Immediately after his baptism Augustine set out to produce a Christianized<BR>version of the ancient liberal arts curriculum. By an ordered<BR>sequence of contemplation, moving from linguistic to mathematically<BR>based disciplines, Augustine suggested that study in the liberal arts<BR>could render the mind and heart docile before God. Though Augustine<BR>later would shift his focus more directly toward biblical study, his early<BR>reflections on secular learning remain an attractive and powerful model<BR>for Christian thinking about the arts.<BR>Happiness and Wisdom contributes to ongoing debates about the<BR>nature of Augustine's early development, and argues that Augustine's<BR>vision of the soul's ascent through the liberal arts is an attractive and<BR>basically coherent view of learning, which, while not wholly novel,<BR>surpasses both classical and earlier patristic renderings of the aims of<BR>education.<BR>Ryan N. S. Topping begins by embedding Augustine's educational<BR>works within the historical and philosophical context of Christian and<BR>pagan late antiquity. He then shows how Augustine's writings on education,<BR>far from being irrelevant to the trajectory of his mature thought,<BR>provide a key to interpreting many of his other explorations in ethics<BR>and epistemology. Augustine's Christianized liberal arts curriculum is<BR>vindicated as an outgrowth of his moral theology, an expression of his<BR>abiding conviction that happiness is the end of human aspiration, and<BR>that -- against both Ciceronian skepticism and Manichean dualism -- the<BR>created order speaks to men of the mind of God.