Today, we are living in a world of religious pluralism. This paper intends to be a contribution to philosophical perspectives on religious education. In my view, these perspectives have to take its point of departure in new readings of old texts which in many ways have set deep traces in culture and the religious consciences of humans all over the world. One such text is Augustine`s Confessions (Augustine 1991). Trying to reformulate the inner core of his religious experiences today means to enter directly into the world of religious descriptions of the self (Taylor 1992). Augustin`s way of thinking in general is deeply embedded in his religious experiences. He reflects the encounter with the Divine as an encounter with a reality, which at the same time is acknowledged as sensuous and super-sensuous. He is using aesthetic categories in order to describe his religious experiences. This papers presents one possible way of thinking on how religious formation and aesthetic experience intertwine in Augustin`s educational thinking. For Augustine, sensual perception of the world is not a neutral process. It always involves our intuitive and evaluative judgement. We want to see the beautiful, we want to taste nice food and to smell something well, and of course to listen to something which gives a feeling of pleasure. Here in the places, where our senses want to be, the spiritual sensuality of the knowledge of God starts. To know God is no satisfaction of sensual willing. But knowing God comprise sensual attachment. If it was not so, knowledge of God would just be a kind of idea which we would grasp sufficiently with the intellect. Man needs to be affected by the senses in process of knowing God. In his early work, De Musica (Augustine 2017), he speaks of music as a “science of good modulation” (scientia bene modulandi). By that he means the artistic ability to produce music which sounds beautifully and well organized. The musician makes use of the sounds which already are there in the creation. Producing music is not a creatio ex nihilo. As in ancient philosophy, music has to do with numbers as the structure of the universe. What Augustine develops, is a theory of the transcendental presuppositions of the possibility of meaning in music. To be moved by music depends on the intrinsic meaning of music. It says something to the listener in the form of organized sounds. Understanding music means to understand the logical relations of the musical elements as an intuitive act of listening. I do not have to reflect on the relations in order to understand them, but I just have to listen to them. To some extent, I understand the music immediately. But just to some extent, then music is not a goal in itself. Then the music gives him a direct path to the truth: “The sound, flowed into my ears and the truth was distilled into my heart” (Augustine 1991, p. 164). This citation from Confessions raises the question of the relationship of music and truth. It opens for hermeneutical activities: The music has to be interpreted. When we listen, we already take part in a hermeneutical process in investigating what we describe as the “depths” and the “truth” in the music. What kind of truth is this? And which perspectives on religious education does it open? I will ask for the conditions of how Augustine comes from listening to the music to the notion of understanding the listening process as a tool for religious experiences and religious education and formation (Harrison 2013/2000).

My claim is that Augustine`s description of his religious experiences with aesthetic terms is an educational and self-reflective process. Understanding Augustine`s method of questioning as a way of thinking (Williams 2016), I will consider how Augustine describes the (super)sensuous reality in his famous work Confessions. I will then, in a second step, use his philosophy of music as an example on how Augustine uses aesthetic categories for describing his religious experiences. His way of describing religious experiences in aesthetic terms is essential for his vision on how religious education should take shape and grow into a mature way of religious living. The methodological framework of my reflections relates to a pragmatic view (Rorty 2016/1989) in reading Augustine: I am not intending to find or to represent a truth behind his words and concepts but to ponder on how he describes his religious experiences. I am not searching for a reality behind his descriptions when I investigate his descriptions of religious encounters with what he calls a sensuous/super-sensuous reality. Is his aesthetic vocabulary of religious experience of importance today? Is his way of describing himself as a religious person provide useful in a pluralistic society? I am reading Augustine from a perspective where I understand Philosophy as a poetic activity (Rorty 2016). I am interested in the vocabulary Augustine uses for describing himself as someone who searches for self-knowledge and self-education. This deals with the distinction of present and past: The aesthetic categories are reflective categories shaped from a distance to the religious experiences he describes. His present questions relate to past experiences and creates concepts on impressions only existing in his mind. The reason for choosing a pragmatic reading of Augustine is founded on the principle that we do not have an access to a reality behind the words we use to describe it. We are the creator of our own understanding of the world. Understanding Augustine from this point of view means to turn into a world of fascinating descriptions rather than trying to figure out some Augustinian answers to epistemological questions related to religion and religious experiences.

With my Augustinian reflections on religious education I intend to show how Augustine uses aesthetic categories in order to reflect his religious experiences. In using his encounter with music and the way he understands the transcending power of the sensuous listening-process in general, I hope to establish a concrete suggestion on how religious education can be described in aesthetic terms. In my reflections I will present my reasons for referring to Augustine today in order to argue for the importance of describing and understanding religious experiences with an aesthetic vocabulary. Hereby, I will also argue for the claim that confronting ourselves with texts from the past with deep traces in our cultures today is the best way of understanding religious experiences as such. In order to understand the Christian tradition of religious education, Augustine is a good address and an interesting partner in discussions on how Philosophy of Education today shall encompass and discuss the different and hybrid religious traditions in Europe.

Augustin (2017): De Musica (Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum), New York/Berlin: De gruyter. Augustin (1991): Confessions, translated by Henry Chadwick, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harrison, Carl (2013): The Art of Listening in the Early Church, Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199641437.001.0001 Harrison, Carol (2000): Augustine and the Art of Music, i: Begbie, Jeremy S./Guthrie, Steven R. (2011): Resonant Witness. Conversations between music and theology, Cambridge: Eerdmans Publishing, s. 27-45. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/litthe/fru001 Rorty, Richard (2016): Philosophy as Poetry, Charlotteville & London: University of Virginia Press. Rorty, Richard (1989): Contingency, irony and solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Charles (1992): Sources of the selves, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Williams, Rowan (2016): On Augustine, London: Bloomsbury.