2. See Rom 5:20.
SERMON 197 71 heard some pagan disparaging Christ, they would probably put up with it more patiently than if they heard him disparaging Donatus.15
Love of the head for his body
5... . Because Christ himself speaks in his saints, as the apostle says: Or are you seeking an experience of the one who is speaking in me, of Christ? (2 Cor
13:3). And while he may say, neither the one who plants is anything, nor the one who waters, but the one who gives the growth, God (1 Cor 3:7), because he didn't want himself, but God in him, to be loved; still for all that he bears witness to some people with the words, Because you accepted me like an angel of God, like Christ Jesus (Gal 4:14). So in all his saints he is the one to be loved; the one who said, I was hungry, and you gave me to eat (Mt 25:35). You see, he didn't say "you gave them, ''but you gave me. Such is the love of the head for his body!
Do not be deceived
6. What is Juno? Juno, they say, is the air.16 Just now he was inviting us to worship the sea in the form of Neptune, to honor the earth in the idol of Tellus;17 now he's inviting us to worship the air.18 These are the elements of which the world consists. So the apostle Paul warns us about all this in advance, in his letter: Take care, he says, that nobody deceives you through philosophy and vain deceit, according to the elements of this world (Col 2:8). He was referring, you see, to the people who give an apparently sensible explanation of idols. That's why, after saying through philosophy, he said in the same passage, according to the elements of this world, warning us to beware, not of any old worshiper of idols, but of the apparently more learned interpreters of signs.
NOTES
1. The majority of scholars opt for this early date; one suggests before 420. But such dating is based in either case on the assumption, which the Maurist editors made, that the fragments come from one sermon. I suspect the source of the fragments in Bede and Floms requires a more critical look than that. Unfortunately this document is not contained in the volumes of Migne's Patrologia Latina devoted to the works of Bede, so I have not been able to look at it myself. From the purely internal content of these six fragments, numbers 1 and 6 deal with the topic of paganism, the others do not. The concerns are so different, that on the face of it the presumption would be that they are extracted from different sermons. Again, the same Maurist editors assume that this (?) sermon is referred to by Possidius in his index of Augustine's works. All his note says, however, is De Kalendas Januarii contra quos supra; On the Kalends of January against those mentioned above (the pagans).
That this refers to Sermon 198 need not be doubted; there is no reason at all to suppose it also refers to this collection of miscellaneous fragments; or that even the two that deal with paganism were preached on 1 January.
2. See Rom 5:20.