Dr Anna Milon 🦌

This is the closest we'll get to "NEW SAINT AUGUSTINE JUST DROPPED": In 2024, a Latin scholar and professor at the University of Wurzburg got a phone call asking him to look at a twelfth-century manuscript housed in a monastery in Poland. The manuscript contained six sermons by St. Augustine, one of the greatest Church Fathers. The scholar, named Christian Tornau, found that four of the sermons were already known to scholars, but two of them were new. They were previously lost works of Augustine that nobody had read or recognized in centuries. But now Tornau was faced with a new question: Were they real? There was some reason to suspect them. The fact that the manuscript was from the twelfth century was unusual. Scholars would normally expect a work of this type to have been created in the eighth or ninth century. But Tornau was able to determine that the manuscript might be a copy of one from an abbey in Saxony. An old catalogue from that monastery lists a work with the same headings as the recently discovered one, so we have a plausible chain for how the twelfth-century version was copied. Tornau brought in other scholars to see what they thought, and in 2025, a summer school of over twenty Latin scholars was held in Vienna to consider the find. Their conclusion was unanimous: The sermons are genuine. “The style, humor, and content also clearly indicate that the sermons in the manuscripts were actually written by Augustine,” Tornau said. Now a critical edition of the sermons is being prepared, and it’s scheduled to be published by the end of 2026. How significant is the discovery? It’s not as momentous as some others. For example, in 1990, thirty previously lost sermons and other writings of Augustine were found. But this is the kicker: the two new sermons deal with one of the most mysterious passages in the Bible. Which one? Read more here: catholic.com/magazine/online…