The Teacher 11–14

So far words have availed; to grant them the most, they only remind us to seek things; they do not display them for us to know. But he teaches me something who presents to my eyes, or to any bodily sense, or even to the mind itself, the things I want to know. By words, then, we learn nothing but words, or rather the sound and noise of words: for if things that are not signs cannot be words, then, although I have already heard a word, I do not know it is a word until I know what it signifies. So when things are known, the knowledge of words too is completed; but when words are heard, not even words are learned. For we do not learn the words we know; nor can we say that we have learned those we do not know, unless their meaning is perceived, which happens not by hearing the sounds uttered but by knowing the things signified. For it is a most true reasoning, and most truly said, that when words are uttered we either know what they signify or do not: if we know, we are reminded rather than taught; if we do not know, we are not even reminded, but perhaps prompted to seek.

But if you say: those head coverings, whose name we hold only as a sound, we can know only by seeing them, nor can we know the name itself more fully except by knowing them; but what we have received about those young men themselves, how they overcame the king and the flames by faith and devotion, what praises they sang to God, what honors they won even from their enemy, did we learn it otherwise than through words? I will answer that all that is signified by those words was already in our knowledge. For what three young men are, what a furnace is, what fire is, what a king is, what, finally, unharmed by fire is, and all the rest that those words signify, I already held. But Hananiah, Azariah, and Mishael are as unknown to me as those saraballae; nor have these names helped me at all to know them, nor could they help me now. And all these things that are read in that history, that they were done at that time as they are written, I confess that I believe rather than know: and the very men we believe did not fail to know this difference. For the prophet says, “Unless you believe, you will not understand”: which he surely would not have said if he had judged there was no difference. What I understand, then, I also believe; but not all that I believe do I also understand. And all that I understand I know; not all that I believe do I know. Nor do I therefore fail to know how useful it is to believe even many things I do not know; and to this usefulness I add also this history of the three young men: so, since I cannot know most things, I know with how great usefulness they are believed.

But about all the things we understand, we consult not the speaker who sounds outside, but the truth that presides within over the mind itself, prompted perhaps by words to consult it. And he who is consulted teaches, he who is said to dwell in the inner man, Christ, that is, the unchangeable Power of God and everlasting Wisdom: whom every rational soul consults, but who is opened to each only as much as each can take in, according to its own will, whether bad or good. And if it is ever deceived, this happens not through a fault of the truth consulted, just as it is not a fault of this outer light that the bodily eyes are often deceived: which light we admit is consulted about visible things, so that it may show them to us as far as we are able to see.

If, then, we consult light about colors, and about the other things we perceive through the body we consult the elements of this world, the same bodies that we perceive, and the senses themselves, which the mind uses as interpreters for knowing such things; while about the things that are understood we consult the inner truth by reason: what can be said to make it clear that we learn anything by words except the very sound that strikes the ears? For all that we perceive, we perceive either by a bodily sense or by the mind. The former we call sensible, the latter intelligible; or, to speak in the manner of our authors, the former carnal, the latter spiritual. When we are asked about the former, we answer if the things we perceive are present; as when we are asked, while looking at the new moon, what it is like or where it is. Here the one who asks, if he does not see it, believes the words, and often does not believe them; but he does not learn at all unless he too sees what is said; and then he learns not by the words that sounded, but by the things themselves and the senses. For the same words sound to one who sees as sounded also to one who does not see.

But when the question is not about things we perceive in our presence, but about things we perceived at some time, we speak no longer of the things themselves but of the images impressed by them and committed to memory; and how we can call these true, when we are looking at false things, I do not know at all; except that we report, not that we see and perceive them, but that we have seen and perceived them. So we carry those images in the inner places of memory as certain records of things perceived before; and contemplating them in the mind, we do not lie with a good conscience when we speak: but these records are ours; for the one who hears, if he perceived them and was present, does not learn by my words, but recognizes them by the images he too has carried away with him; but if he did not perceive them, who does not understand that he believes the words rather than learns?

But when it is a matter of things we see with the mind, that is, with intellect and reason, we speak indeed of things we look upon as present in that inner light of truth by which the one called the inner man is enlightened and in which he rejoices: but then too our hearer, if he also sees them with his inner and single eye, knows what I say by his own contemplation, not by my words. So I do not teach even him, when I speak true things to one who sees true things; for he is taught not by my words but by the things themselves, made plain by God revealing them within: so that, if asked about them, he could also answer. And what is more absurd than to think that he is taught by my speaking who could, if asked, have set out those very things before I spoke? For when, as often happens, someone asked a question denies something, and is pressed by further questions to admit it, this comes from the weakness of the one seeing, who cannot consult that light about the whole matter; and he is prompted to do so part by part, when he is asked about the very parts of which that whole consists which he was unable to see as a whole. And if he is led there by the words of the questioner, it is still not by words that teach, but by words that inquire in the way that suits him who is asked to learn within. As if I asked you this very question we are dealing with, whether nothing can be taught by words, and at first it seemed absurd to you, since you could not see the whole: then I ought to have asked in a way suited to your powers of hearing that inner Teacher, saying: “The things which you admit are true when I speak, and of which you are certain, and which you affirm you know, from where did you learn them?” You would perhaps answer that I had taught them. Then I would add: “What if I said I had seen a man flying? Would my words make you as certain as if you heard that wise men are better than fools?” You would surely deny it and answer that you do not believe the former, or, even if you believed it, that you do not know it, but that you know the latter most certainly. From this you would surely understand that neither in the one which you would not know though I affirmed it, nor in the other which you knew very well, had you learned anything by my words; since, if asked about each, you would swear that the one was unknown to you and the other known. Then indeed you would admit the whole that you had denied, when you recognized that the things it consists of are clear and certain: namely, that in all the things we say, the hearer either does not know whether they are true, or knows that they are false, or knows that they are true. In the first of these three he either believes, or opines, or doubts; in the second he opposes and rejects; in the third he bears witness: so in no case does he learn. For both he who does not know the thing after our words, and he who knows he has heard false things, and he who, if asked, could answer the same things that were said, are proved to have learned nothing by my words.

So even in the things that are seen with the mind, whoever cannot see them hears the words of one who sees them in vain, except that it is useful to believe such things as long as they are unknown: but whoever can see them is inwardly a disciple of the truth, outwardly a judge of the speaker, or rather of the speech itself. For often he knows what has been said while the very one who said it does not know; as if someone who follows the Epicureans and thinks the soul mortal were to repeat the arguments for its immortality which wiser men have set out, in the hearing of one who can contemplate spiritual things; the latter judges that he speaks the truth, but the speaker does not know whether he speaks the truth, indeed even thinks it utterly false: is he then to be thought to teach what he does not know? Yet he uses the same words that one who knew could also use.

So not even this is left to words, that by them at least the speaker's mind is shown, since it is uncertain whether he knows what he says. Add liars and deceivers, through whom you may easily understand that the mind is not only not revealed by words but even concealed. For I do not doubt at all that the words of truthful men try, and in a way profess, to make the speaker's mind appear; and they would achieve this with everyone's agreement, if liars were not allowed to speak. Although we have often experienced, both in ourselves and in others, that words are uttered which are not of the things being thought: which I see can happen in two ways, either when a speech committed to memory and often run through pours from the mouth while one is thinking of other things, as often happens to us when we sing a hymn; or when, against our will, some words leap out in place of others by a slip of the tongue itself; for here too what is heard are not signs of the things we have in mind. For liars do think about the things they say, so that, although we do not know whether they speak the truth, we know that they have in mind what they say, if one of the two things I mentioned does not happen to them: and if anyone contends that these happen sometimes, and that when they happen it is apparent, though it is often hidden and has often deceived me when I listened, I do not resist.

But to these is added another kind, widely open indeed, and the seed of countless disagreements and quarrels: when the one who speaks signifies the same thing he thinks, but often only for himself and some others, while for the one he speaks to, and for some others too, he does not signify the same thing. For someone may say in our hearing that man is surpassed in virtue by some beasts; we cannot bear it at once, and refute this false and pernicious opinion with great energy: while he perhaps calls bodily strength virtue, and expresses by this name what he thought, and neither lies, nor errs about the things, nor strings together words committed to memory while turning something else over in his mind, nor sounds by a slip of the tongue something other than he was considering; but he only calls the thing he thinks by another name than we do; and we would at once agree with him about it, if we could see into his thought, which he has not yet been able to open to us by the words already uttered and his opinion stated. They say that definition can cure this error, so that in this question, if he defined what virtue is, it would become clear, they say, that the dispute is not about the thing but about the word: and granting that this is so, how many good definers can be found? And yet much has been argued against the discipline of defining, which it is not fitting to discuss here, and which I do not approve in every respect.

I pass over the fact that we hear many things badly, and argue long and much as if about what we heard; as you lately said, when I had said that a certain Punic word means mercy, that you had heard from those to whom that language was better known that it means piety: and I, resisting, insisted that you had quite forgotten what you had been told; for you seemed to me to have said not piety but faith, though you were sitting very close beside me, and these two names do not deceive the ear by any likeness of sound. Yet for a long time I thought that you did not know what had been said to you, when it was I who did not know what you had said: for if I had heard you well, it would not have seemed at all absurd to me that piety and mercy are called by one term in Punic. These things happen often; but let us pass over them, as I said, so that I may not seem to stir up a false charge against words because of the carelessness of hearers, or even the deafness of people: those things which I listed above trouble us more, where, though the words are perceived most clearly by the ear and are Latin, we are unable, though we share the same language, to know the thoughts of the speakers. But see, I now relax and grant that, when his words have been received by the hearing of one to whom they are known, it may be known to him that the speaker thought about the things they signify: does he therefore also learn what is now in question, whether the speaker said what is true?

Do teachers profess this, that their thoughts, and not the very disciplines they think they hand on by speaking, are to be grasped and retained? For who is so foolishly curious as to send his son to school to learn what the teacher thinks? But when they have explained by words all those disciplines they profess to teach, even that of virtue and wisdom itself, then those who are called pupils consider within themselves whether what was said is true, looking, that is, to that inner truth as far as they are able. Then, therefore, they learn: and when they have found within that what was said is true, they praise, not knowing that they are praising not so much teachers as the taught; if indeed the teachers too know what they say. But people are mistaken in calling those teachers who are not, because for the most part no interval comes between the time of speaking and the time of knowing; and since, after being prompted by the speaker, they quickly learn within, they think they have learned outwardly from the one who prompted them.

But the whole usefulness of words, which if considered well is not small, we will examine another time, God willing. For now I have warned you not to ascribe to them more than is fitting; so that we might no longer only believe but also begin to understand how truly it is written by divine authority that we should call no one on earth our teacher, because there is one Teacher of all in heaven. And what “in heaven” means he himself will teach, by whom we are prompted outwardly through human beings by signs, so that, turned inward to him, we may be instructed: to love and know whom is the happy life, which all cry out that they seek, but few there are who rejoice that they have truly found it. But now I would like you to tell me what you think of this whole discourse of mine. For if you know that what has been said is true, then, if asked about each statement, you would have said that you knew it: you see, then, from whom you learned these things; not from me, to whom you would have given every answer if I had asked. But if you do not know that they are true, neither I nor he has taught you: I, because I can never teach; he, because you cannot yet learn. Ad. For my part, I have learned through the prompting of your words that by words a person is only prompted to learn, and that it is very little that some of the speaker's thought appears through speech; but whether what is said is true, he alone teaches who, when he spoke outwardly, reminded us that he dwells within; whom, by his favor, I shall now love the more ardently, the further I advance in learning. Yet I am especially grateful for this continuous discourse of yours, because it anticipated and resolved all the objections I was ready to make; and you left out absolutely nothing that made me doubtful, about which that secret oracle did not answer me as your words asserted.