Augustine and Anselm in southern Madagascar

This morning, we held the first of two philosophy sessions.   I was teaching mainly about the relation between faith and reason, as seen by Augustine (around 400AD) and Anselm (Bishop of Canterbury around 1100AD).  Both Augustine and Anselm wrote large amounts of sophisticated philosophy, as well as theology.  In the last couple of years, I had read some Anselm with one of the professors at Loyola, and with one of my fellow graduate students.  Last semester, I had taken a course of Augustine's philosophy from the professor with whom I had been reading Anselm.

One reason for using  Augustine's and Anselm's ideas is that they are way cool !  The range of issues they wrote about, and the novel ideas they came up with, and the way they positively valued responding to objections to their ideas, were all outstanding.   A second reason was that I was able to obtain their writings in both English and French (the language of secondary and higher education in Madagascar).

Several nationalities were present at the session -- Bishop Todd being American, Derek Waller (a 3-year missionary with his wife Jane whom Sue and I knew at university in the 1970s) being British, and the rest being Malagasy clergy, seminarians, and a student evangelist.  Assistant Bishop Samitiana did the heavy lifting of translating between English and Malagasy, for the benefit of those with limited or no English, or to translate questions from Malagasy into English so that I could try to answer them.  Sometimes, I and the other participants spoke in French, temporarily sparing Bishop Samitiana the need to translate.

This was my first ever experience of trying to teach philosophy.  So hey, let's make it a tri-lingual debut!

One major theme of Augustine, taken up also by Anselm, is "faith seeking understanding" -- the idea that Christians should tackle difficult questions relating to what we believe, with the aim of arriving (as best each of us is able) at an understanding of (say) how Jesus could be both human and divine, how the one God can exist as the three Persons of the Trinity, why God allows so much suffering, etc.   We did not tackle those huge questions themselves, but we looked, for example, at the advice Anselm gave in the early sections of his On the Incarnation of the Word. 

Here's the Cliff notes version of Anselm's advice:
Anselm points out that if our faith is second-hand, based merely on the testimony of others -- whether in Scripture or from listening to other Christians -- then we will lack experiential knowledge of God.  We will then not have enough grasp of the God about whom we are trying to think, and will likely get hopelessly lost if we try to tackle difficult issues.  So, whereas the quality of our moral or spiritual lives don't really affect our ability to do (say) mathematics, it is important to seek to lead consistent Christian lives if we wish to get our heads around (say) the Trinity.