ion, the laetum praemissum is the resurrection; "deposited," or advanced, as a foretaste or first
SERMON 221 205 is neither any death nor any sleep; a life which he so conjured up from the dead that it does not now die again, nor does death lord it over it anymore.13 But now those who loved him and came to the tomb at daybreak, looking for his body, did not find it, but were told by angels that he had already risen; so it's obvious that he rose during that night which ended with that daybreak. Accordingly, the one whose rising again we serenade by keeping watch a little longer, will surely grant us the privilege of reigning with him by living forever. But if by any chance, during these hours which we are passing in this vigil, his body was still in the tomb, and hadn't yet risen again, even in this case our keeping watch is not out of place; because he slept so that we might keep awake, just as he died so that we might live. Amen.
NOTES
1. The style here makes me think that this is a fairly early sermon; but the matter suggests to me that Augustine is already a bishop. So I accept, while making more precise, the date suggested by Kunzelmann of 393-405. Fischer suggests 412-415, possibly because of references to the grace of Christ which he may think would have been less likely before the Pelagian controversy broke. But I think by that time Augustine had become a little less academic, a little more down to earth in his preaching.
2. Quod triste commissum est, laetumque praemissum est\ the triste commissum is the crucifix¬ ion, the laetum praemissum is the resurrection; "deposited," or advanced, as a foretaste or first installment of our resurrection.
3. Paulo ante, in the course of the vigil. But some texts read tanto ante, "so long before," referring back to the time of the psalmist. This looks very like a copyist's correction; I somehow don't think Augustine was capable of uttering the ugly and slightly ridiculous sound of tanto ante.
4. Cogitare hodie; literally "think today." It's possible he really said cogitare hoc diem esse, and hoc diem got changed into hodie (it would sound almost exactly the same), and then esse got left out. The next sentence bears out my interpretation, with a word play I cannot match: .. . sol abscessit, dies non recessit, cum lucenti caelo lucens terra successit.
5. Other great feasts were celebrated with vigils, the only one that survives to our day being Christmas. In this section he is expressing himself rather clumsily, and it is hard in some places to tell what he means.
6. See Sermon 219, note 2.
7. Thieves and fornicators also make a habit of keeping awake at night.
8. As belonging to this party myself, I don't entirely accept the comparison of sleep with death. Sleep has its own dream life; and even if we forget our dreams the moment we wake, which is certainly the case with me, we have a sense of sleep not being a kind of death, but a whole alternative, if usually fantastic, kind of life. It makes such a nice change!
9. This is where the sermon begins in the Maurist edition, which was made from manuscripts that evidently originated with extracts from sermons.
10. Did he mean our present way of reckoning the day from midnight, and did this rather odd procedure originate with the Romans, who likewise had the curious custom of beginning the year at midwinter; or was he thinking of the Jewish method of beginning the new day with sunset? In the next paragraph that is clearly what he has in mind.
11. See Gn 1:2-5. It is not in fact clear, as he goes on to assume, that the days of Gn 1 began