Humility as the Crux of Christian Teaching: Insights from St. Augustine

featuring

Dr. Michael Cameron (University of Portland)

Monday, October 9, 2023

Hillsdale College | Hillsdale, MI

Summary

For Augustine of Hippo (354-430), Christian teachers who surrender self in loving humility for the sake of their hearers capture a core dimension of the faith that they teach. The same humility that Christ models, that Scripture communicates, and that seekers germinate as they come to be taught, teachers also share in.

In this public lecture, renowned Augustine scholar Dr. Michael Cameron explores the pedagogical dynamics of humility in Augustine’s great treatise, De catechizandis rudibus (On the Instruction of Beginners), showing it to be the treatise’s hidden crux, in two senses: both as a central theme of Christian teaching, and, paradoxically and counterintuitively, as the mainspring of the teaching act.

Listen to the lecture:

About the Speaker

Michael Cameron (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is Professor Emeritus of Historical Theology at the University of Portland. A leading scholar of St. Augustine, especially on Augustine’s interpretation of Scripture, Dr. Cameron is the author of Christ Meets Me Everywhere: Augustine’s Early Figurative Exegesis (Oxford, 2012), The Essential Expositions of the Psalms by Saint Augustine (New City Press, 2015), Unfolding Sacred Scripture: How Catholics Read the Bible (Liturgy Training Publications, 2015), and numerous essays and reference articles. Michael was editor for the Latin Patristic and Early Medieval period for vols. 1-16 of The Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (De Gruyter, 2009- ), and serves on the editorial boards of Augustinian Studies and the Augustinus-Lexikon. 

Optional Pre-Reading

• Augustine’s De Catechizandis Rudibus is available in several earlier English translations (here and here), but the following version will be sent to those who register for the teaching seminar: Raymond Canning, trans., Augustine of Hippo: Instructing Beginners in Faith (New City Press, 2005).

• Additionally, one can find the following article by Michael Cameron on Augustine’s De catechizandis available for free online: “Love Actually: Modeling Amor in Augustine’s De catechizandis rudibus.” Journal of Religion and Society, Supplement Series 15 (2018): 48–69.

• A few posts on Augustine’s catechesis can be found on the Catechesis Institute blog:

  • “Beginning with Augustine” — on the basic purpose of De catechizandis rudibus

  • “The Joy of Teaching” — on the concept of joy in Augustine’s treatise

• The following article may also be of interest, though behind a paywall: Alex Fogleman, “The Golden Thread of Charity: Love and the Formation of Character in Origen and Augustine,” Journal of Spirituality and Soul Care 13 no. 2 (2020): 246–61.

More about the Lecture

Around the year 400, Augustine dictated De catechizandis rudibus (which translates as, “On Catechizing the Uninstructed” or “On the Instruction of Beginners”), a letter that became a small treatise, in response to a deacon of the church at Carthage named Deogratias. Deogratias was an instructor of those inquiring into Christianity but was frustrated by the work. Bored by repetition, restless at being limited to basics, frustrated by his inability to discern the exact parameters of his instruction, he worried that his defects were eating into his effectiveness. He wrote asking Augustine’s advice on how to shore up the content of his teaching. Augustine’s reply, a classic in the history of catechesis, answers Deogratias top concern by stressing depth over breadth in retelling Scripture’s story, particularly stressing love as the biblical narrative’s center and summit. Love is the axis upon which the scriptural story turns: God’s redeeming love revealed in the death of his Son enables believers to fulfill Scripture’s double commandment of love toward God and neighbor. As such love becomes the criterion whereby teachers judge what to include in their instruction, and it trains teachers to accommodate the biblical story to all types of seekers so that “by hearing they may believe, by believing may hope, and by hoping may love” (4.8).  

But Augustine, unbidden, then goes beyond the Deogratias’s question about the content of teaching to explore the act of teaching. By way of focusing on the teacher’s joy—where it comes from, what stirs it, what blocks it, how it is restored—he subtly but insistently explores the theme of teacherly humility. Augustine deftly weaves together four interlocking dimensions of humilitas: 1) humility’s source and model in the divine self-emptying of the incarnation and Christ’s human self-offering in the crucifixion; 2) Scripture’s strategy of communicating humility by conveying the gospel’s majestically transcendent message in a humble, unassuming style that is accessible to all; 3) the prerequisite for seekers (those whom Deogratias was teaching) to forsake pride and take up “Christian humility” to enter the Christian community; and 4) most poignant for Deogratias, the call for teachers to embody Christ’s humility in self-dispossessing love for their hearers to restore zest, certitude and confidence in doing their holy work. Teachers who surrender self in humility for the sake of hearers capture and convey a core dimension of the faith they teach, for it is the same humility that Christ models, that Scripture communicates, and that seekers grow incipiently in asking to be taught. This paper will explore the pedagogical dynamics of humility in Augustine’s De catechizandis rudibus, showing it to be the little treatise’s hidden crux, not only as a central theme of teaching content but also, paradoxically and counterintuitively, the mainspring of the teaching act.