Everything I Need to Know I Learned from St. Augustine
By Hannah Fischer

Personal Essay

I leaned back into the overstuffed chair, took another sip of green tea, and read a few more pages of The Confessions of St. Augustine. Far from required reading, I secretly had been delighted to find the classic in the Hastings used book section the week before. My heart resonated with his prayer in The Confessions, "You made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it finds its place of rest in You." As a college senior, I take restlessness and uncertainty with breakfast.

For as long as I can remember, I have enjoyed an unhealthy preoccupation with desiring to be right and to know truth. My desire to know truth was both intrigued and exhausted last fall when I took Core 250. Whitworth students simultaneously are blessed and cursed in that they are required, forced even, to take Core 250.

In one semester we are rushed through hundreds of years of thought and given the tools with which to think critically about the world and about truth. Crowded into the Robinson Teaching Theatre, we are taught to doubt and reason.

On the first day of class we learned the four epistemologies of knowing: authoritarianism, when we believe something simply because Forrest Baird said it, and three others that are equally important. I am quite sure they are important, because Dr. Baird said they were.

Core 250 inspired intense wrestling with my own ideas and beliefs and often times left me mentally exhausted as I searched for the truth in conflicting worldviews. Several times I desperately wanted to stop the constant flow of new opinions in order to process the reading from the previous day. Augustine became my calm in the storm.

He openly confessed to wrestling with ideas and his relationship with God much in the same way I was experiencing, but had not put words to yet. Core 250 and my introduction to Augustine taught me just how naturally limited my knowledge of life is. After several years of studying philosophy and teaching rhetoric, Augustine still did not claim to know a great deal.

A friend told me this week that he thinks Whitworth is completely obsessed with St. Augustine. He may be right. But after reading The Confessions, I gladly fit the description. My thoughts have recently turned to graduating and to how I will apply knowledge to life, but Augustine's confessions will be sitting safely in my bookshelf, reminding me that I do not need to have life figured out by 20. So once again I will curl up in that overstuffed chair in the Boppell study closet, cup of tea in hand, and mentally engage the spiritual and philosophical ideas of Augustine, remembering I have the freedom to question, to be wrong and especially, to admit to simply not knowing.