As Christopher Lasch observed already twenty-five years ago, “In the space of two or three generations, enormous stretches of the ‘Judaeo-Christian tradition,’ so often invoked by educators but so seldom taught in any form, have passed into oblivion.” Our programme is an attempt to bring together vital elements of that tradition without which we remain weak in the face of the challenges of our time. It provides an introduction to key ideas by which we live, but also to those traditions of both science and art that serve nothing in the world but, through the understanding of Creation they give us, bind us closer to God. Together we explore the foundational writers, works, concepts, and theories on which Christian civilization depends.

All students are enrolled in the eight full-credit courses offered plus the Book of the Semester reading group – one alumnus calls this “one big course.” For the most part the courses proceed historically, parallel to each other in time, moving from their beginnings in the ancient world through to the present century. Students will discover many connections between art and science and philosophy and literature by studying them together at roughly the same moment in their history.

The historical layout of the curriculum takes us chronologically, in each subject, through the history of the West, leading us from ancient times in September to the present century in April.

Thus we look at the transformation of Art, Literature, Music, Philosophy, and Science over the entire course of Western history:

the ancient origins of science and philosophy; music in ancient worship; the ethics of Homeric society, classical Greece, and the early Church; etc.

medieval developments such as the thought of Church Fathers like Augustine; liturgical music; the worship and art of the Byzantine era and the age of the cathedrals; the scientific and philosophical synthesis of Thomas Aquinas; etc.

Renaissance developments such as the rise of Humanism; the investigation of nature; the division of the Church (the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic response to it); the change from oral to typographic culture; etc.

modern developments such as Machiavellian politics; the rise of technology; individualism; the growth of empiricism and skepticism; etc.

late-modern developments such as evolution and quantum physics; the rise of moral relativism; modernism in art and music; postmodernism in art and philosophy; etc.

See full course descriptions

photo by Stewart Butterfield

ART IN WESTERN CULTURE

A course designed to offer an introduction to Western art in its spiritual and intellectual context, relative to key developments in the cultural life of the West. This we do in a steady effort to answer two primary questions: ‘What is an image?’ (a question central to the Bible) and ‘What is art for?’ The lectures move chronologically through the history of art, beginning with the art of ancient Egypt and ending with work made in the present year.

Our objective is not to give the student a love of art but, rather, the ‘why’ and ‘wherefore’ of these objects. As a part of that undertaking – the attempt to understand art – we will look at what people at various moments of Western history have said about what art is for, what art must do, and what makes a work of art good.

Every student is invited to take these two components – the art we look at and attempt to understand and the aesthetic views of the past – as raw material with which to formulate, over the course of the year, a critical statement about what art, for a Christian, should be or do.

Students use the art they see in weekly slide lectures as test cases for the aesthetic view that they will spend the year formulating (by asking themselves, Why do I like or dislike this picture? Does it have what I have said all art should have? What do I get or not get from it what I want to get? Etc.) It is not often that one has the opportunity to conduct such an experiment.

In this way this course is also about truth. It is a way to learn something not only about the art each student will see but about the human being they themselves are (a person with, likely, a natural readiness to like and dislike, to make claims about what art should do or be). How trustworthy are our first formulations? How difficult is it to say what good art is? How hard, to find the truth?

Slide-illustrated lectures, weekly readings in some signal texts of classical and Christian reflection upon art, supplementary readings, gallery visits, use of video resources, and a sustained, year-long effort to draft a reasonable Christian aesthetic – both individually and as a class – are all features of this course.

Instructor: Prof. Edward Tingley

photo by Ian Monroe

THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY

This course provides Augustine College students with an introduction to church history through a chronological study of the key periods of Christian history from the Old Testament pre-Christian period to the 21st century. Given the breadth of Christian history, the course will not attempt to be exhaustive but rather will focus on key themes, ideas, and debates that have shaped two thousand years of Christianity.

The foundation of this course is a belief in the objective truth of Christianity: the Incarnation, Resurrection, and salvation of the world through Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

By the conclusion of the course students should be familiar with the principal eras of Christian history; have a greater awareness of the main Christian traditions (Roman Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox) and their historical evolution; and be familiar and able to converse more or less freely on key debates in the history of Christianity.

Instructor: Prof. Andrew Bennett

BEGINNING LATIN

This course introduces students with no previous knowledge of Latin to the rudiments of the language. Students learn grammar and vocabulary through class lectures, translations, and regular written assignments. The enduring richness and vitality of this ‘dead’ language becomes evident as we read classical authors, the Latin New Testament, and various Christian texts representing the different historical epochs.

Instructor: Prof. Edmund Bloedow

photo by Jacob Enos

LITERATURE IN WESTERN CULTURE

What are our imaginations for? How can reading works of imaginative literature help us to live in right relationship to God and our fellow human beings? How do our habits as readers reflect and shape our interactions with the world around us? What do the poetic, dramatic, and narrative works of Western literature reveal about who we are and what we struggle to be? How, as readers of Scripture, do we approach the wide spectrum of texts that make up the Western literary canon?

This course is designed to offer an introduction to the history of Western literature and to help students refine and articulate their sense of the role of imaginative texts in the life of a Christian. Our aim is both to develop an understanding of central literary works in their historical and intellectual contexts and, in doing so, to develop our own sense of why and how and what a Christian should read. The authors read include Aeschylus, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Henry Fielding, George Eliot, and Dostoevsky.

Instructor: Prof. Emily Martin

photo by takomabibelot

PHILOSOPHY IN WESTERN CULTURE

The purpose of this course is primarily to furnish students with philosophical resources for the living of their lives. To that end we will look primarily at two things: philosophy concerned with happiness (and the ancient conception of human life connected with it) and the rise of modern philosophy, with the issues attendant upon it. – Why do this?

Augustine, who thought that human fallenness was total (since man can do no good thing but for God’s grace) nonetheless said that “the spark of reason in virtue of which [man] was made in the image of God has not been completely extinguished.” From his time to the age of the American Founding Fathers Christians understood that the mind used well was the very mark of God within us.

Today people like to ‘speak from the heart’ – to say what they feel – not noticing that they are following a Romantic-era distortion of the Old Testament notion of the heart, where reason and feeling supported each other. As thinking adults, we need to see where the concepts we lean on most have come from, because many have come from that period of history in which people were working hard to escape God’s order.

What is freedom? Try to define it. Freedom, people say, is the absence of barriers to the will. That means it is neutral with regard to what is willed (you have freedom for good deeds and freedom for bad). Is that how freedom was always understood?

What is human nature? What is God-given? Did God give us desire, the capacity for pleasure? If so, what for? What is justice? That is something we talk about a lot today – do we know what it is? What are rights and where do they come from? What are we saying, when we call something good? Are there reasons why good behaviour is good, just as there are reasons why apples are good? And are those reasons objective or subjective? What is evil? Is there pure evil in the world? What is friendship, and what is its relation to marriage?

Augustine singled out for special attention “whatever was committed to writing as worthy of being remembered” and it seems to us that what was worthy of being remembered is going to be better on these topics than our own novel musings. In this course we talk about all these issues with help from the author of Ecclesiastes, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, the authors of the New Testament, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Descartes, Pascal.

By the time we have reached the modern period in the second term we watch the editing and changing of this understanding in Machiavelli, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Mill, and ultimately postmodernism. None of these outlooks is mocked; each one arose for a reason that we attempt to understand.

In looking at both streams of thought we seek, with faith, as per the motto of this College, to understand our world and our fellow man.

Instructor: Prof. Edward Tingley

RESPONSA AD QUAESTIONES / QUODLIBETICA

Each week a free discussion takes place on a set question chosen by faculty or students. We mimic here – in a fairly loose and relaxed fashion – two literary genres of the medieval university. The discussion is open to the entire Collegium (students, Faculty, and Staff) as well as visitors and friends of Augustine College from the local community. The discussion alternates week by week between the following.

Responsa ad quaestiones (Responses to questions) poses a question concerning social, religious, or political affairs, including moral issues of College life, to which all participants are invited to respond as intelligently and constructively as they can. Our objective: to give the question asked as sound an answer as we can, or at least to close off some tempting bad answers.

Quodlibetica (as-you-wish) imitates a discussion in the medieval universities in which the masters allowed the students to turn the tables on them by asking them the questions. It was at that time thought essential that those wishing “to hold a quodlibetica dispute have an uncommon presence of mind and an almost universal competency.” We certainly do not have this view of our own wisdom but do accept that, where we have spent time thinking about the issues raised, there might be some benefit in ‘saying truthfully what we think’ (a demand often made by Socrates). Accordingly, professors will respond to questions asked by students on difficult matters of Christian belief, etc. Our objective: to give students the benefit of our own reflections (such as they are), compile a collective answer, and prompt students to think about how they themselves might begin to answer the question.

Led by Andrew Bennett & Emily Martin

SCIENCE, MEDICINE, & FAITH

The 19th-C fable that religion, particularly the Christian religion, was antagonistic to the development of science is now recognized as a very partial telling of the story. This course is intended to provide the background necessary to understand the complex history of thought that led to modern science. It asks,

What are the major ideas in science and how have those ideas evolved?

What are the common misconceptions and myths about science and the attitude of the Christian Church toward science?

And how have reason and faith worked together in the development of science?

In the first term we focus upon ancient and medieval times to approximately 1500. All human cultures have some forms of technology, which reflect the human response to the problems of survival: problem-solving may produce technology but not science. Number systems are an example of problem solving, which did not initially lead to any abstract systematization. Medicine, similarly, was a mixture of incantation, empirical remedies, and crude surgery, and to this day animistic cultures remain hard soil into which to plant scientific ideas. The flowering of abstract mathematics (largely geometry) and the great cultural insight of the Hippocratic physicians is examined, and then the decline into the uncritical encyclopaedic cataloguing of the Roman period.

We then look at the slow emergence of what would become scientific thought following the rediscovery (via the Muslim world) of the works of Aristotle. The 13th and 14th centuries rather than the Enlightenment turn out to be a critical turning point, permitting the later revolutions of modern scientific thought with which the second term opens.

We turn then to the great revolutions of modern science, in physics, astronomy, and the biosciences.

In physics the first revolution in physics is associated with several developments: the idea of a new sun-centered, planetary system by Copernicus, Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, experimental discoveries by Galileo with the telescope, and finally the formulation by Newton of the universal law of motion and the universal law of gravity. The second revolution comes with dramatic developments in physics, such as the discovery of electromagnetic and sub-atomic forces, Einstein’s theories of special relativity and general relativity, and quantum mechanics – theories with profound implications for the way we understand the universe.

The first revolution in the biological sciences is the work of Darwin, building on earlier achievements in classification; the second is the development of biochemistry and physiological medicine; and the third is the arrival of molecular biology and genetics. All are based on a naturalistic exploration of the world, entirely appropriate as long as it is a scientific convenience rather than (as Dawkins et alia maintain) the height of logical rationalism.

Throughout the course the relationship between faith and science is emphasized but, over the eight months of this course, it becomes clear that purely naturalistic thinking, though appropriate to the practice of science, is utterly inadequate as an understanding of man.

Instructor: Prof. John Patrick

photo by Teresa Stanton

READING THE SCRIPTURES

“Reading the Bible should be a form of prayer. The Bible should be read in God’s presence and as the unfolding of His mind. It is not just a book, but God’s love letter to you. It is God’s revelation, God’s mind, operating through your mind and your reading, so your reading is your response to His mind and will. Reading it is aligning your mind and will with God’s; therefore it is a fulfillment of the prayer, ‘Thy will be done,’ which is the most basic and essential key to achieving our whole purpose on earth: holiness and happiness. ”

Peter Kreeft

The Bible is foundational to the development of Western thought and culture, yet most people have no more than a passing acquaintance with its contents. Even the experience of many (dare I say most?) church-going Christians tends to be one of piecemeal encounters with Scripture: Sunday-school stories about ‘heroes of the Bible’, Christmas pageants, seasonal readings and sermons, favourite hymns and choruses, etc.

The aim of this course is to encourage students to approach Scripture as a whole – to see that, although the Bible is in fact a library (scores of books, each with its own integrity, written over the course of centuries, by numerous human authors), it is yet bound together as one volume by the one Divine Author, presenting a coherent revelation: God’s Word to His people.

While our focus will be primarily on the content of the Bible we will also reflect upon how we read and understand the text, often drawing into our discussion insights from other Christian writers throughout the centuries.

Instructor: The Reverend Doug Hayman

TRIVIUM SEMINAR

This course is a practical seminar in techniques of understanding, logic, and effective argument. It therefore reflects the three components of the ancient Trivium: Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric, once counted essentials of any proper education.

Grammar is understood not in the sense most familiar to us (the structuring and mechanics of sentences) but in the broader sense it held within the Trivium: the structuring and mechanics of texts – sentences assembled into literate wholes, especially the kinds of text you will typically study at this college and at other universities. This is addressed by analyzing texts that we read from week to week and by précis writing.

Great emphasis is placed upon careful reading. To learn well and write well you must understand how writers organize complex thoughts – that is, you must first learn to read well. The seminar assists the student to read with greater comprehension using techniques of textual analysis (students are shown how to read with a pencil, analyze texts into divisions, identify theses, look out for the various grammatical objectives an author typically has, etc.)

In addition, students are instructed in the writing of papers. Exercises allow the student, through regular practice, to improve their writing ability.

Logic is approached by way of the deductive syllogism and by instruction in how to identify and defuse the most common logical fallacies.

And, finally, Rhetoric is addressed by exercises intended to help students to speak and debate publicly with more effectiveness and greater comfort. Students are instructed in the moral substance of dialogue: the difference between saying what you think, or winning an argument, and seeking the truth in the company of a fellow seeker (however deluded you think that fellow seeker might be).

Each class ends with Disputatio, during which we discuss a topic in a way that tests and trains the student in the art of discussion.

Instructor: Prof. Edward Tingley