Teaching Christianity (continued)
from them in conducting arguments and making judgments, though there is the point that they serve to sharpen our wits, provided they do not also make them more spiteful or more conceited, so that we either enjoy, that is to say, taking people in with specious arguments and questions, or else think that by having learned such things we have acquired something tremendous, which allows us to consider ourselves a cut above good and inoffensive people.
38, 56. Coming now, though, to the discipline of arithmetic, it must be clear to the dullest of wits that it has not been instituted by human beings, but rather discovered and explored. Yes, though the ancients pronunced the first syllable of Italia short, Vergil wanted it long, and long it became; but it is hardly possible in the same way for you to decide that three threes do not make nine, or that they cannot make a square figure, or that they are not three times three, and one and a half times six, and two times no number, because odd numbers[114] do not have halves. So whether numbers are considered in themselves, or are applied to the laws of shapes or of sounds and other motions,[115] they have their immutable rules which have in no way been instituted by human beings, but have been worked out by shrewd and sagacious minds.
57. However, take someone who loves knowing all these things just so that he can give himself airs among the uneducated, and does not rather go on to inquire why those things are true that he has simply perceived to be true,[116] and why some things are not only true but also immutable, which he has realized are immutable, and who then comes from the observation of material bodies to the human mind, which he finds also to be mutable, because it is now learned, now unlearned, but is all the same set between immutable truth above itself and other mutable things beneath itself, and who does not turn all this to the praise and love of the one God from whom he knows it all proceeds; such a person can