Christus Sacerdos in the Preaching of St. Augustine: Christ and Christian Identity (review)

On New Year's Day, 404, North Africans were out in the streets celebrating the feast of Calends, joining in both traditional ceremonies and raucous revels. Augustine was in Carthage, it seems, and used the occasion to deliver a sprawling magnum opus of a sermon some three hours in length. He denounced in depth and detail the hazards of demon-wooing pagan rites and the dead end fallacies of pagan intellectualism. He then set out the Christian alternative: Christus Mediator et Sacerdos, Christ the mediator and priest, whose graced sacramenta redeem and transfigure his body, the church. This sprawl of a sermon is one of 26 new sermons, first discovered in 1990 by François Dolbeau, who found them buried in a fifteenth century Carthusian manuscript now preserved in the Mainz Stadtbibliothek. Dolbeau's momentous discovery, published in a scatter of brilliant articles through the 1990s, have sparked scholarly conferences and a host of reassessments. This New Year's sermon (known as s. Dolbeau 26) has been acclaimed the "jewel" of the collection. As Peter Brown noted in the New York Review of Books, "modern scholars never dreamed that we would come so close again to Augustine's dialogue with living paganism."

Brown and others have probed s. Dolbeau 26 for its tantalizing glimpses into Augustine's world, what it reveals of a not-yet-triumphant Christianity. Daniel Jones has focused, instead, on the sermon's theology. His Christus Sacerdos, based on a 2003 dissertation completed at the Augustinianum in Rome under Robert Dodaro, is a densely argued, text-focused study. His thesis is that Augustine in s. Dolbeau 26 especially but in other sermons as well invokes the Christus Sacerdos title to do three things "in tandem": to explain "the identity and work of Christ, from which Christian identity originates"; to show "how this doctrine of Christ establishes for Christians an identity and ideal, telling them both who they are and what they are to become"; and to shape these two by defining them over against paganism's cluster of identities, practices, and worldviews (21–22).

Jones begins with Augustine's "critique of cultured paganism." He denies that Augustine's polemics were battles with a bygone reality; like Mandouze, he insists that Augustine "never had a taste for fighting phantoms" (54). Augustine's target was Neoplatonism, specifically the theurgic Neoplatonism of Iamblichus. The issue, as Jones crisply articulates it, was a clash over mediation, its contours, conceptions, and religious meanings. Christians and theurgic Neoplatonists agreed on the vast fissure separating God from humanity; they agreed, too, on the need for sacramental purification. But for the Neoplatonists the fissure was ontological and cosmological whereas for Augustine it was moral and spiritual. In Neoplatonist theurgy—what Augustine labeled sacra sacrilegia—lesser mediating spirits acted as go-betweens bridging cosmic gaps. Christian mediation differed ontologically: Christ the mediator "is not between Creator and man, but is both Creator and man." And Christ's mediation exacts a moral response: self-confrontation, repentance, and fraternal charity (90).

The heart of Jones' analysis focuses on Augustine's use of sacerdos including its "rhetorical load"—the cluster of cultural associations and connotations such terminology evoked in the audience. Jones rightly highlights how sacerdos stirred up images of pagan priestly fraternities with their complex ties to polis and government (not to mention animal sacrifice). He skillfully dissects three clusters of meaning Augustine gives to sacerdos: (1) Christ as a divinely just man; (2) his saving work (death, resurrection, ongoing heavenly intercession); and (3) his "shared identity" in the Totus Christus linking Christ's priesthood to the church's (163). Jones deftly teases out how, for Augustine, mediator and sacerdos broadly overlap yet possess distinct "centers of gravity," mediator in the Incarnation, sacerdos in the Paschal mystery (415). He also traces the interstices with other favorite titles, Christ the Head (Caput ecclesiae) and...