An Unknown Late-Antique Augustinian Collection: Investigations on the "Sancti Catholici Patres Homiliary", and its Relationships with the "Collectio Gallicana" and the Roman Homiliaries (I)

This essay aims at shedding light on the formation of the prominent medieval homiliary known as Sancti Catholici Patres (SCP) and on its pivotal role in the medieval transmission of patristic homiletics. It focuses specifically on its extremely rich Augustinian content, which accounts for more than 160 out of the ca. 345 total entries of the compilation. Although it was initially thought that most of Augustine’s sermons had been drawn from another medieval collection (namely, the Collectio Tripartita), some soundings provided by foremost scholars such as Raymond Étaix and François Dolbeau (among others) have shown that more likely the relationship is the other way round. As a result, the provenance of those Augustinian sermons remains unknown. Relying on these results, the paper moves a step forward considering the transmission patterns of the sermons included in the SCP, and is structured as follows. After the introduction (par. 1), it conducts a thorough critical review of the existing literature on the SCP (par. 2). In a third section (par. 3), it proposes a new classification of the Augustinian sermons in the homiliary, and divides them into four groups according to the likelihood that the compilers have borrowed them from an already existing (and known) Augustinian collection. Since many of these sermons do not feature in other Augustinian compilations, and for some of them the SCP turns out to be the only or the main witness, the picture that emerges brings additional support to an hypothesis already formulated by Dolbeau: that the SCP was able to employ an ancient and wide collection of Augustinian sermons which has not survived as such. Thanks to the detailed survey of the homilies involved, the investigation paves the way to attempt a reconstruction of this collection. The thesis appears additionally strengthened by the fourth section (par. 4): here, in the framework of a quest for the sources, the paper addresses the supposed relationships between the SCP and some prominent collections of Augustinian sermons via an in-depth textual analysis of selected sermons, both edited and unedited (CAE s 219; FU s 3; AU s 192; AU s 197; AU s 317; AU s 59; AU s 224; AU s 210; CAE s 142; AU s 93; PS-AU s 212). The results strongly challenge some current views regarding the interrelationships between sermon collections: e.g., reveal that the Caesarian Collectio Gallicana was probably not employed by the SCP, and question that the Gallicana was a source for Alanus’ homiliary (and, in addition, raise some problems with the current reconstruction of the Gallicana itself and its genesis). Moreover, also the extent and the nature of the contribution by Paul the Deacon’s homiliary to the SCP should probably be reconsidered. Finally, the textual analysis uncovers some interesting evidence that points to the existence of a lost collection of Augustine’s sermons that had started to be reworked into the Caesarian textual shape, but where the process has not been fully accomplished yet.