dawn, and day; and is this expression an indication that this sermon was being preached at the dawn
SERMON 184 19 one which never was not, or this one which never was before or after; that one which has no end, or this one which has its beginning in its end?12
Rightly therefore did the prophets foretell that he would be bom, while the heavens13 and the angels announced that he had been. The one who holds the world in being was lying in a manger; he was simultaneously speechless infant and Word. The heavens cannot contain him, a woman carried him in her bosom. She was ruling our ruler, carrying the one in whom we are, suckling our bread. O manifest infirmity and wondrous humility in which was thus concealed total divinity! Omnipotence was ruling the mother on whom infancy was depending; was nourishing on truth the mother whose breasts it was sucking. May he bring his gifts to perfection in us, since he did not shrink from making his own our tiny beginnings; and may he make us into children of God, since for our sake he was willing to be made a child of man.
NOTES
1. The style of this sermon is so unusually elaborate, the work of a man pulling out all the rhetorical stops of the professional orator (which Augustine had been before his conversion), that I cannot agree with Kunzelmann and others who date it after 412. It was only as a recently ordained priest, between 391 and 396 when he became bishop of Hippo Regius, that Augustine preached in this way. As he grew into his pastoral duties he deliberately simplified his preaching style, and while still using the tricks of the trade in order to delight his audience and keep their attention, he did so much more simply and spontaneously than is the case in this sermon. This is a very formal, carefully prepared and polished piece—something done much better by Leo the Great in the next generation (see for example his Sermon 1 on the Nativity). It was his mature style, but not Augustine's. Augustine matured, so to say, in the opposite direction.
2. A kind of variation on the Nicene Creed's ''God from God, Light from Light."
3. Did the African liturgy at that time have the three Christmas Masses of the Roman: midnight, dawn, and day; and is this expression an indication that this sermon was being preached at the dawn Mass? I like to think so.
4. The Latin has a play on words which suggests that at the back of his mind were both the parable of the good Samaritan, and Jesus' Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem: ut in hoc tanto adjumento, tamquam in infirmitatis suae jumento\ that in/on this so great help, as on a beast for their infirmity . . . ; the beast, jumentum, recalling both the Samaritan's mount on which he placed the man found half dead, and the donkey on which Christ rode into Jerusalem.
But taking this sentence with the next, I also get the impression of a much more daring image: the humble are conveyed up to the divine heights by a kind of rocket (Augustine could have also been thinking of the winged horse Pegasus of classical mythology), while the wise and prudent are tossed about by the wind in mid-air like so many hot air balloons and bits of paper and plastic bags in the dry wind blowing through a southern African town—Cape Town, for instance. He talks of them being inflated, so he cannot just have been thinking of something like autumn leaves. Did they have such toys in those days, innocent of both rubber and of plastics? Something similar, anyhow.
5. See Mt 1:18.
6. Perhaps referring to the third, mid-rnoming, Christmas Mass.
7. See 1 Cor 15:45-49. He goes on from Christ the second Adam (second man) to Mary the second Eve.