Preacher of Grace. A Critical Reappraisal of Augustine’s Doctrine of Grace in his Sermones ad populum on Liturgical Feasts and During the Donatist Controversy

The present monograph addresses the following research question: which elements of Augustine’s doctrine of grace are to be found in his sermones as a whole, external to the specifically anti-Pelagian context? My approach employed two lines of research. The first (chapters 1-3) studies Augustine’s sermons on the Christological liturgical feasts of Christmas (ss. 140, 184-196A, 369, 370), Epiphany (ss. 199-204A, 373-375), Good Friday (‘The Passion of the Lord’: ss. 218-218C), Easter (Easter Season: ss. 219-260E) and Ascension (ss. 261-265F), on Pentecost (ss. 29, 29A, 29B, 266-272, 272A, 272B, 378) and on the feasts of martyrs (from the group sermones de sanctis: ss. 273-340). These sermones belong to the (non-polemical) pastoral preaching genre and are spread throughout the forty years of Augustine’s preaching activity. The content of these sermones is both Christological and ethical. The second line of research focuses on the ca. forty anti-Donatist sermones (ss. 3, 4, 10, 33, 37, 45-47, 71, 88, 90, 129, 137, 138, 147A, 159B, 161B, 164, 182, 183, 197, 198, 202, 223, 252, 266, 269, 271, 275, 292, 293A, 295, 313E, 327, 340A, 357-359, 359B, 360, 360A, 360C, 400) (chapter 4). While the latter share the same polemical preaching genre as the anti-Pelagian sermones, they nevertheless precede the anti-Pelagian sermons chronologically and differ from them in terms of content. My first line of research – the presence of grace in Festal-Liturgical sermones – yielded an affirmative answer: yes, grace is present and, although not explicit, links are discernible with both Augustine’s anti-Donatist implicit and anti-Pelagian explicit thinking on grace. My second research question investigated the issue of grace in the collection sermones ad populum with an anti-Donatist intent. The opposition between divine (gratuitous) grace and human sin (especially the sin of pride) is, within an ecclesiological and sacramentological framework, clearly attested in the ca. forty anti-Donatist sermones Augustine delivered. Grace was thus present in Augustine’s thinking and preaching well before the beginning of the Pelagian controversy. As such, no fundamental difference in relation to the core grace content could be discerned between the anti-Donatist and the anti-Pelagian sermones. The difference is sooner to be found in the explicitness of the thematization of grace – at the centre of debate during the Pelagian controversy, but not in the Donatist controversy – and in the contextual framework of its thematization: existential/eschatological/soteriological in the anti-Pelagian discourses and more ecclesiological, martyrological, sacramentological in the anti-Donatist expositions.nrpages: ix + 235status: publishe