Augustine on the Varieties of Understanding and Why There is No Learning from Words

This paper examines Augustine’s account of understanding and its attainment in De Magistro. Following Myles Burnyeat,1 it is often held that Augustine is especially concerned with explanatory understanding (a complex cognitive state characterized by its synoptic nature and awareness of explanatory relations) and that a principal thesis ofDe Magistro—that there is no learning from words—should be construed not as the claim that testimony is deficient in producing justification in the hearer, but rather as the claim that testimony fails to impart explanatory understanding. Against this view, I argue that in De Magistro Augustine is not in fact especially concerned with explanatory understanding but with various other forms of cognizance (which have hitherto not been clearly characterized or sufficiently distinguished) and that Augustine’s claim that there is no learning from words cannot be construed as typically proposed. I begin by offering a brief, critical account of the received view and observe some of the difficulties it faces (section 2). Next, I distinguish between various different kinds of cognizance which Augustine is interested in— what I term ‘conceptual understanding,’ ‘linguistic understanding,’ ‘explanatory understanding,’ ‘spiritual understanding,’ and ‘infallible knowledge’— and examine Augustine’s discussion inDeMagistro in light of this distinction (section 3). I challenge the traditional interpretation(s) on several points and show that Augustine is initially concerned with basic cognitive states,