Two Lost Sermons by Augustine Found in Poland

St Augustine was a prolific writer, not only of homilies but also of memoirs, The Confessions, and of historiography, The City of God.

From Aleteia

By Daniel Esparza

The newly discovered texts tackle one of the Bible’s most theologically awkward passages.

It began with a phone call in 2024. An employee of the Bad Doberan Monastery Association in northern Germany needed someone to decipher a 12th-century manuscript that had originally belonged to Bad Doberan Abbey but was now held at its daughter monastery in Pelplin, Poland. They called Professor Christian Tornau, a Latin scholar at the University of Würzburg. The manuscript contained six sermons attributed to Augustine of Hippo. Four were already known. Two were not.

“Two of the six sermons are previously undiscovered writings by Augustine,” Tornau said, delighted with the unexpected find. He is now collaborating with Professor Dorothea Weber and Dr Clemens Weidmann of the Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (CSEL) to prepare the first edition of the texts, expected to appear at the end of 2026.

The passage that puzzled the Church Fathers

The subject of both sermons is one of the most theologically awkward episodes in the entire Old Testament: the story of the Witch of Endor from the First Book of Samuel, chapter 28. King Saul, on the eve of battle against the Philistines, finds that God no longer answers his prayers. In desperation, he disguises himself and goes by night to consult a woman who practices necromancy — a pythoness, in the Latin tradition — asking her to summon the spirit of the dead prophet Samuel. She does so. Samuel appears, and the news he delivers is bleak: Saul will lose the battle and die.

The episode presented early Christian theologians with a genuine dilemma. Why can a necromancer summon the spirit of a prophet? This opens up the theodicy problem: how can an omnipotent God allow this, or is he not really omnipotent? Two interpretations competed in the tradition. Either the woman deceived Saul with an illusion — she did not actually summon Samuel — or God permitted the event in order to deliver a final warning to the king of his impending death.

As Medievalists.net reports, Augustine’s newly recovered sermons play with both interpretations. The first was preached during the Sunday service and ends with the theodicy question and the competing interpretations. It was not until the second sermon on the following Wednesday that the options were weighed up. The congregation was given time, in other words, to sit with the problem before hearing further discussion — a pedagogical patience entirely in keeping with what we know of Augustine’s preaching style.

Confirming authenticity

Because the Augustinian corpus has not been immune to forgery — several texts attributed to him have turned out over the centuries to be spurious — Tornau and his colleagues were careful. In autumn 2025, a summer school in Vienna brought together 20 Latin scholars to discuss the texts and evaluate their authenticity. Their conclusion was unanimous that the sermons were genuine. Tornau noted that the open-ended nature of the sermons, which offered competing interpretations without forcing a conclusion, was typical of Augustine. “The style, humour and content also clearly indicate that the sermons in the manuscripts were actually written by Augustine,” he said.

The manuscript itself presents its own puzzles. A 12th-century copy is relatively late for such material. Scholars believe it likely derives from an earlier manuscript from Amelungsborn Abbey in Lower Saxony, whose original library was destroyed during the Thirty Years’ War. The chain of transmission cannot be confirmed, but the trail is plausible.

Tornau is careful about the scale of the find. “This is not a sensational find like the 30 writings of St. Augustine that were discovered in Mainz in 1990. But we are supplementing Augustine’s extensive body of writings with two further exciting texts in a critical edition.”

Why it matters

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) left behind one of the largest bodies of writing in the ancient world — sermons, letters, biblical commentaries, theological treatises, the Confessions, The City of God — and yet new texts still surface. The Mainz discovery of 1990, mentioned by Tornau, added 30 previously unknown sermons to the corpus in a single find. The Pelplin discovery adds two more, on a subject that touches some of the deepest anxieties in Christian theology: the limits of divine permission, the reality of evil, the question of what God allows and why.

That Augustine chose to preach on the Witch of Endor at all — and to do so twice, in consecutive services, leaving the congregation to wrestle with the question between Sunday and Wednesday — tells us something about his confidence in his congregants’ capacity for theological discomfort. He did not rush to resolve what Scripture left open. Augustine’s willingness to sit with ambiguity — presenting options rather than dictating answers — feels strikingly relevant in an age of complex questions and polarised certainties.