The Young Umberto Margiotta as an Interpreter of Augustine’s Pedagogy

Abstract

This investigation does not have a celebratory intent—even though it deals with a great maestro of educational-philosophical research. Instead, this work aims to critically illustrate one of his developmental stages as a young intellectual—that is, a 26-year-old young man—who curated an edition of Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis' De Magistro for I Maestri del Pensiero [The Masters of Thinking], a book series published by Ernesto Germese. Margiotta, the Apulian scholar, advantaged himself through a broad and cultured introduction, which moves from the character of a rhetorician to the pedagogical stream of patristics, and from Augustine’s experience as an educator to the semantic specificity of his De Magistro. We hereby undertake the task to highlight the elements of originality in Margiotta's interpretation, his coherence in assessing the peculiarity of the Christian educational message, as well as the singularity of the figure of Augustine, whose confessed life story—well beyond its radical self-educational commitment—still stands as a milestone for the strenuous and painful conquest of a personal identity resulting from the quest for truth. In the analysis of Margiotta's reflection, this work employs a hermeneutic epistemological framework and a qualitative methodological approach.