Abstract

This chapter probes Augustine’s occasional attitude of indifference to paradox and his capacity to resolve mystery by responding to Gareth B. Matthews’s “The Socratic Augustine” and Peter King’s “Augustine on the Impossibility of Teaching.” Matthews suggests that, despite his dogmatic tendencies, Augustine is content to accept some cases of Socratic perplexity as genuine because the phenomena they describe are real. This chapter argues for the alternative view that Augustine is content not to pronounce on some seemingly paradoxical phenomena because they are not relevant to religious dogma. King defends the Augustinian thesis that teaching, construed as causal transmission of knowledge, is extremely mysterious if not impossible. The chapter suggests that much of the air of mystery evaporates once we distinguish between metaphysical dependency and epistemological dependency.