Two unknown sermons of St Augustine found in a Polish manuscript

Two hitherto unknown sermons by St Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, have just been identified in a 12th-century manuscript preserved at the diocesan library in Pelplin, in northern Poland. German and Austrian scholars worked on them for nearly two years; a critical edition is announced for the end of 2026. The codex held six sermons, four already known; two had never been spotted. It was the attention paid to two Latin words, « Phytonissa » and « Resuscitatio Samuelis », that put the scholars on the trail.

The two texts comment on a harsh passage of Scripture. Saul, forsaken by God, goes to consult the witch of Endor to bring up the shade of Samuel, in the first book of Kings (I Samuel), chapter 28. The manuscript had been copied in a Cistercian abbey, whose library was destroyed during the Thirty Years' War, then carried by monks to their Polish foundation in the 13th century. There, catalogued but never studied in depth, it had waited for centuries.

The Church has never held her Fathers to be antiquities. They are her teachers, the living memory of the faith, and the Bishop of Hippo is the greatest of the Latin Doctors. That one of his words, silent for sixteen centuries, should rise again from a cloister is no archival curiosity: it is a fragment of the common treasure given back to the Church. And it must be said: it was monastic hands that, patient, copied and then kept this codex for centuries. Today's scholarship has only gathered up what yesterday's fidelity had saved.

On the substance, these sermons teach a discipline. The question of Endor divided the ancients: was it truly Samuel, or a deception of the evil spirit? Inspired Scripture leans one way, when the book of Ecclesiasticus says of the prophet that « after this he slept, and he made known to the king, and shewed him the end of his life, and he lifted up his voice from the earth in prophecy to blot out the wickedness of the nation » (Eccli 46:23).

Augustine, for his part, weighs both readings and rejects one thing only: what would contradict the faith. There lies the rule that no age repeals. Full liberty where the Church has defined nothing, full submission to what she has defined. One reads the obscure by the analogy of faith, never against it. The Doctor of Hippo gives us back not only two sermons; he gives us back this measure.

Sources. Sacred Scripture: Ecclesiasticus 46:23, and the first book of Kings (I Samuel), chapter 28, according to the Vulgate.