“The man who is slow to grasp things but who really tries hard is rewarded; equally he who does not cultivate his God-given in­tellectual ability is condemned for despising his gifts and sin­ning by sloth.” — St. Isidore of Seville

There is a clear distinction between three types of people in the Church:

1. Those who are well read as a matter of habit
2. Those who read occasionally
3. Those who actively choose not to read (sometimes we call this third group illiterates).

Yet I feel this is unfair to people who are truly illiterate because ignorance and illiteracy are not the same thing.

Ignorant means “lacking knowledge,” “uninformed,” “unaware.”  Therefore, ignorance is something like a willed unawareness due to lack of care.

Illiterate means can mean one out of two things: first, “unable to read and write,” and second, “having very little or no education.”  I think the first definition is the best one.

The difference between ignorance and illiteracy is subtle but essential.  Ignorance has the added state of being uninformed and unaware.

The Sermon on the Mount (1896)

by Károly Ferenczy

The role of the laity in theology

So while we see a clear distinction between three types of people in the Church, the heritage of the Church has been passed down by both the illiterate and the intellectuals.

What?!

Yes, that’s true and I’ll go one step further: it is something we should celebrate.  Now, I should clarify, you probably have never dealt with illiterates in your churches, but only the ignorant.  I am not saying we should celebrate lack of awareness, but the illiterates are not unaware.  Why?  Because an illiterate allows himself to understand even though they can’t read.

The ignorant are unlike the illiterate because they are unaware about the purpose of our faith, our worship, and our way of being.  The illiterate are often aware of the purposes of these things.

To give an example of the ignorant, take the attitude of today’s laity who asks what the faith can offer them.  They have centered everything on their own desires (which hopefully all of us by now know are faulty).  The ignorant treat Christianity as if it is a business transaction or a certification program instead of understanding that it is the entering into the mystical family of God.  If someone approached a family with the mentality of “What’s in it for me?” that person would be labelled as a jerk because they center everything on themselves whereas a place in a family is self-sacrificial.  And in that self-sacrifice, we experience meaningful fellowship, friendship, and communion.

Now consider the literature that came out of the early Church.  If you have heard about some of the topics covered or even read some for yourself, then you will know that this literature is deep in a variety of ways whether it is philosophy, poetry, or piety.

I think of such instances like St. Gregory the Theologian and his spiritual daughter St. Olympia.  When St. Olympia was about to get married, St. Gregory was sick and knew he would not be able to travel to her wedding, so he wrote her a poem instead (which to my knowledge has unfortunately never been translated into English).

Also, when we look at the letters the early Christians wrote to one another, we see such depth and care.

Nobody does these things anymore: writing poetry or letters to one another.  We have become fragments of humans.  But it is this true membership in the mystical family of God centered on our Lord Jesus Christ that transforms us.  It makes us fully human.

We should thank God for the unnamed early Christian lay people (including the illiterates) in our prayers as much as we praise the Church Fathers because had it not been for the authentic Christian living of the laity and their true reaching out for Christ, we would not have received the rich spiritual and literary treasures of the early Church that we have.

How is this so?

It is because the regard for the audience shapes the author’s way of speaking and the topics the author discusses.

But more than all this, there have been many saints who were illiterate who have left a lasting impact on the Church.

Examples of the Illiterate in the Early Church

St. Anthony the First Monk

St. Anthony the Great was illiterate.  All the people who knew him, wrote about him, and praised him said so.  But he was not uniformed or unaware.  If you read the letters he dictated or his biography by St. Athanasius, it is clear that he had a strong grasp of theology and spirituality.  St. Athanasius (who is the greatest Church Father because of his unique talent in distilling the essentials of Christian doctrine and making them super clear in his writings without watering them down) wrote the biography of an illiterate monk.

This biography in turn had an impact on St. Augustine’s conversion to Christianity, and St. Augustine was a very highly educated man, and continued to be so.  He grew in his learning as he entered into the life of Christ and reflected upon all sorts of aspects of reality and being in the light of Christ.  But St. Augustine was deeply affected to the point of conversion by the life of this illiterate monk.

Here we see the synergy between the intellectuals and the illiterate in the journey of the life of the Church.  Our Lord Jesus Christ did not come to raise everyone to the same intellectual level, or to make Nobel Prize winners, but He came to redeem humanity.  We see how the redemption is worked out in a way that defies comprehension in such a synergy between the illiterates and the intellectuals.

I might also note that it was monks, who took up the example of St. Anthony, who overwhelmingly preserved the writings of the ancient world (both pagan and Christian).

Our Lord came to heal us, which means to make us fully human.  What makes people human is how we live in a family, in a community, and how we raise up the next generation.  We see such in the early Church.

• What is truth? Can we know the truth?
• What comprises the happy life? Can we live it?
• What is the relationship of the order of the created world and evil? Does the order of the created world ensure that evil does not increase?
• What is the soul? Why is it so important?

These are the questions St. Augustine wondered about from his late teens all the way up to shortly after his conversion to Christianity.

Saint Augustine (c.1645-c.1650)

by Philippe de Champaigne

The Spiritual Journey of St. Augustine

In August of 386, when he was 31 years old, Augustine converted to Christianity after a very long and complicated spiritual journey (which in large part was related to these questions) that led him to abandoning his simple Christian upbringing, to joining the Manichaean heretical group, to cohabiting with his mistress for close to 16 years, and to finally settling on Skepticism, which in the ancient world referred to a philosophical position that claimed to not be able to know anything about the truth.  In other words, this was an extreme form of atheism and nihilism.

Things began to change when he crossed paths with St. Ambrose, a charismatic preacher and intellectual who was the bishop of Milan, in the city where St. Augustine had opened a school whose students failed to pay him at the end of the year.  When he met St. Ambrose, he was struck by two things: first the character of St. Ambrose, and second, the fact that St. Ambrose could answer the questions that he thought were so unanswerable with not only strong answers, but also with a gentle disposition.

This led to St. Augustine taking the Christian faith seriously, and unlike in his childhood, he began to engage it with understanding.  This led to his reading Christian literature such as the epistles of the Apostle Paul and The Life of Antony by St. Athanasius.  Reflecting on the faith of his mother (and also more mysteriously being guided by her prayers for nearly two decades), and the faith of St. Ambrose and the Christian community, and what little he now correctly understood from the Scriptures, he came to believe, with the list of the questions I mentioned above still unanswered.

That may seem strange, and it may seem irrational, but it actually isn’t.  Christianity is not a faith whose main channel is the mind, nor is it a faith whose main channel is the heart, but it is a living faith of the whole human being.  For that reason, we convert when we assent to the life of Christ and His Church, even though we may have lingering questions.  To give an analogy, it is like how we assent to going to a graduate school even though we know it will be so incredibly hard.  We assent not because we have answered our questions, nor because it feels good (because graduate school is anything but comfortable), but because we have seen the community that has graduated from such schools and those that are finishing their course in there, and we see what type of people they have become, so we assent to that way of life even though we may not feel comfortable or have all of our questions answered.  It is the transformation that we see in others that draws us in, so we have faith that we too can have that state of being.

This is the best way I can explain the conversion of St. Augustine.  (It would also be good to reflect on most people’s conversion stories and whether they resemble his).

The Retreat at Cassiciacum

Following his conversion, St. Augustine and his mother, his son, his brother, a few of his friends, and two of his students retreated to a villa on the estate of one of his friends where they spent the late summer of 386 through spring of the following year.  This estate was called Cassiciacum.

Early in the retreat, in November of 386 (before, during, and after his 32^nd birthday which was on November 13), he framed his questions better and began (and only began) to answer them over a series of discussions with all of these people involved.

What is truth?  Can we know the truth?

The first of these conversations addressed the questions: “What is truth?” and “Can we know the truth?”

He had this discussion with his friends, his students, and his son.  This discussion was recorded in dialogue form in the book titled Against the Academics.  As I mentioned above, the Academics were hardcore Skeptics who descended from Plato’s Academy, but radically departed in worldview from Plato’s original vision.  They claimed that there is something known as truth, but we can never know it, but only know something having the appearance of truth.

If you have ever read St. Augustine, you know how beautiful his style of writing is and how the ideas flow smoothly, but these early conversations do not have that polish, as you can bear in mind that these are his earliest writings.

Rather, what this conversation models well for us, especially for us Christians who have an intellectual side, is how to approach these questions honestly, coherently, and logically and what type of labor we must go through in framing and reframing the questions and testing the coherence of the answers given to these questions.

The reason he had ever raised these deep questions was because the Bible makes claims, and if we cannot know the truth, then it doesn’t matter if the Bible’s claims are true because we can never know what is true.  But, if we can know the truth, then we can determine whether the Bible’s claims are true or not.

The conclusion that he and his group arrive at is that we can indeed know the truth because of three principles which are now known in philosophy as:

1. The Law of Identity
2. The Law of Non-Contradiction
3. The Law of the Excluded Middle

although they are not referred to by these names in the dialogue.  This is an important conclusion for those who doubt the possibility of knowing the truth because these three principles help us cancel out what is certainly not true and can help us gain greater confidence in the possibilities that remain.

What comprises the happy life?  Can we live it?

Then St. Augustine on the day of his birthday, November 13, and the following two days gave his friends what he called “a banquet,” but not of food, but rather of ideas and rational delight (“rational” in the ancient world refers to both the soul and the mind; they are the same in ancient thought).

We often have a lot of thoughts on our birthdays, specifically about our origins, our span of life both past and future, and we become increasingly sensitive to how old we are becoming.  I even had a student a few years ago who was afraid of her birthday.  But in the midst of all this, we think about what it is that makes us happy.