Ancient Sermons From St. Augustine Rediscovered

A routine request to decipher a medieval manuscript has quietly added two new works to the canon of one of Christianity's most studied thinkers. Latin scholar Christian Tornau of the University of Würzburg was asked in 2024 to examine a 12th-century manuscript now held in Pelplin, Poland, that contained six sermons attributed to St. Augustine of Hippo. Four were known. Two, Tornau realized, were not. After months of stylistic analysis, comparison with Augustine's known writings, and a 2025 Vienna summer school where two dozen Latinists weighed in, scholars agreed: the sermons appear to be genuine Augustine.

Augustine lived from 354 to 430 in a Roman province in what is now Algeria. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes him as "perhaps the greatest Christian philosopher of Antiquity and certainly the one who exerted the deepest and most lasting influence," noting that his "authority in theological matters was universally accepted in the Latin Middle Ages and remained, in the Western Christian tradition, virtually uncontested till the nineteenth century." Tornau says the newly discovered texts focus on the Old Testament account of the Witch of Endor, where King Saul, believing himself to be in a hopeless situation before a battle, asks a medium to summon the spirit of the prophet Samuel.

The sermons probe a thorny question, the Latin scholar says: "Why can a necromancer summon the spirit of a prophet? This in turn opens up the theodicy problem: how can an omnipotent God allow this or is he not really omnipotent?" In typical Augustinian fashion, Tornau says, he lays out rival explanations—trickery or divine permission—without forcing a conclusion, inviting listeners to think it through before a follow-up sermon days later. The critical edition, prepared with editors from the Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, is slated for publication later this year.

• Tornau believes the manuscript could be a copy of a much older text destroyed when the library collection of the Amelungsborn Monastery in northwest Germany was destroyed during the Thirty Years' War, which lasted from 1618 to 1648.