5 2 S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 8 - 1 S p r i n g 2 0 2 2 1 Introduction Augustine focused on the topic of God’s mercy in his systematic works as well as in his sermons and commentaries to the books of the Bible. The online CAG database shows that 934 out of 2,744 references to mercy mentioned in his works can be found in his homiletic commentaries to the Book of Psalms in the Old Testament – Enarrationes in Psalmos. Onethird of all references come from Augustine’s great collection of sermons. Several Latin terms found in the textual tradition represent only synonymic diversity: exposition, sermo, enarratio, tractatus (Augustinus 1911 in CSEL 57, 453). Unlike his sermons for believers (Lat. sermones ad populum), which do not represent systematic exegesis of any concrete biblical book but only preaching related to a given liturgical text during the Christian liturgy, Augustine’s homiletic commentaries to the Psalms and the Gospel of John take the form of systematic exegesis (Mohrmann 1954, 97–107). In our study we provide an analysis of the topic of God’s mercy in this complete and most extensive work of Augustine of Hippo. Literary corpus of Enarrationes consist of 205 sermons to the Psalms. The related commentaries were written between the years 392 and 422 (Fiedrowicz 1997, 20). There are Psalms to which Augustine wrote only one sermon, and there are others with two or three sermons. However, we can also find an exception in the corpus of 32 sermons to Psalm 118 (nowadays Psalm 119; Andoková et al. 2019, 35). Some homiletic commentaries to the Psalms were written as sermons and preached by Augustine, but there is also another part consisting of sermons dictated according to the wishes of his friends (Augustinus 1956 in CCSL 40, 1664). Sermons represented a crucial and most important means of communication for Augustine, through which he presented fundamental thoughts on the spiritual richness of Christianity. Augustine presented not only literary but also spiritual exegesis, because the entire Sacred Scripture, including the Psalms, speaks about the mystery of the merciful love of Jesus Christ towards his Church (Augustinus 1956 in CCSL 39, 1111). Augustine often used symbolical images (Poque 1984), which have not been explored from the point of view of God’s mercy in homiletic commentaries to the Psalms mentioned above; therefore, we decided to focus on them in our study. We start with an explanation of the methodology and the author’s perception of mercy. Afterwards, we focus on an analysis of the most significant images of God’s mercy, through which the sermonizer communicated the crucial content of Christian spirituality. 2 Methodology In the past, scholars used to give preference to Augustine’s systematic tractates, while his sermons were seen only as sources of secondary significance. In modern times, however, sermons are considered to be essential spiritual-theological material. According to Augustine, preaching was one of the tools used by God to spread his Word and to lead believers into spiritual adulthood, ensuring their matureness in the area of comprehension of faith. The theologian of Hippo often used sermons to address the most serious spiritual and theological problems of his time. Christine Mohrmann affirms that Augustine merged theological knowledge with spiritual experience in his sermons (Mohrmann 1961, 42). As we have already pointed out, we have limited the studied corpus to the commentary to the Psalms. We have explored the sermons in a synchronous way, which means the reading of a particular sermon in its final version as a literary and theological text within the closed corpus, because any implementation of chronological procedure is impossible in most cases. We use a hermeneutic method of so-called “emerging topics”, which allows us to avoid the scholastic approach within which the texts are usually approached with prearranged spiritual-theological theory and the work consists of mere effort to confirm it. The method we have chosen is based on a holistic and continuous approach to all texts, where relevant thoughts and topics emerge from reading the text, and the frequency of their appearance is directly associated with their weight and importance. The advantage of this method lies in the fact that the topics and their relevance are substantiated by the text itself, without any attempt of readers to push through their own interest and ideas (Borgomeo 1972, 16–17).
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MzgxMzI=