thinking of are the magic arts practiced by Neoplatonists like Porphyry, and also the rituals of the
72 SAINT AUGUSTINE - SERMONS
3. See Rom 3:23. 4. There have traditionally been two approaches to "proving the existence of God": one, indi¬ cated by Paul in this text and developed by Thomas Aquinas in his famous five ways, Summa Theologiae, la, q.2, a.3, starts from the external visible world; the other, favored by Augustine and Newman, starts from the internal invisible world of the soul or consciousness. Augustine here characteristically tacks this on to what Paul says.
5. Of seeing the creator in and through the creature; though he uses language more appropriate to the seeing of God face to face, as in 1 Cor 13:12.
6. The devil. 7. Per partes nescio quas superbiae. I am tempted to emend partes to artes, because what he is thinking of are the magic arts practiced by Neoplatonists like Porphyry, and also the rituals of the mystery cults, such as those of Eleusis, Mithras, or Isis.
8. Nowhere, in this or the following fragments, is there an explicit reference to the pagan rites marking the New Year. It is possible, however, that they were chiefly concerned with the cult of Neptune. In Sermon 196, 4 he refers to Christians who took part in pagan rites at midsummer by going and "being baptized" in the sea, which could well have been an element in the cult of the sea-god. Perhaps he was also honored in a similar fashion at New Year—though it would have been a distinctly chilly act of worship.
9. Possibly an image of Hercules. See Sermon 24, notes 1 and 34 (volume III/2). 10. Orator in those days was almost equivalent to lawyer—barrister or counselor—because it was in the practice of the legal profession that the art of oratory found its main outlet. Augustine himself had been something of an exception, an academic orator/lawyer teaching the art, rather than one in legal practice. Not so Cyprian, who had been a lawyer before his conversion.
11. On the face of it, it seems unlikely that this fragment comes from the same sermon as section 1.
12. See Acts 8:18-19.
13. See 2 Cor 11:14. The false mediator is Satan.
14. Though he doesn't put this in the past tense, he may have had chiefly in mind the practice of emperor worship, which only Constantine's conversion to Christianity had put an end to.
15. Imagine Dr. Ian Paisley saying "If Catholics heard some unbeliever disparaging Christ, they would probably put up with it more patiently than if they heard him disparaging the Pope," and you can see to what kind of unwarrantable slur Augustine here allowed himself to sink.
16. That is, this goddess represents the air as Neptune does the sea. I do not know who said this; it is not part of the common Juno mythology. She was the wife—very jealous as she had every reason to be—of Jupiter, and was also venerated as the goddess who presides over childbirth.
17. Tellus is a poetic word meaning earth; often used, though, as a name of the earth-goddess.
18. There is no telling who "he" was. He may be just the imaginary pagan interlocutor conjured up by the preacher in his sermon. Or he may have been some real pagan apologist, either a contem¬ porary controversialist, or a literary figure of the past, like Varro, for example, whom Augustine quotes constantly in the early books of The City of God.