Teacher Formation Reading #3 Questions and Answers

Awakening wonder: A classical guide to truth, goodness, & beautyby Stephen Turley PhD. Classical Academic Press. (2014). “Chapter 4: Truth, goodness, and beauty in the Christian world, Part II”.

1.)  According to St. Augustine (354-430 AD), how do we come to truly know God?

We must enter into the deepest recesses of our soul, through the guidance of Christian scripture, in order to know God in his fullness.

2.)  What happens when one truly knows oneself?

One is directed toward God and sees oneself as an image and likeness of divine life.

3.)  What awakened the desire of a “meaning and purpose outside himself?”

The reading of literature, in particular Cicero’s Hortensius.

4.)  Describe Truth for St. Augustine. 

For Augustine, truth is God Himself. He is the supreme Good.

5.)  What is the difference between knowledge (scientia) and wisdom (sapientia), and why/how is Jesus important to this difference?

Scientia (knowledge) is worldly knowledge and sapienta (wisdom) is eternal knowledge. Jesus is the bridge between the two. He is the Incarnate Word who is Truth and through grace transcends knowledge to wisdom and the transcendent.

6.)  Explain the hierarchy of Goods.

God is the supreme good. All things are inherently good. “All things are to be valued and loved in accordance with their proportionate value in the divine economy.” God is worthy of being loved for His own sake. All created things exist to cause us to love God. With Christ, we can see our rightly ordered humanity and its divine place in God’s economy of salvation.

7.)  Describe how Augustine views Beauty.For Augustine, beauty is the “cosmic order of things, an aesthetic order that serves, in Platonic fashion, as a ladder of ascent to divine life…Beauty serves the indispensable role of momentum toward God, a gravitational pull that draws the soul onward toward the True [Jesus] and the Good [God].”

8.)  What qualities does St. Thomas Aquinas add to Beauty? 

Proportion, integrity, clarity, and harmony. “…Beauty does not simply endow this cosmic chain of Being with proportionality and continuity but also provides the allure, the momentum, for drawing the cosmos back up into inner Trinitarian life…Beauty for Aquinas thus involves both the complex of the cosmos and the calling to consummation, to divine communion, in which all things are eternally perfected in God.”

 "By encountering Truth, the human intellect is awakened to the infinite wisdom of God revealed in Christ; by encountering Goodness, the human volition is directed to act in accordance with the divine purposefulness of creation and out own created nature renewed in Christ; and by encountering Beauty, the human soul is awakened to the inexhaustible wellspring of divine love revealed in Christ."

Thought Provokers 

What is it about these transcendentals that are useful to a Catholic education? What is Catholic education like without these?

The transcendentals can be applied to all things of being, but when applied to man they touch the heart and propel man toward the transcendent. It is there that we move into the realm of Theology and develop a relationship with God and Jesus who is the perfect man and perfect teacher. Catholic schools have functioned very effectively without the use of philosophical questioning, but with this type of questioning all involved in the quest for the meaning of life, from teacher to student, become more deeply enriched in their faith and drawn deeper into the heart of the Church.