Augustine in His Own Words
from the Old Testament or from one of St. Paul's letters.6 Augustine then sent word to the cantor which Psalm he wanted sung. The Psalm was sung in responsorial style, the cantor intoning the verses with the congregation joining in the refrain. After this, a deacon stepped up and read an excerpt from one of the Gospels. Each Gospel was likely bound as a separate codex. When finished, the deacon handed the Gospel book over to Augustine. Augustine then preached. He normally remained seated, preaching with the Gospel book in hand. The earliest known portrait of Augustine, a rather crude sixth-century fresco found in the Lateran Basilica in Rome, captures him in this classic pose, seated at a bishop's chair, the Scriptures under his gaze, his hand extended in the gesture of a teacher. In Augustine's day, sermons were expected to last an hour, and while some were shorter, others went much longer.
When we today meet Augustine the preacher, we encounter printed words, not a living voice. Reading Augustine's sermons simply as printed texts, as words fixed in black-and-white on a page, gives the wrong impression. Augustine worked neither from notes nor from a text first written out, then memorized. He prepared, as he tells us, only by prayer and study. The written texts we now possess record his on-the-spot improvisations, recorded in shorthand by stenographers known as notarii.7 We need to read these surviving texts with a vibrant historical imagination, remembering that Augustine was a performing artist of enormous skill, charm, and vigor. The texts preserve only a faint residue of his living speech. What has been lost is the very thing that gave his speech its dynamism: the cadence of delivery, the accents and pauses, the gestures and facial expressions. We need only compare the written transcript of Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" with the film to appreciate how striking this gap is between written text and oral performance.
The surviving corpus of Augustine's sermons is staggering, yet it likely represents only a small proportion of what he actually delivered.8 It includes the 124 sermons of his Tractates on the Gospel of John (In Johannis evangelium trac-
6. On the feast day (natalis, "birthday") of martyrs, such as Perpetua or Cyprian, the acta of their martyrdom was inserted into the service of readings; see s. 275.1; 276.1; 280.1; 302.1; 313D.1–2.
7. On the extemporaneous character of the sermons, the classic studies are those of Roy J. Deferrari, "St. Augustine's Method of Composing and Delivering Sermons," American Journal of Philology 43 (1922): 97–123, 193–219; "Verbatim Reports of Augustine's Unwritten Sermons," Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 46 (1915): 35–45.
8. Pierre-Patrick Verbraken, "Lire aujourd'hui les Sermons de saint Augustin," Nouvelle Revue Théologique 109 (1987): 830, estimates that Augustine, over his career, would have preached "around 8000 times" and thus we still possess only about 1 in 14 that he delivered. Verbraken, "Forward," in Sermons I (1–19) on the Old Testament, WSA III/1 (1990): 11, gives a total of 548 authentic sermons. This number does not include the Tractates on John or the Expositions of the Psalms, nor does it include discoveries since 1990 by Dolbeau and others. For a chart listing Augustine's complete sermons, see Éric Rebillard, "Sermones," AugEncy, 774–89; see also Verbraken's chart, WSA III/1 (1990): 138–63. Readers should be cautious about dates cited in both charts; on this issue, see Hubertus R. Drobner, "The Chronology of St. Augustine's Sermones ad populum," Augustinian Studies 31 (2000): 211–18; 34 (2003): 49–66; 35 (2004): 43–53.