Augustine & Academics

I have been reading ‘the Confessions’ by Saint Augustine lately.  If you haven’t read it you probably should: Augustine is the best.  Not only is he  is crazy-wicked smart (ever want to have your mind bent inside out?– try book xi of the Confessions ‘On Time’) but  you never feel like he is writing to impress.  For being someone so important (as in, probably the most important post-New-Testament author in all of western civilization) he seems very little consumed with blowing his own trumpet.  In fact, he is ready to call others out of exactly this sort of behavior.  For example, in one of my favourite scenes so far, Augustine goes to talk to a visiting speaker for the Manachees:

‘Nevertheless I put forward my problems for consideration and discussion.  He modestly did not even venture to take up the burden.  He knew himself to be uninformed on these matters and was not ashamed to confess it.  He was not one of the many loquacious people, whom I have had to endure, who attempted to instruct me and had nothing to say.  He had a heart which, if not right towards you, was at least very cautious with himself… This was an additional ground for my pleasure.  For the controlled modesty of a mind that admits limitations is more beautiful than the things I was anxious to know about.’

I love this passage!  It just seems so clear to me that when Augustine mentions those ‘loquacious people, whom I had to endure’, that he simply must have meant academics!  Now if you have been stalking me you would already know that I am currently trying to worm my way into the academic world (confrencences, papers, seminars– oh my!).  But in same ways my entrance into academia has been disappointing: everyday I ask myself, where are the Augustines?!   I mean, sure, people are smart here (although I think few, well probably none, would stand up Augustine) but what bothers me is that so much energy goes into trying to look it: attempting to instruct but ‘having nothing to say’.   In this way, I feel like academia is  like a deadly game of jenga.  It is about being able to drop references to authors you haven’t read and boast about languages you’ve never really learned—and doing it well enough, with enough false confidence, that no one ever calls you on it.

Yet I feel like we all, including myself, could learn a bit from Augustine.  In a world where so much of success is built on boasting about your accomplishments and presenting yourself as confident, learned, and put-together, the ideas of mental ‘modesty’ and ‘caution’ can seem ridiculous.   But if you keep going down the other path you better be careful: one misstep and the whole tower will fall.