In de Magistro, St. Augustine explains that the art of teaching is accomplished by leading a student along a previously trod path of discovery. The effective teacher does not just tell the student where to go, but the story of how they personally found their way and how they understand themselves and their journey. In this way, all teaching is a kind of storytelling. In the Confessions, Augustine plays this idea out in a multi-layered fashion: he reflects upon his life in a series of personal vignettes through which he takes his reader as he goes looking for the light of the Inner Teacher within his memories, and he spends a great deal of time retelling the stories that served to guide him – stories in scripture, stories of his family and friends, and stories told to him by those going through their own journeys of discovery and conversion.
What I propose to explore in this paper is the extent to which all teaching is a kind of storytelling, and all learning a kind of literary project that teaches us as much about ourselves as intersubjective interpreters as it does about any particular subject. What I hope to uncover in this workshop is where all of this leads in terms of our own interactions with ourselves, with each other, with scripture, and with the Inner Teacher.
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