Augustine's Preached Theology: Living as the Body of Christ

By J. Patout Burns

Vital insights from Augustine’s sermons on the life of faith. 

Augustine is not usually thought of today as a preacher, but he delivered sermons weekly over the course of nearly forty years to his congregation in Hippo Regius and occasionally also in Carthage and other Roman cities he visited as bishop. The differences between his sermons and his theological treatises are striking but not surprising considering that the treatises targeted an elite, educated audience while his preaching was intended for Christians who lived—then as now—by the spoken and remembered rather than the written word. Where Augustine’s treatises were intellectual, intricate, and theoretical, the rhetoric of his sermons is characterized by conviction, emotion, and a firm commitment to putting faith into action. 

This volume by renowned Augustine scholar Patout Burns explores the theology of Augustine’s preaching. Utilizing recent advances in the chronological ordering of Augustine’s extant sermons, Burns traces the development of their core thematic elements—wealth and poverty, sin and forgiveness, baptism, eucharist, marriage, the role of clergy, the interpretation of Scripture, the human condition, and the saving work of Christ. He also identifies the influence and manifestation of significant controversies in Augustine’s preaching, most notably Donatism and Pelagianism. As Burns shows, most of Augustine’s groundbreaking insights on the relation of Christ to Christians were developed in his sermons. 

Like any good preacher, Augustine strove to establish a dialogue between scripture and lived experience through his sermons—and did so quite effectively. Thus, pastors as well as scholars will benefit from Burns’s insight into the teachings of one of the most effective ministers in Christian history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Jul 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781467463928

J. Patout Burns

 J. Patout Burns Jr. is the Edward A. Malloy Professor Emeritus of Catholic Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School. He is the author of Cyprian the Bishop and the Church's Bible volume Romans: Interpreted by Early Christian Commentators, and he is the coauthor, with Robin Jensen, of Christianity in Roman Africa: The Development of Its Practices and Beliefs.

Book preview

Front Cover of Augustine’s Preached TheologyHalf Title of Augustine’s Preached TheologyBook Title of Augustine’s Preached Theology

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

4035 Park East Court SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546

www.eerdmans.com

© 2022 J. Patout Burns Jr.

All rights reserved

Published 2022

Printed in the United States of America

28 27 26 25 24 23 22 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

ISBN 978-0-8028-8022-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

For

Robin Margaret Jensen,

who discussed generously

all that this volume contains—

and much that it does not—

in hundreds of dinner conversations

CONTENTS

Foreword by J. Warren Smith

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Augustine as Preacher

Editions of Augustine’s Preached Works

The Chronology of Augustine’s Preached Works

Using This Book

1.Interpreting the Scripture

Prophecy and Foreshadowing

Figurative Interpretation

Multiple References to a Single Person

The Whole Christ

Augustine and Tyconius’s Book of Rules

Augustine’s Practice

Conclusion

2.Riches and Poverty

Wealth, Poverty, and Righteousness

The Christian Forms of Life

Enjoying Wealth and Enduring Poverty

Almsgiving within the Body of Christ

The Religious Power of Almsgiving

Conclusion

3.Sin and Forgiveness

God’s Dealing with Sins

Repenting and Forgiving within the Christian Community

Forgiveness by the Church through the Bishop

The Power of Forgiveness

Conclusion

4.Baptism

Pastoral Concerns

Doctrinal Issues

Conclusion

5.Eucharist

Instruction of the Newly Baptized

The Bread of Life Discourse in the Gospel of John

Eucharist and Baptism

The Body and Blood of Christ

Conclusion

6.Marriage

Sexual Practice in Christian Marriage

The Bond of Marriage

Marriage and Property

Christ and the Church

Conclusion

7.The Ministry of the Clergy

The Minister of Baptism

The Minister of Reconciliation

Priests Offering and Interceding

Preachers of the Gospel

Watching over the Congregation

The Bishops as Successors of the Apostles

Conclusion

8.The Saving Work of Christ

Paying the Price to Purchase Humanity

Plundering the Strong Man’s Goods

Condemning Sin in the Flesh

Christ’s Identification with Christians

Descent into the Underworld

Resurrection and Ascension

Conclusion

9.The Human Situation

The Initial Decade of Augustine’s Ministry

The Second Decade: Preaching on Human Sinfulness

The Third Decade: The Pelagian Controversy

Original Sin and Inherited Guilt

Preaching in Carthage on Inherited Guilt

The Sinning of Adam and Eve

Conclusion

10.Christ and the Church

The Union of Divine and Human in the Savior

The Union between Christ and the Church

The Operation of Divine and Human in the Savior’s Work

The Collaboration of the Savior and the Church

Explaining the Union of Christ and the Church

Conclusion

Notes

A Note for Instructors on Further Reading

Bibliography of Secondary Sources Cited

FOREWORD

WHEN I ASSIGN MY FIRST-YEAR DIVINITY STUDENTS Gregory of Nazianzus’s Theological Orations , the first point of shock for them comes with the realization that these orations were actual Christian sermons, preached in an actual church and to a real congregation. The initial cause for their incredulity centers on the length of sermons that are so theologically dense. How could a preacher commit such a long text to memory? And how could a congregation listen to such a lengthy message? In a culture so dominated by the visual media, it is hard to imagine the aural experience of listening to orations that were crafted as works of verbal artistry. Moreover, the sermons of the patristic era generally lack illustrative stories that are standard features of contemporary preaching. Rather, the stories used were often vivid word pictures taken from diverse but, to the church father’s thinking, interconnected portions of scripture. Often their points were moral or sought to arouse holy emotions of contrition or compassion. Whereas contemporary sermons have a moral or therapeutic focus—a point of overlap with patristic preaching—the thrust of patristic homilies often was simply the depiction of the wonder and mystery of the triune God.

Precisely here in the differences between ancient and modern preaching lies the value of studying sermons of a bygone era. The differences lift us out of our present context with all its cultural norms and social expectations and provide us an opportunity to be reflective about those norms and expectations precisely by showing us alternative ways of living and worshipping under vastly different norms. The recently published translations of patristic sermons, not the least of which being The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century by New City Press, is of tremendous value for the modern church, giving pastors and students access to more sermons than ever before, translated into a contemporary literary style that is more easily understood.

Sometimes the content of the sermons reflects values and beliefs drastically different from modern commonplace assumptions. One example might be how Augustine, in his homilies on marriage, argues that the intention behind all holy acts of sexual intimacy must be procreation (see p. 135, below). Even when the sermons, like the Bible itself, seem strange—we’re not in Kansas anymore—they have the value of reminding us that we cannot read these texts through the lens of our twenty-first-century Western assumptions. Even familiar terms such as grace or faith or reason do not carry meanings that directly correlate with our modern understandings. Often we need a guide to chart our way through this alien intellectual and spiritual landscape. But with such a guide, we can discover the value of listening patiently to familiar words clothed with different meanings. Paying attention to these sermons delivers us from confining our reading to the echo chamber of our particular form of the Christian faith and in so doing allows us to see the richness that lies in the theological breadth of the Christian tradition across the generations.

Though the differences may be astonishing at times, more often these ancient sermons address perennial pastoral matters with a boldness whose honesty, if shocking, is also refreshing. Such is the case when, in discussing his congregation’s questions about giving to the church, Augustine answers in an imagined dialogue. Question: How much should we give? Answer: The Law specifies a tenth; this is what the Scribes and Pharisees gave. But then Augustine quotes Jesus’s words to his disciples, Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Scribes and the Pharisees, you shall not enter the Kingdom of heaven (Matt. 5:20). Augustine leaves hanging in the air the question, What does that imply? (see p. 35, below). Such is the forthrightness of which many a contemporary preacher is envious.

But Augustine was no show orator playing the provocateur simply for the sake of demonstrating his craft. Rather, he deployed such rhetorical frankness because of a deep-seated conviction: God speaks. God spoke through Ambrose’s sermons even when Augustine sought nothing more than to assess Ambrose’s oratorical gifts. And Augustine’s heart was convicted as God’s word for him came to him in a certain garden in Milan through Paul’s letter to the Romans. For, as John’s prologue declares, In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. God’s actions in the world are, for Augustine, his mode of speaking to and through creation. In his homilies on Jesus’s bread of life discourse in John 6, Augustine begins by observing that both the barley grains and the barley loaves had the same maker. The seeds were fashioned by the Word, through whom all things were made, and the loaves were multiplied by that very same Word now incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. Therefore, they both have the same purpose; they are signs (sacramenta) designed to arouse wonder. In the seed, there is the wonder of germination and transformation; and with the loaves, there is the miracle of multiplication. But in both, Augustine says, Something was brought to the attention of the senses whereby the mind would be alerted, something displayed before the eyes whereby the understanding could be exercised so that we might marvel at the invisible God through his visible works … [and thus be] raised up to faith and purified by faith (Tractates on the Gospel of John 24.1; trans. Hill, 423–24). Thus he exhorts his congregants to "read the miracle," for it is the deed through which the Word speaks (24.2; trans. Hill, 424). Out of this conviction, Augustine employed all his considerable rhetorical skill to give his people the sense that Christ was speaking to them. Thus when he would renarrate an event from the gospel, Augustine would often quote Jesus’s exact words in which he addresses his disciples with the second-person plural pronoun. Immediately, Augustine would then rephrase or elaborate on Jesus’s words, still using the second-person plural pronoun (e.g., 25.3; trans. Hill, 432). Here Augustine is intentionally ambiguous. Is this simply a paraphrase of Jesus’s words? Is the you the disciples in the gospel? Or are Augustine’s congregants the antecedent? Augustine’s answer would be, Both. For the incarnate Word who spoke to his disciples in first-century Judea now speaks to the church at Hippo through those same ancient words glossed in the words of the modern preacher. The preacher’s tasks of reading scripture and proclaiming the Word are, for Augustine, a living speech act, which, like the miracles of the barley seed and the loaves and fishes, raises the congregations’ minds through these signs to the God who spoke the signs and whose indwelling luminous Spirit gives understanding.

One of the deep, though rarely spoken, fears of all young preachers is whether he or she will have something new and interesting to say each Sunday for fifty Sundays out of the year for a lifelong ministry of forty or fifty years: How will I make the resurrection story fresh and interesting to my people for the next fifty Easters? Augustine, who preached two to three times a week (see p. 2, below), does not seem to have been troubled by that question, in part at least because of his view of the sacramental nature of scripture. When he comes to the end of the feeding of the five thousand, Augustine explains that the twelve baskets of scraps of bread signify the meanings of Christ’s teachings that we are not able to consume. This may be because we lack the maturity to grasp certain spiritual nuances in the text. But it also may lie in the surplus meaning Augustine sees as inherent in all scripture. Since Christ, who is the Father’s expression of his infinite love for the world, is the content of all scripture, then scripture possesses a surplus meaning that is infinite and inexhaustible. Augustine affirms this when he describes the believers’ communion with God in a vast inner shrine (Tractates on the Gospel of John 25.14; trans. Hill, 442), where, quoting Psalm 35:8–9, they will get drunk on the abundance of your house (25.17; trans. Hill, 445). The superabundance of God’s goodness, wisdom, and power revealed in scripture means that there will always be new insights to be gleaned and proclaimed.

Augustine’s sacramental and christological view of scripture as always having a surplus meaning offers a fuller and more expansive view of scripture. He does not see one passage of scripture as having a single, historical meaning that is confined to the author’s intent. Rather, Augustine recognizes that when the Holy Spirit speaks in and through us, whether an ancient prophet or a modern preacher, our words carry more meanings than we intend at that moment. Thus, as at Pentecost, the gospel can be heard and understood as having many meanings, all of which cohere in a message of love.

One of the ironies of Augustinian studies is how little attention, comparatively speaking, has been given to his sermons. Though Augustine speaks at length in Confessions about his training in and teaching of rhetoric, the fruit of that early formation has been overlooked. It is as if we have decided that the writings of Augustine the Christian philosopher and theologian—e.g., Confessions, City of God, On the Trinity—are the works of enduring value that reveal his true genius, as if preaching were merely one of those duties the bishop of Hippo had to perform in between writing profound theological treatises. Such a view, however, loses sight of an important point. Augustine the convert to Christianity never stopped being Augustine the orator. As critical as he was of the vane aspirations of his teachers and parents who saw oratory as the way to rise socially, nevertheless Augustine, reflecting on the relationship between his early education and his present work as a bishop, prayed, Turn to your service whatever may be of use in what I learned as in boyhood. May I dedicate to your service my power to speak and write and read and count; for when I learnt vanities, you imposed discipline on me and have forgiven me the sin of desiring pleasure for these vanities (Confessions 1.15.24 [CCSL 27:13; trans. Chadwick, 18]). Augustine the bishop remained the orator whose prodigious skills were now devoted to serving God by fulfilling Jesus’s command to Peter, Feed my sheep.

In the volume before you, Patout Burns offers a corrective to this omission. He has laid out a systematic treatment of the major themes, pastoral and theological, that occur in Augustine’s various homilies. As someone who has spent years working through Augustine’s corpus, treatises as well as sermons, particularly surrounding Augustine’s doctrine of grace, Burns has gained a familiarity with these texts as well as with Augustine’s complex North African context to see the overlap and the differences between the treatises and the homilies. His decades of experience reading Augustine make him a perfect guide into these rich sermons. Through his analysis of their theological content and rhetorical artistry, Burns gives us insight into these sermons as examples of pastoral theology, that is, adaptations of themes from his treatises in a homiletical form that would inform, edify, and delight his congregants. Inasmuch as a bishop’s sermons in late antiquity were recorded and preserved to be models of exposition for their priests, this volume and Augustine’s sermons themselves are not for academics alone. They are also for women and men who know the weekly challenge and the pleasure of preaching the word by which God speaks to his people. Tolle lege.

J. Warren Smith

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

IN MY FINAL TEACHING POSITION, at Vanderbilt University Divinity School, I was responsible for an introductory course, The Formation of the Christian Tradition, that provided a survey of the development of Christian doctrine and practice from the period following the formation of the New Testament through the European Middle Ages to the eve of the Reformation. Most of the students in the course were preparing for some form of church ministry and many were already engaged in it. I came to realize that the level of their attention and interest rose when the topic of my lecture was presented in a way that they could imagine themselves using in a sermon. That’ll preach was the highest form of approval of an early Christian doctrine or interpretation of the Bible. What would not preach, what they were certain was sure to be rejected or ignored by the congregations they served or in which they worshiped was met with general resistance. They liked Augustine’s doctrine of the gratuity of divine initiative and effective support but not his (thereby entailed) doctrine on the unmerited predestination of the saved. One extended exchange ended with the exasperated student’s I’m not buying it, and my It’s not for sale; I just need you to understand what he wrote and why. Augustine, as will be noted in this study, carefully avoided preaching on predestination and even avoided the topic in his treatises for decades.

The subtitle of this volume was inspired by the Gospel of Luke, Forgive and you will be forgiven; give and it will be given to you (Luke 6:37–38), a text that Augustine cited more than twenty times in his preaching and to which he alluded regularly. As the second and third chapters of this volume show, sharing wealth and pardon with one’s neighbor were closely linked practices. As the remaining chapters explain, both were deeply rooted in his understanding of the Christian life as manifestations of the presence of charity, the love of God and neighbor, that was the work of the Holy Spirit in the members of the body of Christ.

The Henry Luce Fellowship in Theology through the Association of Theological Schools supported a broad range of research projects. All of them were linked to current practice of religion in the modern world. The grant that supported this study of Augustine’s preached theology, despite its historical focus, was thereby directed toward its modern relevance. This study of the relation between Augustine of Hippo’s preaching and the development of his theology is one of the reports of that research.

AUGUSTINE AS PREACHER

Aurelius Augustine was bishop of the church in Hippo Regius, in the Roman civil province of Proconsular Africa from 396 through 428.* He had a good literary and rhetorical education in Africa. He was a successful public orator attached to the imperial government in Milan, then the capital of the Roman Empire. In his early thirties, he turned away from that career, received baptism from Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, and returned to Africa, planning a life dedicated to the intellectual exploration of the Christianity in which his mother had raised him. Instead, he was drafted into the clergy as a presbyter (elder) in the port city of Hippo Regius in 391. He was immediately given preaching assignments usually reserved for the more advanced; he preached On the Faith and the Creed to the bishops of Africa assembled at the Council of Hippo in October 393. Made bishop and given full responsibility for the church in the city and in many villages in the agrarian area surrounding it, he would continue preaching regularly—two or three times a week—for more than thirty years to the congregation in Hippo. As Augustine traveled extensively in Roman Africa on church business, he was expected to preach in the towns he visited, particularly in Carthage.

Immediately after his first ordination to clerical office, Augustine asked for and received time to study the scriptures on which he would be preaching and writing. He became familiar with them, first in Latin translation of the Greek text of both the Old Testament and the New Testament. Later, he moved to the Vulgate translation that the Roman presbyter Jerome produced from the Hebrew Old Testament and a revision of prior Latin translations of that Greek text. Augustine occasionally checked other Latin translations and even the Greek version of difficult or disputed passages, though he seldom mentioned such research in his sermons. He eventually acquired a detailed knowledge of the scriptures but admitted that he still needed the written text; unlike some of his congregants, he could not recite long passages of scripture from memory.¹

Although Augustine prepared his sermons, he did not write them in advance. He had been trained in the common practice of composing by dictating to a secretary; he used it even for his complex treatises. He was reliant on a written text of the scripture as he preached but the plan for a sermon and the supporting materials—mostly related scriptural passages—were probably in his memory. This method allowed him to adapt his presentation to inspirations of the moment and the responses of the congregation. Thus, he was able to provide an exposition of a psalm that the lector proclaimed by mistake. The resulting sermon may not have been as smooth as others, but it did cover the text well. The surviving texts of Augustine’s sermons were produced by notaries who made shorthand transcripts during the sermons and turned them into full texts, which were then stored in the episcopal library in Hippo. The same must have been done for the many sermons that Augustine preached in Carthage.

As he approached the end of his career, Augustine began reviewing and editing all his literary production, intending to provide information—date and circumstances of composition and delivery—along with corrections he deemed necessary. His Reconsiderations covers all his treatises, in chronological order. Fortunately, most of the treatises he surveyed survived. Unfortunately for historians of his work and times, he never found time to review his correspondence and sermons. Still, many letters and sermons were passed down in various collections, some of which must have been made in Hippo during the years following his death. The texts survived, like much of ancient literature, through the copies and distribution networks of monastic and cathedral libraries. Some are still being discovered in the remnants of those great institutions that were taken over by municipalities and universities.

EDITIONS OF AUGUSTINE’S PREACHED WORKS

The foundational collection of Augustine’s sermons was edited by the French Benedictine congregation of St. Maur in the late seventeenth century. That edition introduced a system of numbering the sermons, based on the books of the Bible and the sequence of the liturgical year. That system took hold and became normative. Subsequent discoveries were integrated by adding a letter of the alphabet to the number identifying sermons on the same or similar topic or scriptural passage in the Maurist sequence. These more recent discoveries are signaled in this volume by providing both the name of the post-Maurist collection or editor and both numbers identifying the sermon. Thus, for example, Serm. Dolb. 21(159B).3 refers to the third paragraph of Sermon 21 in the collection discovered and edited by Francois Dolbeau and its place (159B) in the Maurist numbering sequence. Some, but not all, sermons in the Maurist collection have both chapter and paragraph numbers. Thus, Serm. 71.2.4 refers to Sermon 71, chapter 2, paragraph 4. Since each of the two sets of numbered divisions is continuous through the sermon, the chapter number is sometimes omitted in modern editions and translations. In the Expositions of the Psalms, in contrast, some texts required multiple sermons. In these cases, the first number indicates the psalm; the second may refer to the sermon or the paragraph; the final number refers to the paragraph. In some systems, the expositions of Psalms 19–33 are given an additional initial number (1 or 2) to distinguish the longer sermons from the earlier brief commentaries. Thus, Psal. 32.1.22 refers to a brief commentary on Psalm 33 and Psal. 32.2.2.8 to the longer exposition of Psalm 33, Sermon 2, paragraph 8. Augustine’s Expositions of the Psalms are numbered according to the Septuagint (Greek) translation of the Psalter. References to the Psalms in the text of the essays use the Hebrew numbering that is common in most modern translations.

This volume has been designed as a resource for identifying and studying Augustine’s theology as it was developed in his preaching. References are generally limited to the texts of the various sermons of Augustine, following the standard divisions of Augustine’s works into books, chapters, and paragraphs. Where the text of Augustine is translated in the exposition, a reference to the contemporary critical edition of the Latin is also included. Little attempt has been made to coordinate the sermons with parallel treatments in Augustine’s treatises and letters. When such connections are considered, the discussion is in the notes rather than the text.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF AUGUSTINE’S PREACHED WORKS

As has been noted above, the chronological sequence of Augustine’s treatises is indicated in the order of their treatment in his Reconsiderations. He provided no such general sequence for either his correspondence or his preached works. The editors attempted a relative chronological sequence of his correspondence, like that of his treatises, by using internal references to persons or topics treated in similar ways in his treatises. In addition, some few external references such as datable events or the names of office holders in the church or empire are found. Sometimes the city in which the sermon was delivered can be coordinated with Augustine’s reconstructed travel schedule.

Establishing the chronology of Augustine’s Sermons to the People, Expositions of the Psalms, and Tractates on the Gospel and First Letter of John has been a sustained and challenging enterprise. It has been pursued with ingenuity by tenacious scholars of more than ordinary erudition, using the smallest of clues. Perhaps the most significant success has been achieved dating materials to the first decade of the fifth century. This is anchored by correlating the early Tractates on the Gospel and First Letter of John with the Expositions of the Psalms 119–33, the Psalms of Ascent. Subsequent work on the Tractates on the Gospel of John by Marie-François Berrouard and others has extended that success.² To these sermons were added another set of Expositions of the Psalms and a good number of the Sermons to the People discovered in Mayence and edited by François Dolbeau.³ Pierre-Marie Hombert and Hubertus Drobner have continued and systematized that work.

The present study attempts to exploit these advances in dating primarily to assist in distinguishing the different ways that Augustine spoke about a particular topic. In this sense, in its methods—but not the grand sweep of its erudition—it parallels the work of Anthony Dupont’s study of grace in Augustine’s sermons.⁴ The chronological tables accompanying the Sermones and Enarrationes in Psalmos in the Sant’ Agostino website (www.augustinus.it) provide a readily accessible summary of the judgments of specialists on individual texts. The scriptural indices in the Corpus Augustinianum Gissense database were then used to identify citations of the relevant scriptural texts in these sermons and detect changes in Augustine’s use and interpretation of these passages. The result was a grouping of texts that often suggested chronological development but not without some significant outliers. These results allowed different types of studies that are reported in the following chapters.

In some instances, Augustine’s treatment of a topic is concentrated in a small number of well-dated sermons. The most substantial discussion of the eucharist, for example, is to be found in two sets of sermons. In sequential sermons belonging to the Tractates on the Gospel of John, and dealing with the latter part of the Bread of Life discourse in the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John, Augustine explained and established his doctrine on the identification of the eucharistic body of Christ.⁵ The other discussions are found in short sermons preached to the newly baptized on Easter Day, during the ritual itself rather than immediately following the readings so that only the baptized Christians were present.⁶ These presentations manifest no significant change in his thought but different emphasis in presentation.

The forgiveness of sins, in contrast, was explained and urged by Augustine in many sermons, and his presentations exhibit some variety. Moreover, the sermons in which the topic is treated have not been so successfully dated that they can be studied in a chronological order that manifests a development in Augustine’s thinking and speaking about the practice. So, the presentation in this volume attempts to catalog the different ways he addressed the topic and the elements they have in common.

The study of baptism shows the influence of the conflict of the controversy with the Donatist party. Adherents of this Christian movement in Africa attempted to separate themselves from the corrupting influence of the idolatry of the Roman Empire and the failures of their fellow believers. They refused to recognize the baptism and holiness of the Catholic communion, with whom they competed for members and social influence. Some elements of Augustine’s instruction on baptism seem designed to prepare his hearers for debates with these neighbors—in the streets, shops, and homes of their common city. The discussions of the church’s power to forgive sins in the sermons, however, bear the imprint of his engagement in his treatise On Baptism with the writings of Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage in the mid-third century, rather than the significantly different approach he took in his polemical treatises responding to Donatist adversaries: the recent bishop Parmenian of Carthage and the emerging leader, Petilian of Constantine, as well as a layman of that city, Cresconius.

Unlike these topics, Augustine’s treatment of the heritage of Adam and Eve that defined the condition of their offspring changed, sometimes dramatically. Augustine’s early treatments focused on inherited mortality and the consequent development of habits of personal sin. Four sermons preached in Carthage in the summer of 413 CE asserted a doctrine of inherited sin, guilt, and punishment with a clarity and force that is hard to identify in sermons or treatises that preceded the outbreak of the Pelagian controversy in that city a couple of years earlier. The chapter treating this material not only will identify different approaches that Augustine took to the issues but will suggest a chronological development of his thought, albeit one not without unexpected lurches forward or backward.

USING THIS BOOK

Each of the following chapters is intended to stand on its own, so that they may be used independently of one another. References are made, however, to parallel or supplementary materials in the other chapters. Occasional explanatory notes will be found at the bottom of the page; references to secondary studies are gathered at the end of the volume. The studies of Christian practices are placed before the four essays on doctrinal issues.

All of the sermons and scriptural expositions studied in this volume are to be found in recent English translation in section III of the collection The Works of Augustine for the 21st Century, that was initially edited by John E. Rotelle, OSA. The Sermons to the People are in volumes III/1–11, were translated by Edmund Hill, OP, and are preceded by the introduction of Cardinal Michele Pellegrino. The Tractates on the Gospel of John are in volumes III/12–13, also translated by Edmund Hill, OP, and introduced by Allan D. Fitzgerald, OSA. The Tractates on the First Epistle of John are in volume III/14, translated and introduced by Boniface Ramsey. The Expositions on the Psalms are in volumes III/15–20, translated by Maria Boulding, OSB, and introduced by Michael Fiedrowicz.⁷ This edition is also available on the Past Masters database through many academic libraries. More concise essays under the titles Enarrationes in Psalmos, In Johannis euangelium tractatus, and Sermones are in the encyclopedia, Augustine through the Ages, edited by Allan Fitzgerald, OSA.⁸

The Latin Maurist edition of these works was republished in the Patrologia Latina volumes 35–38. That edition, along with the materials discovered more recently is available online through the www.augustinus.it website, along with older translations of many texts in modern European languages. The Maurist editions of the Tractates of the Gospel of John and the Expositions of the Psalms were reprinted in the Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina, volumes 36, 38–40. Critical editions of the Sermons to the People, beginning in volume 41 of that series, remain incomplete. A critical edition of the Expositions on the Psalms is nearing completion in the Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum series, beginning with volume 93/1A.

Readers are encouraged to use the essays in this volume as an introduction and guide to the reading of the transcripts of Augustine’s own preaching.

Unless otherwise noted, scripture quotations are translated from the Latin version appearing in the edition of Augustine’s text being cited or interpreted.

* Hippo, along with much of western Proconsular Africa, remained in the ecclesiastical province of Numidia when Constantine realigned the boundary between the two civil provinces in 314 CE.

Chapter One

INTERPRETING THE SCRIPTURE

AUGUSTINE ’ S PREACHING WAS FOCUSED on the interaction of the message of scripture with the practice and meaning of Christian life. Most of the surviving records of this ministry are concerned with a particular text of scripture rather than on a topic or question: all of his expositions of Psalms, more than half of his treatments of the Gospel of John, all of those on the First Letter of John, and many of his sermons to the people of Hippo, Carthage, and other African churches. In all his preaching, moreover, Augustine constantly cited a wide range of scriptural texts and images to instruct and exhort his hearers. His objective in preaching was seldom limited to the discovery and communication of the meaning of the text, as it was, for example, in his successive commentaries on Genesis and his early treatises on Romans and Galatians. Instead, he sought to articulate how scriptural truths should be lived by Christians. Thus, his constant interpretative guides were both the rule of faith and the law of love. ¹

Augustine never abandoned his interest in the literal and historical meaning of the scriptural text that he articulated in the second book of his treatise On Christian Teaching. There he called upon learned Christians to produce dictionaries of the places, animals, and plants mentioned in the Bible, so that the full import of the text might be better understood and appreciated.² In written commentary, though seldom in live preaching, he occasionally attended to the Septuagint Greek version of the Psalms and to the variations within and between the Latin and Greek texts of the New Testament to which he had access.³ When a doctrinal point was at issue, he could rival Origen as a close reader of the biblical text. His developing interpretation of Romans 7:15–25 advanced through an ever-closer reading of that text until he identified inbred lust as a sinful but unavoidable evil.⁴ In dealing with Adam and Christ, he preferred to interpret the whole of Romans 5:12–21 rather than isolate its first sentence.⁵

In his preaching, moreover, Augustine heard the scripture as directed to himself and his congregation. He understood that God could address and move individuals by presenting a particular scriptural text or guiding a speaker to offer considerations adapted to a chosen individual’s dispositions—most famously illustrated in the conversion narratives of his Confessions.⁶ That theory bore fruit consistently in Augustine’s sermons: he not only prayed that God would guide his preaching but also sought analogies in the daily lives of his hearers, which they might appreciate and act upon.⁷

Both the words recorded and the actions narrated in the scriptural text carried revelatory meaning for the Christian, Augustine insisted. Christ himself spoke, as shall be seen, not only in the gospels but elsewhere in the Bible. Were Christ to appear before the congregation, Augustine suggested, the vision alone would bring little profit to the gathering unless he spoke. In fact, the gospels showed that Christ’s bodily presence had been of little advantage to most of the people who encountered him.⁸ Once absent in body, Christ addressed the community in the scripture read aloud, the psalms they sung, and even the sermon they heard.⁹ While most events of people’s lives were beyond their control, Christ had chosen deliberately the encounters and actions of his birth, ministry, and death. As a result, the details of these events as reported in the gospels could carry his message as fully and meaningfully as his words. As the Gospel of John showed, Augustine noted, Jesus’s miracles had to be meditated upon to grasp their full import. Examples were multiplied: Jesus’s flight from the crowd that sought to make him king demonstrated the objective of his mission; his prayer on the mountain as the disciples struggled on the stormy sea foreshadowed the earthly church’s relation to her heavenly Lord. Similarly, because Jesus suffered voluntarily rather than under coercion, each of the actions of his passion was a revelation of his interior dispositions.¹⁰ The task of the preacher, Augustine explained, was to draw out these meanings of both Christ’s words and his actions for his hearers.

PROPHECY AND FORESHADOWING

In practice, Augustine treated the whole of the scripture as intended by God and therefore meaningful. The Bible was the exposition of a single divine plan and operation for the salvation of humanity. Any event or statement within the narrative, therefore, might be relevant to the understanding and appreciation of any other. More particularly, as shall become apparent, the scripture should be read back-to-front, from the perspective of its culmination in the mission of Christ and the life of the church. All the blessed, beginning with Abel and continuing through the last child baptized before the return of Jesus, belonged to the same City of God established in Christ.¹¹ The Old Testament could be used to interpret the New Testament, since its events not only prepared for but foretold and foreshadowed those that were to follow. In a similar way, the New Testament narratives and letters clarified the meaning and import of the events, laws, and prayers that formed the preceding history of Israel. The religious rituals of Israel found their full meaning—as well as their salvific efficacy—in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Those preceding interpreted and were interpreted by those following.¹² Thus, Augustine affirmed the historicity of both the foreshadowing and the foreshadowed persons and actions.¹³ Each had its own place in the narrative, but its significance was not limited to or exhausted by its role in that one place or time. Some of the actors in the ancient drama, moreover, were privileged to understand the fuller meaning of the events in which they participated. Augustine explained that Abraham had grasped that the promise made to him would be fulfilled in Christ; Moses foresaw the New Covenant even as he codified the old; some of the Israelites perceived the reality symbolized by the manna falling from heaven. Christ’s work was not only foreshadowed but recognized as his, by at least some in Israel.¹⁴

The life of the Christian church could be used in this same dialogic way as the Old Testament both to interpret the New Testament scripture and to be clarified by it. The gospel writers had been able to discern the biblical foreshadowing and prophecies of the events they narrated but only later Christians, who knew the worldwide spread of the church, could grasp the fuller import of some actions narrated in the New Testament. Jesus’s resurrection clarified his passion predictions about his death that had so confused his disciples. Fourth-century Christians could witness in the spread of the church the fulfillment of the promise of a numerous progeny made to Abraham.¹⁵ As the Letter to the Hebrews had used the Israelite ritual of atonement to understand the saving power of the death and resurrection of Jesus, so would Augustine use that letter to explain the structure of the community’s celebration of the eucharistic ritual and its eschatological fulfillment.¹⁶

Augustine was, of course, on solid and traditional ground in using this interactive interpretation not only of the two testaments but of the life of the church. He found it employed, for example, in Paul’s interpretation of the initiations of Israel in the crossing of the sea and of the church in baptism (1 Cor. 10:1–6, 11).¹⁷ The events were so interrelated that the tense of the verbs being used in the text—past, present, or future—did not always determine the sequence of the events. Events could be spoken of as either past or present while the true referent remained in the future.¹⁸ Thus, Christ told his disciples that he had already made everything known to them, though his teaching would be completed by the Holy