Faith-education and Augustine’s Divine Illumination

ABSTRACT

Augustine proposed his unique theory of ‘divine illumination’ as the central concept in his thoughts on education and theology, which was beyond the poetic metaphor or symbol of light. In his book on education,『De Magistro』 he classified knowledge to two classes, namely, ‘wisdom (sapientia)’ on eternal immutable truth and ‘science (scientia)’ on sensational experiences. He demonstrated the impossibility of teaching wisdom with signs, words, or showing the materials. It was the common claims of both Platon and Augustine that the eternal immutable universal truths are already present in the inner mind of the learner. Platon argued that the learner recollected his knowledge of former lives, but Augustine did not admit past life. Instead, Augustine insisted that the learner remembered the truth in his inner mind thanks to the light illuminated by God’s grace. His theological thoughts were presented in ｢De Trinitate｣ and connected to his pedagogical thoughts via his epistemology. His originality was the observation of the structural similarity of the epistemological triplet of human reason to the trinity of God as an imprint. The relevance of light in the trinity was the metaphor of the Sun-light in the cognition of material objects : The recognition of the ultimate truth is possible due to the God’s light. He established principles of his faith-education through his theory on divine illumination which was given by the grace of God. We considered the significance of Augustine’s ‘wisdom-education’ with respect to the contemporary needs of faith-education.