Augustinus, In Joannis Evangelium tractatus I-VI, cum admonitione et praefatione incerti auctoris

Admonition

On the following Tractates on John.

We shall not seem to have acted rashly if we assign Augustine's Tractates on John to the sixteenth year of Christ beyond the four hundredth, or to the time next after it. Certainly, when he was expounding this evangelist, the struggle of the Catholics with the Donatists was even then ablaze, since the holy Doctor is so copious and so vehement therein in refuting those factious men; besides the fact that up to that time their schismatic altar stood at Hippo: whence in the Tractate on the Epistle of the same John (to the expounding of which Epistle he applied himself, namely, after the treatment of the Gospel had been begun long before and broken off for a little while), he complains in these words: What are two altars doing in this city? And although this could be referred also to times earlier than the Conference of Carthage, which was held with the Donatists in the year 411, nevertheless, because in these very Tractates on the Gospel of which we are treating not only is the faith of Predestination set forth as a thing thoroughly established, in Tractt. XLV, XLVIII, LXVIII, LXXXIII, CV, CXI, etc., but the Pelagians too are censured without their name being given in Tractt. LIII, LXVII, LXXXI, LXXXVI, etc., hence it was certainly possible to understand that these same Tractates were not published before the four hundred and eleventh year of Christ, in which the Pelagian heresy first made its way into Africa. But another argument, by which it comes about that they are assigned by us to the four hundred and sixteenth year, is supplied far more expressly from Tract. CXX, where Augustine proves that Nicodemus came to Christ more often, in order to become His disciple by hearing, by this reasoning: Which certainly, he says, is now made known to almost all nations in the revelation of the body of the most blessed Stephen (which, namely, took place when the four hundred and fifteenth year was nearly finished).

Moreover, he had his Tractates or sermons for this purpose on any days whatever. The first, for example, [he delivered] on a Sunday; that he delivered the second on the following day he indicates in this very Tract. II. Likewise the forty-sixth was held on a Sunday, as appears from Tract. XLVII; but the forty-fifth had been spoken the day before, as appears from Tract. XLVI. The thirty-fourth and the three following were held on four consecutive days, as is evident from the opening and the close of each, and indeed the thirty-seventh on a Sunday, as appears from Tract. XXXVIII. So too the eighth, ninth and tenth; so finally these five, XIX, XX, XXI, XXII and XXIII, are shown to have been delivered one on each of successive days. That Augustine took care to pass over none of the days appointed for holding a sermon is understood even from this, that in Tract. VIII he excuses one such day omitted on some occasion, and in XLVI he defers a more careful treatment of the passage read from the Gospel to the days for delivering the sermon owed. In XLVII, which he held on a Sunday, he says that he is not at all prevented, as usually happens, by the constraints of time from pursuing his discourse more fully. On the other hand he sometimes testifies that he does not wish to prolong his sermon on the more solemn days, for this reason, that there were perhaps many who had come together for the sake of the solemnity rather than from a desire to hear the sermon: so at the end of Tractate VIII. But from XLVI

and from others we understand that he was accustomed to order that the part of the Gospel which he was about to expound to the people be read out during the divine offices, and that he then endeavoured to explain it once it had been read. But if ever this was going to take longer than was fitting, he put off the remainder to another time; and then too he directed that the Gospel be read again.

Moreover, Augustine undertook his explanation of the Gospel of John before the winter was yet over. For he testifies in Tract. 6 that he had been afraid lest the people be deterred from frequenting the church by the force of the cold. In 10 he indicates that the time is close at hand for the solemnity of the Lord's passion and resurrection to be celebrated. And in 11, that the time now requires him to exhort the catechumens. On the day before the day on which he delivered 12, he had promised the people that he would speak about the peace of the Church, both what he had done and what he still hoped was to be done; but he wished to put first the customary treatment of the Gospel reading, and then to discharge his promise. What, further, it was that he had to say about the peace of the Church is unknown; nor was it written down at the end of that same treatment. It seems possible to gather from the opening of Tractate 13 that the Gospel of John had been broken off by him for not so few days; and indeed he interrupted it during the Paschal feasts, which fell on the 2nd day of April in the year 416, because on these days fixed and set readings from the Gospel had to be read out in church, in place of which it was not permitted to substitute others, as he teaches in his preface to the Exposition of the Epistle of John. For in the meantime he undertook to expound this very Epistle, and soon, having treated it thoroughly, he returned to the Gospel. In the explanation of this he had not yet gone beyond Tractate 27 by the feast of Lawrence the martyr, whom he praises in that place, although, as has already been observed, he had completed five Tractates, from 19 to 23, on five consecutive days.

How many things excerpted from this work you will find in Bede and Alcuin on John, and in Florus in the Commentaries on the Epistles of Paul published under the name of Bede, etc.; and also certain sentences brought forward by the ancients from various Tractates for the sake of confirming the catholic faith: namely from 2, by Cassian, book 7 On the Incarnation, chapter 27; from 78, by Pope Leo in the Letter to Leo Augustus, formerly 97, now 134, etc. Cassiodorus Senator recalls the same work in the book of Institutions, chapter 7, commending John as illustrated by Augustine with a copious and remarkable exposition. Possidius, in the Indiculus, chapter 6, under these words: Tractates on the Gospel of John from the beginning to the end, in six codices. Augustine himself, in the preface to the Tractates on the Epistle of John: Your Holiness remembers, he says, that we are accustomed to treat the Gospel according to John in the order of the readings. And again, in book 15 On the Trinity, chapter 27, he marks out Tractate 99 on John, when he says: On this matter we have spoken in a certain sermon to be delivered to the ears of the Christian people, and we have written down what was said. He would certainly have said more, had he lived long enough, in the particular books of the Retractations which, as he writes to Quodvultdeus, letter 224, he was contemplating on the popular Tractates and homilies delivered by him.

In the ancient codices the work is entitled, in some Tractates, in others Sermons, in some Homilies on John. But a somewhat fuller title stands in the Mss. of Saint-Ouen, Jumièges and Préaux, in this manner: Here begin the Homilies of Aurelius Augustine, Doctor, bishop of Hippo, on the Gospel of the Lord Jesus according to John, which he first delivered himself in speaking to the people, and which, taken down by notaries while he spoke, he afterwards dictated word for word in the order in which they were delivered. Finally, as regards the preface set below here, you would look for it in vain either in the Mss. or in the editions of Amerbach and Badius. The Louvain editors gave it after Erasmus, though they observe that it is not Augustine's and does not exist in any Ms. It is found, with a few words changed, in Bede and Alcuin on John.

Preface of an uncertain author.

The Gospel excels all the pages of divine Scripture, because what the Law and the Prophets foretold as future, this the Gospel declares fulfilled. And among the writers of the Gospels themselves John stands out in the profundity of the divine mysteries; he, from the time of the Lord's ascension, for sixty-five years preached the word of God without the aid of writing, up to the last times of Domitian. But when Domitian had been slain, and he had returned from exile to Ephesus with Nerva's permission, he was compelled by the bishops of Asia to write concerning the divinity of Christ coeternal with the Father, against the heretics who had burst into his Churches in his absence, who denied that Christ existed before Mary. Hence he is deservedly compared, in the figure of the four living creatures, to the flying eagle, which flies higher than the other birds and gazes at the rays of the sun with eyes that are not beaten back. For the other evangelists, who sufficiently set forth Christ's temporal birth and the temporal deeds which He did in the man, and said little about the divinity, walk on earth with the Lord like animals that go on foot; but this one, recounting little about His temporal deeds, but contemplating more loftily the power of the divinity, flies with the Lord to heaven. For he who reclined upon the Lord's breast at the supper drank a draught of heavenly wisdom more excellently than the rest from the very fountain of the Lord's breast. For he had read the Gospels of the three evangelists, and had approved their faith and truth; in them he saw that some things were lacking to the history of the deeds done, and especially those which the Lord did in the first time of His preaching, namely before John the Baptist was shut up in prison. These things, then, as though left aside by them, John writes, the things which Jesus did before John was shut up; but above all he took care to commend the divinity of Christ and the mystery of the Trinity. For the three other evangelists, the temporal sayings and deeds of the Lord, which avail most for forming the morals of the present life,