On Christian Teaching: Book 2

In book 2 of St. Augie's On Christian Teaching I encountered some very interesting passages. One that stuck out to me was about the types of learning according to Gus (by humans vs. by divine power). In the by humans section I found some of the examples very interesting. SA started out by describing superstitious human constructs, such as: astrology, fortune telling, foretelling, etc. I found this very interesting because Gus condemns any sort of forecast of the future given by a human being, regardless of whether it is correct or not. What I think is interesting is that Jesus made predictions about the sequence of events leading up to his death and was completely correct about them. Jesus, in his time on earth, was a human being and would seem to fall under the same category as astrologists. The only difference between the two would be the origin of the foretelling: Jesus' predictions coming from God and an astrologist's from the stars (the devil). Obviously there is also a difference in the predictions in that Jesus predicted his own death for the most noble cause there could possibly be and the astrologist would be predicting for money. I just think that it is interesting that there are such similarities between who is condemned and who is worshipped. I think it is safe to say that Augie wouldn't be a big fan of modern day weather forecasters; they predict things based on human created inferences.

Another type of human created learning is essentially: art. Any sort of human expression of the things around him/her falls under this category; it is also an accepted form of human constructed learning, one won't be condemned for performing an interpretive dance. Both of these types of human created learning are based on natural God given things. They both utilize the natural world in order to make sense of things, one just oversteps its boundaries. Also, both of these types need to be interpreted, because they are human created, they can't necessarily be completely understood by all humans. Only ideas presented by God himself/herself can be understood universally and without any translation. This is related to Gus' methods for interpreting scripture: we have to interpret it because it was written by humans and passed along via a human created system.

An interesting point I came across in the "human created" section, was the part about lies. Augie says that lies "derive exclusively from mankind itself." This idea is part of why human created mediums need to be interpreted, whereas anything coming from God is wholly true and universal. One would think that some sort of evil spirit (ie. the devil, demons, etc.) would be the original source of falsehood by influencing humans, and that these spirits tell nothing that is truthful. On the contrary Augustine himself mentioned that demons influence humans to correctly predict future events, which would be truthful. I think that a being that presents a statement is not labelled as "evil" or "good" based on whether it lies or not, but the intentions of that statement. A demon may influence a person to always tell the truth, but that truth causes pain and suffering each time. Whereas a person may lie constantly but each time he does he saves a person's life, should that liar be condemned? Humans created lies, but lies can do positive things (though admittedly they do some really bad things too).