail to see that to which the finger is pointing; in short, one can’t see the signpost, the other to what it is pointing. Those who think they know without the need for any aid or instruction forget that they know only because others have taught them at least how to read or they have remembered what has been spoken and heard, an important point about the oral traditions which historically precede writing. Augustine commends, for instance, Anthony the Great of Egypt, the illiterate desert father who “committed the Scriptures to memory through hearing them read by others” and by “wise meditation arrived at a thorough understanding of them.” That is testament to the strong desire to know and to love the truth.
From the outset Augustine highlights the primacy of Scripture in terms of what it teaches and in what ways but without negating or denying other disciplines of knowing and learning that belong to human experience. They too have their use and, to be sure, their abuse. “All men are seeking for thee,” the disciples say to Jesus who in turn says “I preach … for therefore came I forth.” As Austin Farrer notes, preaching and teaching are necessarily rhetorical; they have to do with making ideas, concepts, and things known, a sharing of things learned.
The structure of the argument is clearly stated and reiterated throughout the treatise. It is divided into two parts: first, “the mode of ascertaining (or discovering) the proper meaning of Scripture,” secondly, “the mode of making known the meaning when it is ascertained” (modus inveniendi quae intelligenda sunt, et modus proferendi quae intellecta sunt). Composed of four books, the first three written in 327 AD deal with what the Scriptures teach, and the fourth, written in 426 AD (four years before his death in 430), treats the mode of making the meaning known. He says that the second is the more difficult part but it is really about the necessity of sharing with others what has been learned. Such is teaching really.