Manichees and their arguments there and then. The Manichees continued to exist, of course, through¬
308 SAINT A UGUSTINE - SERMONS
2. See Heb 1:1. 3. See Jn 4:6.
4. This change to past tense suggests that he and his congregation are not confronted with actual Manichees and their arguments there and then. The Manichees continued to exist, of course, through¬ out Augustine's life; but it was only during the early years of his ministry that they preoccupied him as an actual challenge and threat to the faith of his flock. They are brought into this sermon because of the text itself, since people knew about them, naturally. His dealing with their opinions does not militate against the later date suggested for this sermon.
5. A word play that cannot be reproduced in English: Vel creditis quia vivo, si vobiscum convivo.
6. He has the Donatist martyrs in mind, in particular fanatical Circumcellions (their strong-arm "fundamentalists"), who not only courted martyrdom, but also, if it failed to respond to their ad¬ vances, inflicted it on themselves by jumping over cliffs.
7. Supplying a word like porrige. The Latin is evidently defective, reading merely Jactantiae partem tolle, partem caritatis: Remove the boastfulness portion, the charity portion. A copyist's eye, if he were copying from another manuscript and not from dictation—or the dictating reader's eye in the other case—could easily have jumped from the p of porrige to the p of partem.
8. He has dealt with Manichee ways of eliminating the resurrection. Now he deals with pagan ways, and he will conclude by dealing with Donatist ways, not of eliminating the resurrection, which they believed in, but of ignoring what Augustine saw as the inescapable consequence of it—the world-wide Catholic Church.
9. See Is 8:14.
10. An incoherent sentence in the Latin too.
11. The bride's privilege to be late has very august authority.
12. He is getting at the Donatists, of course, but so briefly, in the same sort of detached way as that in which he has dealt with Manichees and pagans, that it seems unlikely the sermon was preached when the conflict with the Donatists was in full swing; which is my main reason for siding with the later date suggested for the sermon, rather than the earlier 400-410.