May 2026 Reading on St. Augustine

On Wednesday, April 22 the faculty discussed a selection from William Harmless’
Augustine in His Own Words, a brilliant anthology of Augustine’s writings that serves as an
introduction to all of the thought of St. Augustine. I highly recommend it to those who
want to know more about Augustine and have not read much or anything by our patron
saint. I’m not sure that I will ever read all that Augustine wrote, although I’ve read a fair
amount. I’ve taken my position at SAS as a reason to read more of Augustine and more
about Augustine. I’ve enjoyed reading his commentaries on St. John’s Gospel and on the
Psalms this year. And yet, I’m struck by St. Isidore of Seville’s statement that anyone who
claims to have read all of Augustine is a liar (versus in Bibliotheca, 7).

In his discussion of Augustine’s On Catechizing Beginners, Harmless cites Augustine at
length. It seemed an apt summation of what I and the other teachers experience in
reading great books with our students.

Augustine…was deeply attuned to the needs of beginners and…once composed
a brief, brilliant treatise entitled On Catechizing Beginners (De catechizandis
rudibus). He wrote the work at the request of Deogratias, a deacon from
Carthage. In it, he stressed that teaching beginners is both a noble task and an
intricate art form. He reminded Deogratias of the experience of taking friends
on a tour of one’s hometown and the nearby countryside, noting how “we, who
have been in the habit of passing this landscape by without any enjoyment,
find our delight renewed by their delight at the novelty of it all.” And if, he
added, long familiarity has cooled our enthusiasm, then we should be “renewed
in their newness” and “catch fire in their fire.” Good teaching, he believed,
springs from a mysterious, heartfelt sympathy between teacher and learner:
“For so great is this feeling of compassion that when people are touched by us
as we speak and we by them as they learn, we dwell in each other, and so it is
as if they speak in us what they hear while we, in some way, learn in them what
we teach.”