wake of twentieth-century deconstructionism; even as does his adage that‘it is
a mark of good and distinguished minds to love the truth within words and
not the words themselves’(4.11.26). Texts were for him likewise a means,
accordingly, and not an end; in the pursuit of wisdom,‘we love those things by
which we are carried along for the sake of that towards which we are carried’
(1.35.39). The Augustinian motif of the educational journey, deeply obligated
to the Exodus as well as Abrahamic narratives, is charged with implications
for the practice of the intellectual and moral virtues. Ours is to be‘a road of
the affections’(1.17.16); we learn the good by doing the good (1.9.10). Not
everything we use instrumentally is to be loved (1.23.22) but since the end of
our pursuit is knowledge of that Being whose image we call‘human’(1.22.20),
knowledge of the human is essential to our own participation in that Being.
These formulations are echoed explicitly in Anselm of Canterbury (Mono-
logion14, 16, 64, 66) as a conceptual propaedeutic for all higher intellectual
reflection. Implicitly, our participation in theimago Deimakes of the study of
the humanities something almost sacramental—at least as long as there is
acknowledgement that the highest human good is not simply a product of our
own acculturation—or as we might now say, our‘social construction’. Recog-
nition of the magnitude and authority of our exemplar, Augustine wants to
say, is essential, and not least because it allows the mind really formed by the
Scriptures to become capable of a true cosmopolitanism. For example:
If those who are called philosophers, especially the Platonists, have said things
which are indeed true and are well accommodated to our faith, they should not be
feared; rather, what they have said should be [adopted] and converted to our use.
Just as the Egyptians had not only idols and grave burdens which the people of
Israel detested and avoided, so also they had vases and ornaments of gold and
silver and clothing which the Israelites took with them secretly when theyfled, as
if to put them to a better use...In the same way all the teachings of the pagans
contain not only simulated and superstitious imaginings and grave burdens of
unnecessary labor, which each one of us leaving the society of pagans under the
leadership of Christ ought to abominate and avoid, but also liberal disciplines
more suited to the uses of truth, and some most useful precepts concerning
morals. (2.40.60)That is, on a biblical view, truth is truth from wherever it comes (2.28.28; cf.
Thomas Aquinas:‘studium philosophiae non est ad hoc quod sciatur quid
homines senserint, sed qualiter se habeat veritas rerum’,De caelo1.1.22, a 8).
They also expected there to be a harmony between the books of Nature and
of Scripture, rightly placed and understood (2.39.59). Obscurity andfigura-
tive discourse in relation to the‘big questions’is not necessarily a failure of
language or a means of gnostic exclusion of the uninitiated, but even in
Scripture itself can be an artfully deliberate means ofinducare,educare,
leading to the Truth (2.6.7–8). The appropriate method of learned investiga-
tion is thus hermeneutically ordered—patient unfolding of the layers of
Scripture in theStudiumand the Rise of the Humanities 167