Happiness and Wisdom: Augustine's Early Theology of Education

Immediately after his baptism Augustine set out to produce a Christianized
version of the ancient liberal arts curriculum. By an ordered
sequence of contemplation, moving from linguistic to mathematically
based disciplines, Augustine suggested that study in the liberal arts
could render the mind and heart docile before God. Though Augustine
later would shift his focus more directly toward biblical study, his early
reflections on secular learning remain an attractive and powerful model
for Christian thinking about the arts.
Happiness and Wisdom contributes to ongoing debates about the
nature of Augustine's early development, and argues that Augustine's
vision of the soul's ascent through the liberal arts is an attractive and
basically coherent view of learning, which, while not wholly novel,
surpasses both classical and earlier patristic renderings of the aims of
education.
Ryan N. S. Topping begins by embedding Augustine's educational
works within the historical and philosophical context of Christian and
pagan late antiquity. He then shows how Augustine's writings on education,
far from being irrelevant to the trajectory of his mature thought,
provide a key to interpreting many of his other explorations in ethics
and epistemology. Augustine's Christianized liberal arts curriculum is
vindicated as an outgrowth of his moral theology, an expression of his
abiding conviction that happiness is the end of human aspiration, and
that -- against both Ciceronian skepticism and Manichean dualism -- the
created order speaks to men of the mind of God.