Happiness and Wisdom

Immediately after his baptism Augustine set out to produce a Christianizedversion of the ancient liberal arts curriculum. By an orderedsequence of contemplation, moving from linguistic to mathematicallybased disciplines, Augustine suggested that study in the liberal artscould render the mind and heart docile before God. Though Augustinelater would shift his focus more directly toward biblical study, his earlyreflections on secular learning remain an attractive and powerful modelfor Christian thinking about the arts.Happiness and Wisdom contributes to ongoing debates about thenature of Augustine's early development, and argues that Augustine'svision of the soul's ascent through the liberal arts is an attractive andbasically coherent view of learning, which, while not wholly novel, surpasses both classical and earlier patristic renderings of the aims ofeducation