Situating and Studying Augustine's Sermons

This essay will review four recent studies of Augustine's preached works, directing particular attention to the authors' methods of dealing with the problems of dating these texts both in relationship to each other and to the treatises of Augustine whose sequence and chronology are more securely established. Before evaluating the individual studies, the essay will review a successful project of dating Augustine's sermons, the seventy-five-year effort to place the In euangelium Iohannis tractatus and In epistolam Iohannis tractatus, and relate them to the Enarrationes in psalmos 119–133, on the Psalms of Ascent. This section will display not only the difficulties involved in the dating but the methods developed and employed by a series of scholars who carefully corrected and built upon the advances of their predecessors. The review of this achievement will enable a more discerning appreciation of the methods used by the three authors for dealing with the problems of chronology encountered in studying Augustine's sermons.