ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 (‘Christian Anthropology and Aristotle’s Character Ethics’) starts from the recognition that teachers today inevitably face the test of participating in what is essentially a moral enterprise, while the prevailing culture tends to reduce education to instrumental goals without any real vision of human flourishing. Christian educators, however, have the advantage of their Scriptures and Tradition, combined with experience and reason. These educators are led first to Scripture, and in particular to the teaching of Jesus Christ, as their primary resource for understanding the virtues of good character and the making of moral decisions. In terms of the development of Christian tradition, the Fathers of the early centuries of the Church, such as Augustine of Hippo, are presented as integrating certain ideas of human nature and virtue drawn from pagan thought, such as Platonism and Stoicism, within the more extensive vision of human flourishing offered by Christian faith. No necessary conflict was envisaged between moral truth drawn from faith and moral truth drawn from reason. The chapter further indicates how, in the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas employed the rich vocabulary and ideas of Aristotle, whose works had been rediscovered in the West, within the heritage of Christian moral thinking he had inherited from Augustine. The chapter contains a survey of points of comparison and convergence between Aristotelian and Christian approaches to morality, and concludes that a theological anthropology, where human beings are made in the image of God and are called to communion with him through Christ, provides a context for understanding education in character and virtue.
