Homily for Matins, Teacher Work Week 2023
Homily for Matins, Teacher Work Week 2023
August 28 + The Commemoration of St. Augustine
Beloved Brothers and Sisters,
Today is the commemoration of St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, and one of the greatest minds of the western church. It is fitting for us this morning to look to him to guide us on our task of forming minds in the classical Christian tradition.
Augustine teaches us that true education is listening to the Word of God, even—especially—when it tells us what we do not want to hear.
Your best servant is he who looks not so much to hear from you what he wants to hear, but rather to want what he hears from you. ––Confessions 10.26.37
This is from Augustine’s great work Confessions. It is addressed to God throughout. We get to listen in on his address to God. He models for us a life lived before God, always in His presence, always conversing with a God who seems silent, yet has spoken to us in His Word.
“Augustine’s very first words (which in fact are themselves words of Divine Revelation, Ps 47:2; 95:4; 144:3): “You are great, O Lord, and greatly to be praised: great is your power and to your wisdom there is no limit.” (1.1.1). (William A. Frank, “A Reading of Augustine’s ‘Confessions’ and Its Implications for Education” in Arts of Liberty; portions of this sermon are drawn from this essay.)
Praise is the end for which God has made us. Our disordered loves turn us away from the end we are to contemplate.
Augustine’s confession is this praise of God, but it must be preceded by a confession of sins. This he does in great detail, painstakingly recounting something we would regard very small - the theft of a pear. Yet this theft reveals the condition of his heart.
Beyond question, theft is punished by your law, O Lord, and by the law written in human hearts, which not even sin itself can erase; for does any thief tolerate being robbed by another thief, even if he is rich and the other is driven by want? I was under no compulsion of need, unless a lack of moral sense can count as need, and a loathing for justice, and a greedy, full-fed love of sin. Yet I wanted to steal, and steal I did. I already had plenty of what I stole, and of much better quality too, and I had no desire to enjoy it when I resolved to steal it. I simply wanted to enjoy the theft for its own sake, and the sin. Close to our vineyard there was a pear tree laden with fruit. This fruit was not enticing, either in appearance or in flavor. We nasty lads went there to shake down the fruit and carry it off at dead of night, after prolonging our games out of doors until that late hour according to our abominable custom. We took enormous quantities, not to feast on ourselves but perhaps to throw to the pigs; we did eat a few, but that was not our motive: we derived pleasure from the deed simply because it was forbidden.
The Law entices us to sin. The children in our classrooms are not by nature good, but by nature those deriving pleasure from forbidden deeds. Our task is not to beat this out of them, making outwardly obedient people; no, we have a much greater task, the task of leading them to repentance – literally, the turning of the heart toward the good. The repentant heart derives pleasure from the Word of God because He is good.
This task of ours, then, is more than teaching correct answers to exam questions. We are pedagogs; pedagogy is literally “child-leading.”
The themes in Augustine’s Confessions show us where and how the human child must be led.
One such theme is the restless heart, particularly seen in the famous phrase,
“Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”
Another theme is the scattered, empty soul, being wasted on worldly pleasures:
“Deafened by the clanking of my mortality . . . I wandered farther away from you and you let me go. I was tossed about and spilt out in my fornications; I flowed out and boiled over in them” (2.2.2)
“My life is a distention or distraction . . . dissipated in many ways upon many things” (11.29.39)
On the positive side is the theme of self-control, or continence:
“There appeared to me the chaste dignity of continence” (8.11.27)
“By continence we are gathered together and brought back to the One, from whom we have dissipated our being into many things” (10.29.40)
“In you may my scattered longings be gathered together” (10.40.67)
Another theme is clinging to the Good:
“See where a man’s feeble soul lies stricken when it does not cling to the solid support of truth” (4.14.23)
If we put these together, we have children in our care who were made for the praise of God, but who must learn to confess their sin to praise Him aright.
They are restless - literally restless, but also with a scattered heart, easily susceptible to distraction and squandering their gifts.
We take that restless heart and teach it self-control, and guide them to cling to the Good, i.e., to God Himself.
Training good habits, we also seek to undo their bad habits. He says,
“Disordered lust springs from a perverted will; when lust is pandered to, a habit is formed; when habit is not checked, it hardens into compulsion. These were like interlinking rings forming what I have described as a chain, and my harsh servitude used it to keep me under duress.”
This year we will encounter such compulsions in our students, springing from bad habits, originating in the perverted will. Can these compulsions be broken? Yes, and Augustine is exhibit A. For us to so help our children, we must seek the same help ourselves for our own disordered lusts. Our ultimate aim is not to prepare children for HS, but to bring them to the One who can heal their souls. Augustine says, “To Him my soul confesses, and He heals this soul that has sinned against Him.”
He made the souls that are under our care. This doctrine of Creation, Augustine teaches us, means every person has value.
“For You abandon nothing You have made.”
St. Augustine sets us this morning on the course of our year as pedagogs, leaders of children on the path to the Good. In this task the Word of God is central: Central to guiding restless hearts from their wandering, leading them toward continence and clinging to the good, forming habits, or better, the habitus of the heart that fears, loves, and trusts in God above all things.
Unlabeled citations are from Augustine’s Confessions.