The Vast Corpus

Augustine left more written work than any other author of Christian antiquity — a corpus so vast that a medieval saying held that anyone claiming to have read all of it must be a liar. This file surveys that output and the sources that preserve and catalogue it: the Retractationes, Augustine’s own remarkable late review of his every book; the hundreds of letters and sermons, swelled in modern times by the Divjak and Dolbeau discoveries; and the Vita Augustini of his disciple Possidius, the earliest biography, which closes with the Indiculus, a catalogue of Augustine’s works that itself testifies to the scale of what he wrote.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism West; “Blessed Augustine”)

The Scale of the Output

The quantity of Augustine’s surviving work is staggering even by the standards of a prolific age. Possidius’s catalogue (the Indiculus) lists well over a thousand items — books, letters, and sermons — and a great deal survives: the major treatises (the Confessions, the City of God in 22 books, On the Trinity in 15, the long Literal Commentary on Genesis, the anti-Donatist, anti-Manichaean, and anti-Pelagian works), the immense Expositions on the Psalms (Enarrationes in Psalmos) and the Homilies on John, the Enchiridion, the catechetical and exegetical works, and on top of all this some three hundred letters and over five hundred sermons (Brown 2000, ch. 28 and epilogue; Possidius, Vita 18, with the Indiculus). The Benedictine Maurist edition of the seventeenth century filled eleven folio volumes; Migne’s Patrologia Latina devotes sixteen volumes (PL 32–47) to Augustine. The medieval scholar’s despairing jest — that a man who said he had read everything Augustine wrote was lying — was not far wrong.

This sheer volume is itself a fact about Augustine’s influence. He wrote on nearly every question of Christian doctrine and life, and he wrote at length, with the result that the Latin Middle Ages could find in Augustine an opinion on almost anything, and built much of its theology by quarrying him. The scale is also a caution to the interpreter: Augustine’s mind developed across more than forty years of writing, and an isolated sentence — torn from a corpus this large and this varied — can be made to prove almost anything. Reading Augustine responsibly means reading him in development and in context, a discipline his own Retractationes was the first to model.

The Retractationes

Near the end of his life, in 426/427, Augustine did something no other ancient author had done on this scale: he sat down to review the whole of his own published output in order, work by work, and to correct, qualify, or defend what he had written. The result, the Retractationes (better rendered “Reconsiderations” or “Re-treatments” than “Retractions”), surveys his books from the earliest Cassiciacum dialogues onward, noting the occasion of each, restating its purpose, and — crucially — flagging the passages he had come to regard as mistaken, badly put, or liable to misunderstanding (Retractationes, prologue; Brown 2000, ch. 28). It is at once an indispensable chronological key to his corpus, a model of intellectual honesty, and a primary witness to the development of his own thought.

The Retractationes is especially valuable on the very points where Augustine’s theology is contested. There he explains how his early defense of free will against the Manichees (in De Libero Arbitrio) is to be read in the light of his later doctrine of grace, conceding that the Pelagians had quoted his early work and clarifying that he had never meant to deny the necessity of grace (Retractationes 1.9; see Against the Manichees). The work thus shows Augustine himself aware that his earlier and later writings could be set against each other, and trying to govern his own reception. For the Orthodox reader weighing the Augustine of the predestinarian works against the Augustine of the Confessions, the Retractationes is the indispensable witness that this was a single mind in motion, not a fixed system.

The Letters and the Sermons

Beyond the great treatises, two bodies of more occasional writing preserve the living Augustine. The letters (Epistulae) — more than three hundred — range from short notes to full theological treatises in epistolary form, and document his exchanges with Jerome, with fellow African bishops, with imperial officials, with Pelagius’s circle, and with ordinary inquirers (Brown 2000, ch. 28). The sermons (Sermones) — over five hundred, mostly taken down by stenographers as he preached — preserve the working pastor’s voice as nothing else does (see Pastor and Preacher).

Two twentieth-century discoveries dramatically expanded both corpora and reshaped Augustinian scholarship. In 1975 Johannes Divjak identified a collection of previously unknown letters (the Epistulae ex duobus codicibus nuper in lucem prolatae, “Divjak letters”), many of them from late in Augustine’s life, throwing new light on his pastoral and social world — including the slave-trade and the workings of his court (Brown 2000, new epilogue). In 1990 François Dolbeau discovered a manuscript at Mainz containing dozens of previously unknown sermons (the “Dolbeau sermons”), including substantial pieces against paganism and on social questions, again from the heart of his preaching ministry (Brown 2000, new epilogue). These finds, the subject of Peter Brown’s long new epilogue to his biography, show how much of even so vast a corpus had been lost — and how the recovery of the pastoral Augustine has tempered the older picture dominated by the systematic controversialist.

Possidius and the Vita Augustini

The earliest and most important external source for Augustine’s life is the Vita Augustini of Possidius, bishop of Calama, who had lived in Augustine’s monastery at Hippo for some forty years and knew him intimately (Possidius, Vita, prologue; trans. Hoare 1954). Written soon after Augustine’s death, the Life is a brief, affectionate, and historically valuable portrait by an eyewitness. It gives us the forced ordination, the monastic clergy-house, the labors of the bishop’s court, the great controversies seen from beside the man who waged them, the conduct of the clergy as the Vandals came, and — most movingly — the account of Augustine’s last illness and death during the siege of Hippo, with the penitential Psalms hung on the wall before his bed (Possidius, Vita 29–31). Possidius’s portrait of the working, ascetic, pastoral Augustine is the necessary corrective to a knowledge of the man drawn only from his books.

Possidius closed the Life with the Indiculus (or Indiculum) — a systematic catalogue of Augustine’s works, grouped by subject and against the various heresies he had opposed (Possidius, Vita, appendix; Brown 2000, ch. 28). This catalogue is itself a primary source of the first importance: it tells us which works existed, helps date and identify them, and stands as a contemporary witness to the sheer scale of the output. Possidius records that Augustine, dying, left no money but bequeathed the library of Hippo — his manuscripts — to the Church, and that he had ordered it carefully preserved (Possidius, Vita 31). It was this library, and Possidius’s catalogue of it, that carried Augustine intact through the Vandal sack of Hippo and into the Latin Middle Ages. The survival of so vast a corpus through the collapse of Roman Africa is, in no small part, the achievement of Possidius and of the library Augustine took care to leave behind.

A Corpus That Shaped a Civilization

The vastness and the survival of the corpus together explain much of Augustine’s unique position in the West. Because he wrote so much, on so many subjects, with such authority and at such length — and because, against the destruction of Roman Africa, it nearly all survived — the Latin Middle Ages inherited in Augustine a single Father who could be consulted on virtually any question, and who therefore became the master and measure of Western theology in a way no Greek Father became for the East (see Augustine East and West). The Retractationes gave the West a model of the developing, self-correcting theologian; the letters and sermons gave it the pastor; Possidius gave it the man. Out of this corpus the West built, and rebuilt, its theology for a thousand years.

References

Possidius. The Life of Saint Augustine (Vita Augustini), with the Indiculus. Trans. F. R. Hoare, The Western Fathers. London: Sheed & Ward, 1954. (The intimacy of forty years; the catalogue of works at 18 and appendix; the death and library at 29–31.)
Augustine of Hippo. Retractationes (Reconsiderations). Trans. M. I. Bogan, The Fathers of the Church, Vol. 60. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1968. (The review of the corpus; De Libero Arbitrio at 1.9.)
Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. New ed. with epilogue. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. (Ch. 28 and the new epilogue on the corpus, the Divjak letters, and the Dolbeau sermons.)