Recollecting the Religious: Augustine in Answer to Meno’s Paradox

A review in the University of Toronto Quarterly

New Blackfriars, 2017

Journal of Beliefs and Values, 2019

In this article we (Patricia Hannam and Gert Biesta) offer reflections on the final report of the Commission on Religious Education (CoRE) that was published in England in 2018. We expose and problematise the prominent place of understanding in the report, not only as an educational method, but also the underlying world view of the report itself, a world view which we characterise as ‘hermeneuticism’. We raise educational, theological and political concerns about the particular approach taken in the report. We propose instead that religious education (RE) should be considered first of all in terms of what it means to live with a religious or non-religious orientation, conceived in existential terms rather than in terms of beliefs or practices or objectified world views. Educationally we show that what we term a non-hermeneutic way of viewing our humanity would open different possibilities for RE and its future.

Routledge eBooks, 2016

The reflections in this chapter were catalysed by the paper given at the International Conference on Catholic Education held in 2015 by Prof. Lieven Boeve that can be found in Chapter 7 of this collected volume. That process of development began in the form of a response to his paper at the Conference itself, and has continued as I have reflected further on the contents of his chapter. Here, I seek to put Boeve's context and my own into dialogue with each other, very much in the spirit of the Dialogue Schools project that he is working on for the Bishops Conference in Flanders. My aim, in these reflections, is to shed light on the similarities of our two situations, and also what is distinctive about them, so as to further the project of Catholic education in both contexts. I begin by looking at the current situation of Catholic education, and of the place of the church in a wider sense, in Belgian and British society. Recent studies have shown a decline in trust in churches in both of our countries, whilst it seems that there is still a lot of confidence in Catholic education. What this means for the project of Catholic education in Flanders in particular is something that Boeve raises, and I engage with his account of this pairing of mistrust and confidence as being paradoxical, suggesting that what it is that people have trust and confidence in may help unlock the relation between the two. I consider what it means to live in a post-secular and post-Christian culture in the light of Boeve's analysis, and how this offers two important possibilities at this point in history. On the one hand, it helps us to recognise the breakdown of the secularisation thesis that was dominant in the modern era. On the other, it offers us the potential to craft a relation between belief and unbelief in new and creative ways, which can better serve the educational development of young people in our two countries, and perhaps more widely, too. What this amounts to is seeing education as an invitation to a community of identity formation, in which each of the participants can journey towards fullness of life, whilst accompanying others on their journey seeking meaning and fulfilment.

2016

The current paper will explicate and examine the linkage between the brief reinterpretation of the concepts “teaching” (ad docendum, docere, doctrina) and teacher (magister), conducted by Thomas Aquinas mainly in his Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, question 11, where he refers to the substantial treatise of Augustine De magistro, and the specific character of his contemporary doctrinal and cultural practices, compared to the one, which Augustine knew and had to consider in the time, when he was building his own theory of transmission of knowledge. The work also very briefly outlines the contemporary with Thomas educational and cultural practices, bringing them into comparison with those that were known to Augustine in the time in which he builds his theory of transmission of knowledge. The text aims to show the interpretational turn that Thomas Aquinas undertakes, in order to preserve the main Augustinian thesis that God is the ultimate intrinsic teacher, but at the same time, using Aristotle’s theory of potency, to open the possibility for the human being to be a teacher. Thomas demonstrates that one person could teach another not in the role of an internal cause, but as an external secondary cause, as the teacher only helps the learner to activate his own intrinsic power of knowledge acquisition, inborn to him as an active potency (potentia activa).

This is my first paper dealing with Theology and took place within the context of my Post Graduate studies in Teaching at St Mary's University, Twickenham. In the paper, I put forward the claim that the Church's approach to education should be Kerygmatic and oriented to particularly Catholic ends. This Catholic approach is not specific to Roman Catholics and was influenced more by my reading of Eastern Orthodox sources than Roman Catholic, but focused on the former because I was attendin a Roman Catholic University. Since then, my views have grown and changed, especially with the work of James KA Smith, Fr Nikoloas Loudovikos, Ivan Illich et al. but I present my early and unedited edition, in all it's simplicity, for reference.

Participation in the Divine, Ch. 6 (Cambridge), 2024

I show that Augustine’s “divine illumination theory of knowledge” is merely his belief that the human mind is capable of intellectual cognition because it naturally “participates” in the Divine Mind, as its image. Consequently, the claim that Augustine thought the human mind must be enlightened by special divine assistance in ordinary (nonmystical) intellectual cognition is erroneous. That is true of the whole of his writing career: earlier works such as On the Teacher and the Confessions agree with his presentation in On the Trinity 12. This resolution of a longstanding debate about how to interpret Augustine becomes possible when we pay careful attention to the ancient philosophical problems “illumination” is meant to resolve, and when we use Plotinus and the early Christian Neoplatonist Marius Victorinus to interpret his vocabulary and claims. The recovery of this late antique context greatly clarifies Augustine’s epistemological theory and reveals its explanatory power. For the Plotinian basis of the account is a synthesis of Aristotelian and Platonic elements that can explain why our minds are uniquely suited to abstracting intelligibility from sensory data, and how they do so. Clean copy of printed paper will be uploaded soon.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 Unported License, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

2015

Due to the relatively recent developments in academia as well as cultural and social contexts, it has become imperative for religious educators to dialogue with a variety of disciplines. If no real dialogue is initiated, the subject risks irreversibly enter a ghetto reserved for irrelevant scholastic optional choices. Research in the fields of instructional science, sociology, philosophy and psychology, amongst others, can assist scholars in identifying the specificity of religious education. The paper argues that the dialogical identity of the discipline depends on the ecclesial model one holds. It also argues that the context of the school, which is very different from the context of the believing community, defines the very nature and role of Catholic Religious Education

Religions, 2021