The Duty of a Teacher: Liminality anddisciplinain Augustine'sDe Ordine

Abstract

This chapter discusses Augustine's duty as a teacher, looking at the importance of disciplina, and of the need to communicate godlike wisdom to others. In the retirement of Cassiciacum, Augustine drew on resources nearer to hand: those of the Ciceronian–Platonic philosophical dialogue. In that most conventional and nostalgic of didactic genres (in the early part of Book 2 of De Ordine), he devised a ‘theology’ of disciplinarity which, by undercutting the Neoplatonic distinction between the divine and the corporeal, already casts doubt on the logic of his proposed Christianisation of the liberal disciplines. The chapter suggests that the abandonment of the ‘disciplinarum libri’ reflects Augustine's own recognition of the project's conceptual inadequacy.

Pathology, Therapeutic Discipline and Its Limits in Augustine: A Dialogue with Foucauldian Readings

“…On the other hand, the post-colonialist appropriation of Foucault in reading Augustine takes discipline as the comprehensive project of power conditioning desire, which problematizes the divide between the religious and the secular. Recently, though not influenced by Foucault's perspectives nor by post-colonialist perspectives, there have been solid historical studies on Augustine's view of discipline that focus on the literary aspect of education (Conybeare 2005), epistolary correspondence for exhortation and admonition (Ebbeler 2012), and the role of rhetoric in the justice of the city (Dodaro 2004) within classical studies and patristics. However, according to Wetzel, as the concern for resituating the Augustinian position in "the fractious twenty-first century", grappling with "the global debate over religion", comes to increase, there is a growing necessity to delve into "the intersection between temporary and ultimate realities" in Augustine's thought (Wetzel 2012, pp.…”