In the pursuit of an authentic education, we must be most careful when we choose our teachers. The modern school says unhelpful things like “nobody knows you like you know yourself.” And “believe in yourself.” And “follow your truth.” The false platitudes are endless.

The truth is that because of our fallen natures, we are prone to self-deceit, and we can’t possibly be our own best teachers. We are less prone to deceit when trying to understand others, in other words, we are able to see flaws in others better than in ourselves. We are capable of recognizing genius and truth, even if we ourselves are not geniuses and not always truthful. 

We have the capacity to seek out and find the best teachers, unless we have come to believe the false teachers that try to convince the world of the subjective and relative falsehoods that we are our own best teachers.

Think of the missed irony that if we are convinced we are our own best teachers by false teachers, that we are not following our own lead as they suggest they would suggest, but we are following their lead to participate in the contradiction that we have been taught by others to be our own teachers. 

The biggest stumbling block to finding the best teachers today is that in our modern society, there has been a concerted effort to deform common sense, and when common sense is deformed, it becomes nearly impossible to discover the intellectual and moral principles that lead us to the discovery of true knowledge.

This is a benighted age, an age where the truth is actively scorned and denigrated. Test this out, speak and intellectual or moral truth in public and witness what follows. In the public school, I made a career out of this, and it generally draws ire and anxiety to challenge the ideological narrative. 

All the above aside, we are still with the task of seeding out and finding the best teachers for ourselves and our children, so let the search begin. I will begin by suggesting that we acquiesce to the assertion that St. Augustine is one such great teacher we can trust and from whom we can learn. 

I made this assertion to a colleague who had a master’s degree in Shakespearean performance and he said “I read the Confessions, Augustine didn’t do much for me, I am not a fan.” My colleague, like so many others today, is so addled by self-reference that he will likely never have true access to St. Augustine’s teachings.

We ought to establish criterion for finding the good teachers and soon in these pages we will, but let it suffice for now that since St. Augustine is a Father and Doctor of the Church and his works speak truth to us from across the ages, we can take it on good authority that he is one of the most excellent teachers in history. He has written books on teaching, culture, the Faith, catechesis, politics, and much more. A brief look at one of his works may get the ball rolling. 

Saint Augustine once observed that the “New Testament lies hidden in the Old and the Old Testament is unveiled in the New.” In his early years as a Manichean, St. Augustine had trouble interpreting the Bible. He later discovered the role of his intellectual pride played in his prior difficulty with Scripture.

After his conversion to the Catholic Church, he learned from St. Ambrose to interpret the Scriptures symbolically.  As a guiding principle for the revelation of the Scriptures’ inner spirituality, he took the Ambrosian hermeneutic: “the letter kills, but the spirit gives life.”

In time, St. Augustine came to possess a skillful spiritual insight showing remarkable depth in biblical exegesis. By the time he wrote his Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount  in 393, he was adept at searching out the will of God revealed through the scriptures.

He approached his work with the temperament of a child, rather than that of a scholar. Indeed, as a God fearing man, St. Augustine’s commentary possesses a clarity and depth that recommends it across the ages.

If the above is true, and we examine what St. Augustine is treating in his commentary, then it is not a stretch to conclude that St. Augustine is a teacher worth following. I highly recommend that we all begin with Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5 and then we go on to read St. Augustine’s commentary that will carry us deeper into the Sermon.

St. Augustine begins with the profound assertion that:

Anyone who piously and earnestly ponders the Sermon on the Mount—as we read in the Gospel according to Mathew—I believe he will find therein … the perfect standard of the Christian Life.

One defining mark of the great teacher is that he always references the great teachers, and in this commentary, he is recommending the teachings of the One True Teacher Jesus Christ.

The Sermon on the Mount elucidates the divine principles of justice guiding us to the narrow path that leads to communion with the Saints. It draws us out of ourselves towards the search for objective truth.

Begin with St. Augustine, and then let’s look forward to discovering the greatest teachers in history together.