By Ryan N.S. Topping
ISBN-10: 0813219736
ISBN-13: 9780813219738
Immediately after his baptism Augustine got down to produce a Christianized model of the traditional liberal arts curriculum. via an ordered series of contemplation, relocating from linguistic to mathematically established disciplines, Augustine steered that examine within the liberal arts might render the brain and middle docile ahead of God. although Augustine later could shift his concentration extra at once towards biblical research, his early reflections on secular studying stay an enticing and robust version for Christian brooding about the arts.
Happiness and Wisdom contributes to ongoing debates in regards to the nature of Augustine's early improvement, and argues that Augustine's imaginative and prescient of the soul's ascent throughout the liberal arts is an enticing and essentially coherent view of studying, which, whereas no longer fully novel, surpasses either classical and past patristic renderings of the goals of education.
Ryan N. S. Topping starts off by way of embedding Augustine's academic works in the old and philosophical context of Christian and pagan past due antiquity. He then indicates how Augustine's writings on schooling, faraway from being inappropriate to the trajectory of his mature idea, supply a key to reading a lot of his different explorations in ethics and epistemology. Augustine's Christianized liberal arts curriculum is vindicated as an outgrowth of his ethical theology, an expression of his abiding conviction that happiness is the tip of human aspiration, and that—against either Ciceronian skepticism and Manichean dualism—the created order speaks to males of the brain of God.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ryan N. S. Topping earned a doctorate in theology from the college of Oxford, is Pope John XXIII Chair of reports in Catholic Theology at St. Thomas college in Canada, and is writer of St. Augustine within the Continuum Library of academic suggestion series.
PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:
"This is without doubt one of the best experiences of the early Augustine to emerge lately, admirable for its stability, the standard of study, and its sage judgment. even though it has implications for the way we see the connection among Augustine's paintings pre-391and his later paintings, this learn asks us to pause, and to take heavily, the beliefs of a interval in Augustine's existence while his outlook as a layman desiring to give a contribution to the academic undertaking of the Church was once his major predicament. The learn asks us to pass judgement on this era by itself advantages, no longer just by the way it compares to what got here later. within the method, although, we do stumble upon to boot a really accurately balanced evaluate of continuities and discontinuities, in addition to intimations of Augustine's attainable relevance to our personal academic dilemmas. an excellent study."—John Cavadini, collage of Notre Dame
"Topping's publication occupies a safe area of interest of its personal . . . His designated research has allowed him to give a contribution to debates over the translation of Augustine's early thought."—Raymond Canning, professor of theology, Australian Catholic collage and translator of Augustine's teaching newbies in Faith
"Happiness and Wisdom is a truly available paintings on Augustine's early theology of schooling. it really is useful to quite a lot of readership, from philosophers and theologians to educators of each kind. He emphasizes the ethical element of schooling, bargains a textually wealthy argument for the mandatory position of Christ's illuminating task to ensure that schooling to be attainable, and attests to the ongoing price of a liberal arts education." —Bibliographia