Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
The Preacher 125 tatus) and the 10 sermons of his Tractates on the First Epistle of John (In epistulam Johannis ad Parthos tractatus) It includes his massive Expositions of the Psalms (Enarrationes in Psalmos), which preserves at least one sermon on each of the 150 psalms. But the largest collection is his Sermons to the People (Sermones ad populum). Hundreds of individual sermons were passed down in the Middle Ages under Augustine's name, but not all were authentic. When Augustine's seventeenth-century editors, the Benedictines of St. Maur, published their remarkable edition of his complete Latin works, they concluded that some 363 sermons had good claim to authenticity, with another 33 classified as "doubtful."9 Later nineteenthand early twentieth-century researchers continued the effort, authenticating (by a rough count) over 170 additional sermons, some complete, some fragments.10 The hard work of recovering lost sermons continues. In 1990, François Dolbeau made a momentous discovery, unearthing 26 long-lost sermons from a fifteenth-century Carthusian manuscript, now preserved in the Mainz Stadtbibliothek. Dolbeau's discovery, published in a scatter of remarkable articles in the 1990s, has sparked international scholarly conferences and a host of reassessments.11 The discovery of six more sermons was announced in 2008.12
Augustine was not only an accomplished orator but also an ex-teacher of oratory. Scattered through his sermons and treatises, one finds seasoned reflections on both the art and the experience of preaching. Especially striking is his influential treatise on Christian oratory, De doctrina christiana. The title is best translated not as On Christian Doctrine but rather as On Christian Teaching, or even On Teaching Christianity. Its first three books were written around 397, soon after Augustine became bishop of Hippo. These first three explore prin-
9. The Maurists' edition of Augustine's sermons is reprinted in PL 38–39. On the authenticity of individual sermons, see Pierre-Patrick Verbraken, Études critiques sur les sermons authentiques de saint Augustin, Instrumenta Patristica 12 (Steenbrugis: In abbatia S. Petri, 1976); Hubertus R. Drobner, Augustinus von Hippo: Sermones ad Populum; Überlieferung und Bestand Bibliographie-Indices, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 49 (Leiden: Brill, 2000).
10. For most of these texts, see Germain Morin, ed., Sermones post Maurinos reperti, vol. 1 of Miscellanea Agostiniana (Rome: Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1930–31); and A. Hamman, ed., Patrologia Latina Supplementum, vol. 2. In older scholarly studies, one sees this miscellany listed under the names of individual discoverers (e.g., Michel Denis, Cyrille Lambot, Germain Morin) or the manuscript collection (e.g., Guelferbytanus). Verbraken, in Études critiques, renumbered these more recent finds and integrated them into the Maurists' numbering system by adding a letter to the number; for example, s. Guelferbytanus 7 is listed as s. 229A. Verbraken's proposal has recently become the standard numbering system.
11. François Dolbeau, ed., Augustin d'Hippone: Vingt-six sermons au peuple d'Afrique, CEASA 147 (Paris: Institut d'Études augustiniennes, 1996). For an overview, see Henry Chadwick, "The New Sermons of St. Augustine," Journal of Theological Studies 47 (1996): 69–91. For studies of these newly discovered sermons, see Madec, ed., Augustin Prédicateur (395–411). Dolbeau has discovered four others since then.
12. In May 2008, it was announced at the annual conference of the North American Patristics Society that four new sermons and two partly known sermons had just been discovered by I. Schiller, D. Weber, and C. Weidmann. The new texts are preserved in a 12th-century manuscript in the Bibliotheca Amploniana in Erfurt, Germany. They will be published in a forthcoming publication of the CSEL.