The challenge of the modern university is the question of how to not be so tied to the prevailing economy so that other kinds of timeframes, questions, approaches, thoughts, are possible while not becoming irrelevant, the cliché of the ‘ivory tower.’

The presence of AI on the scene has brought me back to basics, to a question behind the challenge I just stated. Here is the question: What is education for? In other words, what are we up to here? Why should it matter and why should we bother? Why should it take four years of students’ lives to get a B.A. if Silicon Valley, like a giant fish trawler scraping the bottom of the ocean, illegally downloaded the sum of human learning thus far and now offers a menu of mix-and-match solutions to any kind of problem humanities scholarship might raise? It promises exhaustibility, it promises speed, it promises accuracy, it promises ease.

These questions have brought me back to think about my own experience of education. What mattered to me? What drew me in? What sustains human beings far past the years of institutional schooling as they move into the dark wood of midlife? What is it that made me want to teach?

AI is, to my mind, not a break with the past but rather an extension of the notion of learning as the imparting of information and gaining skills for “productivity,” a notion that we have allowed to creep into much of our education—elementary, high school, college, graduate school—over many years. What is education for? Why are we here? According to an informational-productivity view, the answer would be, “to learn some facts as efficiently as possible, to prove you know them, to get credentialed so that you can go into the world and make money.”

What I remember of college and graduate school, though—what caught my attention and my love, and what sustains me now so many years later—were practices of contemplative learning. This meant developing the habit of slowly turning over the intricacies of a text, of a problem, seeking as much, if not more, to generate questions than arrive at answers. It meant engaging with riddles. This work of ‘turning over” the text happened in my study alone but more memorably in classrooms with others as part of a dialogical endeavor. Getting lost together in conversations by turns pacific and raucous, books were positioned as the hearth around which seminars gathered, warmed themselves, situated themselves.

Augustine was an exemplar and theorist of contemplative reading. I want to outline three hallmarks of such reading and teaching as I see them in his work.

First: it is slow. Attentive. It returns, again and again, to the inexhaustibility of a passage. The famous scene in the Milanese garden comes to mind (Conf. 8.12.29): Augustine looks to Romans 13:13-14 following a child’s voice instructing him to “take up and read.” He struggles over this passage. There is friction, there are tears. There are words that resist his understanding. He wrestles with them, trying to win a blessing. The question is not only, what do these words mean, but what do they mean for him? The drama of interpretation, of truth-seeking, unfolds between the poles of the reality of the text—the divine message—and his own situatedness. His interpretation, in other words, has a point of view. It has a point of view because it comes from someone who (unlike a Chatbot), has a body, and therefore it requires judgement.

In other words, the interpretation of the text does not gain significance by operating as a post-cartesian fever-dream, yielding a single argument that might be apprehended once and for all. It is a site of slow, engaged struggle.

Second, contemplative reading is transformative. This kind of engagement, if the Milanese garden scene is any indication, changes a person’s body and soul. This transformation is accomplished through relationship—with texts and the histories and people they bring to readers, with the others with whom one reads. It is not done alone. In the treatise, On Catechizing the Unlearned, Augustine talks about how, in teaching material that is old news to the teacher, that same material becomes new and alive again for them, for teaching and learning involve “sympathy,” an affective connection across and through what is being learned that is so powerful he describes it as allowing for mutual indwelling:

when people are affected by us as we speak and we by them as they learn, we dwell each in the other and thus both they…speak in us what they hear, while we…learn in them what we teach. Is it not a common occurrence, that when we are showing to those who have never seen them before certain lovely expanses, whether of town or countryside, which we… [because we have] often seen [them] already have been in the habit of passing by without any pleasure, our own delight is renewed by their delight at the novelty of the scene? And the more so, the closer the friendship between them and us; for in proportion as we dwell in them through the bond of love, so do things which were old become new to us also. (De Catechizandis Rudibus 12.17; tr. Joseph P. Christopher, 1946).

Learning requires continual renewal through relationship with others. Teachers and students, students with other students, learn, renew, transform, together.

Third, contemplative reading is hermeneutic, meaning most fundamentally that the text offers its meaning through language, through what Augustine calls the “obscure” nature of signs.

Signs are obscure both because we are finite—our vision of things is partial—and because language is a human creation, not a function of divine transparency. This means that our language is foundationally symbolic. Words mediate, refer us to things that they re-presence in symbolic form. It seems we humans have a habit of trying to talk our way out of symbolization; we seek a fantasy of securitizing our communication, of direct access to one another, of offering our point of view without the risk of misunderstanding. But for Augustine, such attempts are a fantasy. We don’t have that kind of experience of communication in this life, while in a body. Our learning and our communication with others is, Augustine holds, bound to our finitude.

A passage from On Christian Teaching shows well what I mean. Augustine describes the apostle Paul as an example of the ideal reader and interpreter of God’s words. Although Paul had a visionary experience in which he was “caught up to the third heaven” and heard unspeakable divine utterances (2 Cor. 12:2)—in other words, he enjoyed escape from mediation, time, perhaps the body (he isn’t sure), Augustine says that what is important about Paul is that even after this experience, he relied on human instruction, human community, to live out his spiritual vocation. Paul exemplifies learning and teaching not by operating as some kind of disembodied channel of the impersonal divinity, one who tells everyone the truth of things once and for all, thereby removing the need for interpretation, community, for the friction of working towards understanding together.

Augustine writes:

the apostle Paul…though prostrated and then enlightened by a divine voice from heaven, was sent to a human being to receive the sacrament of baptism and be joined to the church…All this could certainly have been done through an angel, but the human condition would be really forlorn if God appeared unwilling to minister his word to human beings through human agency. It has been said, “For God’s temple is holy, and that temple you are”: how could that be true if God did not make divine utterances from his human temple but broadcast direct from heaven or through angels the learning that he wished to be passed on to mankind? Moreover, there would be no way for love, which ties people together in the bonds of unity, to make souls overflow and as it were intermingle with each other, if human beings learned nothing from other humans. (De Doctrina Christiana Preface 6; tr. R.P.H. Green, 1997).

The picture that emerges here is one in which being finite, being in a body in time, entails relying on others for survival, for understanding, for connection to God. Language is human and as such it is communal. Revelation, for Augustine, is mediated through human language, not dropped from heaven as an absolute answer.

I take this observation to apply, more widely, to the work in the humanities in the university where we learn, speak, interpret together.

If we think about seeking answers, information, “data,” in relation to knowing God, Augustine is clear. We can’t comprehend God. Our signs cannot capture the thing (res) that is God. God’s reality is intensely, not quantitively, greater than ours. Therefore, he speaks ambiguously, obscurely. This puts us into each other’s keeping.

The obscure nature of signs, Augustine writes, renders them sites of desire. Obscurity turns them into “lures.’’ We are hooked by it. The work of reading, of interpretation, is (as Freud says of analysis), interminable, always incomplete. It leads to more questions, not to territory one grabs.

The contest between a notion of knowledge as conquest and acquisition and knowledge as a process of loving attention—what Francis de Sales called consuming the flower with a locust’s voracity versus drinking from the flower like a “sacred Bee”—is ages old (A Treatise of the Love of God, 1630, 324-25). We are in another, more fraught, iteration of its struggle. Augustine would say, I think, that the university needs to preserve drinking from the flower. It needs to carefully guard the very human process of interpretation, engagement, inquiry if it is to have a reason for being at all.