Augustine's Mom Trumps Plato

"I cannot talk to Augustine, for he is dead. Yet I can connect with him and even walk around a bit in his skin since my mind was trained in the same way his was and my mental adventures are much like his."

This, I hope, will be the conclusion of my students, who, receiving a classical education in the heart of America, will understand exactly what the great man meant when he opined about the struggles he had learning Greek.

The difficulty of mastering a foreign language, wrote Augustine, "was like bitter gall sprinkled over all the sweetness of Greek stories and fables" (Confessions of St. Augustine). It's comforting to know that even the greatest of the ancients struggled with his homework as a boy.

He speaks of Homer, Terence, Vergil, and Cicero--men whose works have become familiar to these classical students as well.

He speaks of "learning the beginnings of literature and rhetoric" in Madaura, of being a senior student at the School of Rhetoric in Carthage, of later teaching the art of rhetoric in Tagaste (his hometown)--features of adolescent education and its first fruits that resonate with the student.

He expresses admiration for the Syrian, Hiereus, who was a master of Greek oratory and of Latin, a sort of fellow in the international fraternity of the classics, a fraternity which begins to tug at the heart and mind of the student.

Augustine then turns toward the chronology of his eventual encounter with Christ. He explains how, though the works of the philosophers made more sense to him than those "interminable fantasies of the Manichees," Aristotle's Ten Categories could not save him from his sin.

He avers that at Carthage he "had begun to be disturbed by listening to a man called Elpidus who spoke and argued openly against the Manichees and produced evidence from the Scripture which was not easy to resist." His classical training in logic finds its match in the mind of the God of his mother. Can it be?

He goes on to tell that, being called from Rome to Milan as a professor of rhetoric, he came into contact with Bishop Ambrose of Milan, who "had a worldwide reputation" as a classical scholar yet was a servant of Christ. Wheels begin to turn in the the midwesterner's mind.

But, most importantly, Augustine ticks off the many ways in which the teachings of the Platonists came nothing near the monumental truth that "the soul of man, though it bears witness to the light, yet itself is not that light."

The great works of Greek and Latin, of rhetoric and literature, of Manichee and Platonist come nothing near the profound teaching of the Hebrews and the one who had "called the Gentiles into [God's] inheritance."

As students steeped in the same classical tradition as Augustine, classical students in a Christian milieu find that their own life experiences blend almost entirely with those of a kid who lived, was educated, and flourished in the late fourth century.

It authenticates their own journey as they realize they are on the same path that the ancient scholar trod.

And it encourages the Christian mother who stands unmoved as her son, once blown about by every wind of doctrine, finds that the greatest treasure of the philosopher's heart is trumped by the treasure in the heart of his mom. It is a joy like no other. It is the fruit of the classical Christian school.