The Teacher

Contents

Reading pages: 1–4 · 5–7 · 8–10 · 11–14

1. 1Augustine and his son Adeodatus agree that speech serves to teach or to remind, and that even prayer in words serves only to remind ourselves or others, since God dwells in the inner man.
2. 2Testing a line of Virgil word by word, Augustine and Adeodatus find that words like “if”, “nothing”, and “from” can be explained only by other words, not by showing the things they signify.
3. 3Adeodatus first holds that nothing can be shown without signs, but Augustine shows that actions such as walking can be shown by doing them, provided one is asked when not already doing them.
4. 4Augustine and Adeodatus classify signs: written words are signs of spoken words, every name is a word but not every word a name, and some signs, like “sign,” “word,” and “name,” also signify themselves.
5. 5Augustine shows that “word” and “name” signify each other and differ only in their reason (from striking the ear and from knowing), and proves from Paul, from Greek equivalents, and from the logic of propositions that every part of speech is in some sense a name.
6. 6Augustine and Adeodatus find a further class of signs, such as Latin nomen and Greek ὄνομα, which signify themselves and each other and differ only in sound.
7. 7Adeodatus summarizes the dialogue so far: speech teaches or reminds, words are signs, some things can be shown without signs, and signs can be classified by how they signify one another.
8. 8Augustine explains that their exercise prepares the mind for the happy life, then uses the sophism “you are not a man” to show that we naturally attend to the things words signify rather than to the words themselves.
9. 9Augustine argues that what exists for the sake of something else is worth less than it, so that knowledge of things is worth more than the signs by which we learn them, even when a word like “filth” or “vice” is better than the thing it names.
10. 10Augustine shows that some things can be shown without signs, as a fowler shows his art by doing it, and argues further that we learn nothing from words themselves: we learn what a word means only by knowing the thing, as with “head” and the unknown saraballae of Daniel 3.
11. 11Words only prompt us to seek things; what we know we know from the things themselves or from the inner Teacher, Christ, the truth within the mind, while what we receive only through words, like the story of the three young men, we believe rather than know.
12. 12We learn sensible things from the senses and intelligible things from the inner light of truth; words lead us to believe, reject, or recognize what is said, but never by themselves teach.
13. 13Words do not even reliably reveal the speaker's mind, since speakers may repeat what they do not believe, lie, misspeak, sing by rote, or use words in a different sense, and hearers may mishear.
14. 14Pupils learn not from teachers' words but by consulting the inner truth, so we should call no one on earth our teacher, since the one Teacher is Christ within; Adeodatus thanks his father, having learned that words only prompt us to learn.