Two unknown Augustine sermons found: a witch, a dead prophet and theodicy

One day in 2024 the telephone rang in the office of Christian Tornau, professor of Latin philology at the University of Würzburg.

The caller was from the Bad Doberan Monastery Association in the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. They had a twelfth-century manuscript. It had originally belonged to the monastery at Bad Doberan and was now kept at its sister house in Poland, at Pelplin. It contained six sermons attributed to Augustine. Could they be deciphered?

What looked like an ordinary piece of philological work turned into a discovery.

“Two of the six sermons are texts by Augustine that were previously unknown,” Tornau says.

Why it matters#

Augustine, bishop of Hippo (354-430), is the most influential thinker in Latin Christianity, philosophically and theologically. He set the shape of Western philosophy, of the doctrine of grace and of the understanding of the Church.

But Augustine is not only a theologian. With the Confessions he left a founding text of introspection, with the City of God one of the philosophy of history, and with his writing on time one of the philosophy of consciousness. The sentence is his: “What is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to someone who asks, I do not know.”

Adding two new texts to such a body of work is a measured but genuine event.

Tornau himself does not overstate it: “This is not a sensational find like the thirty Augustine texts discovered in Mainz in 1990. But we are adding two more exciting texts to Augustine's vast corpus — and in a critical edition at that.”

The subject: the Witch of Endor#

The new sermons treat a scene from the first book of Samuel in the Old Testament.

King Saul, on the eve of battle with the Philistines, is desperate. He prays; God does not answer. So he turns to a witch — a medium at Endor. The woman summons the spirit of the dead prophet Samuel, and the spirit tells Saul that he will die in the battle.

The scene is a theological bomb.

Tornau puts the question plainly: “How can a medium summon the spirit of a prophet? This opens the problem of theodicy: how can an omnipotent God permit it — or is he not in fact omnipotent?”

Theology offers two readings. Either it is a deception by the witch, and the figure summoned is not Samuel; or God allowed the summoning in order to warn Saul of his certain death.

The real find: the method#

The most striking thing about the sermons is not their content but their form.

According to Tornau, the first sermon was delivered at a Sunday service and ended with the question of theodicy and the two readings. The matter was weighed only in the second sermon, on the following Wednesday.

Augustine, in other words, raised the question, set out the options — and left his congregation without an answer for several days.

Tornau describes this as Augustine's characteristic didactic and rhetorical approach: to present the interpretative options, to withhold the final judgement, to let the listener think for himself.

For a preacher this is an unusual choice. A sermon, by definition, gives guidance. Here Augustine defers the guidance.

And this is more than a matter of style. It is also the basis of his method in the Confessions: to hold the question open inside the reader rather than close it. The effect of the text comes less from the answer it gives than from the gap it opens.

The risk of forgery, and the verification#

There are cases in which texts attributed to Augustine have turned out to be spurious. Tornau therefore proceeded carefully.

He worked through the text with the specialist Clemens Weidmann, carried out detailed research and, in the autumn of 2025, organised a summer school in Vienna. Twenty Latinists discussed the text and tested its authenticity. All reached the same conclusion: the sermons are genuine.

Tornau's grounds are stylistic rather than technical: “The style, the humour and the content show clearly that the sermons in the manuscript really were written by Augustine.”

Determining the authorship of a text from its style is philology's oldest and most contested method. The shared judgement of twenty specialists shows how that method is policed: not by the intuition of one person, but by the testing of a community of experts.

The manuscript's journey#

Reconstructing the history of transmission proved difficult.

“It is unusual for a manuscript of this kind to have been produced in the twelfth century,” Tornau says. “A copy from the eighth or early ninth century would be more typical.”

He therefore thinks it very likely that the text derives from an older version held at Amelungsborn Abbey in Lower Saxony. An old catalogue from that monastery records a text with the same titles and the same order of contents.

But this cannot be confirmed: the entire library collection at Amelungsborn burned during the Thirty Years War (1618-1648).

The survival of the texts thus depends on a chain of accidents: a copy reaching a monastery that did not burn, that monastery passing it on to its sister foundation in Poland, and someone picking up the telephone in 2024.

What comes next#

Tornau is preparing the critical edition with Dorothea Weber and Clemens Weidmann for the CSEL (Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum). The edition is expected to appear at the end of 2026.

It will examine the transmission history of the texts, classify their contents and document their authenticity.

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The source manuscript: Pelplin, Diocesan Library, Codex 114 (195), fol. 14r. The heading, written in red ink: “Sermons of Augustine on the woman who divined and the appearance of Samuel.”

Note: since Augustine lived long before photography, the cover image is the fresco Botticelli painted in Florence around 1480.