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HOMILETICS
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U and largely ignored until the last decade of the twentieth century,
the topics of early Christian preaching and the early Christian homily have only
recently begun to receive the attention they deserve. What is beginning to emerge
from this growing area of research is a realization that the homily and the preaching
of it are of far greater interest in their own right and are far more complex than had
previously been imagined. That aside, the field itself is a minefield and full of traps
for the unwary. If one is to take advantage of the riches offered by early Christian
sermons and their preaching, one needs to approach every aspect of this complex
field with care.
. E A
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Scientific study of early Christian preaching can be said to have begun with Joseph
Bingham, who treats the subject in book , chapter , of his ten-volume Origines
Ecclesiasticae (–, reprinted and re-edited numerous times). Covering topics
as varied as who did and did not preach in different parts of the early Christian
world, how many homilies were preached at a time and how often, how homilies
were preached (whether read, from notes, or spontaneously), what immediately
preceded and followed in the liturgy, content and relevance, the length of homilies,
audience stance and behaviour, how homilies were delivered, and how they were
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recorded, so thorough and useful is his survey that it has been superseded only
recently. Olivar’s monumental La predicación cristiana antigua () now offers
the most comprehensive treatment of the topic. Prefaced by a brief discussion of
the origins and terminus of patristic preaching, the body of this encyclopaedic work
divides into two parts: a lengthy survey of individuals who preached in Greek, Latin,
Syriac, Armenian, and Coptic; and an equally lengthy discussion of different aspects
of preaching. This second half expands on the topics introduced by Bingham,
offering a much more developed study of the audience, and in addition including
new topics such as the classification of homilies, where homilies were delivered,
attendance levels, and textual transmission.
Prior to the s interest in early Christian homilies per se and in the act of
preaching was limited (Cunningham ). Attention tended to focus on a small
number of areas: the editing of texts, the associated issues of textual transmission
and authenticity, the rhetorical or syntactical analysis of individual corpora (with
emphasis on the Second Sophistic (Ameringer ; but see Müller on preaching techniques in Coptic), and consideration of exegetical technique or theological
or moral content. Throughout this period there was a tendency to pair hagiography and homiletics (e.g. Ehrhard –), and the volumes of the Bibliotheca
Hagiographica Latina (BHL) and Graeca (BHG) remain major sources for locating
unedited homilies on saints and martyrs. In publishing diplomatic editions of single
homilies and information about inedita that exist in a variety of languages, the
journals Analecta Bollandiana, Revue Bénédictine, and Le Muséon, among others,
have throughout the twentieth century played a major role. The series Corpus
Christianorum (CCSL (Latin): – ; CCSG (Greek): ) and Source Chrétiennes
(SC) (– ) have also been instrumental in publishing new editions of homilies in
the Greek and Latin tradition.
Throughout this period a few isolated scholars displayed interest in other aspects
of preaching. As early as it was recognized that homilies were a significant
source of social and cultural information (Vance ), which led to the occasional
exploration of a particular aspect of popular belief or practice via the corpus of
a specific homilist (Politis ; Loukatos ; Graffin ), and later to a small
number of articles advocating the investigation of homilies from this perspective
(Berthold ; Spira ). The occasional study of the preacher’s audience also
appeared. In Zellinger published a brief article on audience acclamations and
applause in early Christian homilies; in Pontet included a chapter on the
audience and where the homilies were preached in his examination of Augustine’s
homiletical exegesis; and in Bernardi produced an investigation of the preacher
and his audience with a focus on Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and
Gregory of Nyssa. These were followed more than a decade later by investigations
on Maximus of Turin (Devoti ), Romanos Melodos (Hunger ), Origen
(Monaci Castagno ), and the Cappadocians, this time expanded to include
Chrysostom (MacMullen ). Not until Olivar () and the first focused study
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of the preacher–audience dynamic within the eastern church (Cunningham and
Allen ), however, did the subject begin to receive treatment across more than
a narrow range of preachers in any depth. Aside from the topics of homilies as
a source for daily life and for the preacher and his audience, the subject of how
homilies were composed, delivered, and recorded has also received brief attention
(Wikenhauser ; Deferrari ).
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P
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In the last decade of the twentieth century, early Christian homiletics began to come
into its own as a serious field of research. Homiletics, often lumped together in
scholars’ minds with hagiography, had in the main been viewed prior to that point
as ‘popular’, and therefore trivial. The rise of late antiquity as a separate discipline,
with its emphasis on cultural and social history, rather than the history of ideas,
and its equal interest in the eastern and western regions of the Mediterranean, has
played a significant role in the recent rehabilitation of the homily and its elevation
in value. When scholars wish to recover the daily life of a city, to explore villages and
the surrounding countryside, or to look at sectors of the population other than the
elite, it is to the more ‘popular’ or bureaucratic literary forms, such as saints’ lives,
homilies, and letters, that they are obliged to turn. The result has been the greater
inclusion of homilies as evidence in recent publications, the change in view being
epitomized by Peter Brown in the epilogue to the new edition of his biography of
Augustine. ‘On looking back’, he writes, ‘I think . . . that I had not paid sufficient
attention at the time to his sermons and letters’ (Brown : ). He then goes
on to show how remedying this oversight now substantially alters his perspective
on the Augustine he had come to know.
Homilies have other riches to offer, in addition to access to the daily life of
the world in which they played a role. Homilies from Origen onwards, to varying
degrees, reflect the rhetorical training of the day. That rhetorical expertise was taken
up and transformed in the service of communicating God’s word. In the process,
the early Christian homily became a new rhetorical and literary form in its own
right, albeit not one that sprang forth newly formed. While homilies have been
studied piecemeal as works of persuasion, which promote a discourse and construct
a reality often quite at odds with that experienced by the audience whom they
sought to persuade (Wilken ), and while Averil Cameron () does much
to locate them among the texts through which the alternative reality of Christian
discourse gained its power, what we lack is a serious engagement with the homily
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as both medium and message in its own right. As part of this, we need to document
and analyse the exempla that homilists use and document in greater detail the
diverse forms which a homily can take. We need to trace more thoroughly the
development of discourse on topics such as authority, poverty, wealth, marriage,
and virginity across regions and through time, with an awareness that the choice
of exempla or topic has as much to say as the exempla and topic themselves. We
need to liberate ourselves from the study of great preachers to focus on the homily
itself. This kind of approach is just beginning to emerge (Retzleff ) and will
gain momentum as traditional approaches to the homily continue to bring their
reward.
Homilies have an important role to play, too, as liturgical documents. By the
end of the third century, the act of preaching within the Christian assembly had
become a culminating moment in the Liturgy of the Word. Delivered variously in
response to the date in the local liturgical calendar, the lections of the day, or to
novel events (such as the arrival of new relics), and at different locations in a city or
its suburbs, the homily can be a rich source of information about regional variation
in liturgical practice and about local liturgical practice and developments. The value
of the homily in this area has long been recognized (Baumstark –; ; Willis
; van de Paverd ; Sottocornola ), but there is much unexplored that
remains, particularly in the domain of what took place liturgically in the streets and
public spaces of towns and cities. The acts of preaching and receiving the homily
also offer fruit for research. Reception theory, for instance, has scarcely been applied
to the field of early Christian homiletics, and is due to receive attention. The effect
of preaching on the audience and their subsequent behaviour is another area that is
just beginning to receive serious analytical thought in light of Bourdieu’s theory of
habitus (Maxwell : –; Bourdieu ), as is the framing of preacher and
audience within theories of religious identity and religious interaction drawn from
both anthropology and sociology.
. T O E D
C P
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One aspect of early Christian homiletics that received surprisingly little attention
before the s is the question of how Christian preaching arises from within the
classical Graeco-Roman and Jewish traditions. Initially this question was posed by
scholars of the New Testament and post-apostolic era, who were less interested in
following it through to the emergence of mature preaching in the third and fourth
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centuries. Kyrtatas’s sociological approach to the question () constitutes one
of the few attempts at this early period to explain the full development of the
phenomenon. Relying on the analytical concepts of prophets and priests, which
always existed side by side within the early church, Kyrtatas traces a transfer of
authority over time from prophets to priests, associated with the requirement for
radically new techniques for communicating moral instruction to the masses that
emerged following the conversion of Constantine. In his schema, as one of the
radical new tools, preaching became a powerful underpinning of priestly authority,
although elements of prophetic sensitivity were still preserved within the priestly
ministry.
Recently, a more nuanced model has been proposed (Stewart-Sykes ), in
which during the period between the teaching ministry of Jesus and Origen a
development from prophecy to preaching in the need to communicate the word
of God ‘to believers within the Christian assembly’ is likewise traced. For StewartSykes the origins lie in the need to test the prophetic message, which saw prophecy
becoming increasingly tied up with scripture, as this could be used to provide an
external check. In the process, the techniques of scrutinizing prophecy became
transferred to scripture itself. All of this took place initially within a household
setting, and was quite separate from preaching in the synagogue or from the
practice of the Hellenistic philosophical schools. In time, however, and parallel
to the development of a growing respect for the written scriptural canon and a
growing dominance of scripture over prophecy, the households themselves developed into scholastic social organizations, with the result that the models of
communication current in the synagogue, and to a lesser extent in the Hellenistic schools, came to influence how the word of God was communicated. This
development occurred unevenly in different regions within the first three centuries, but is seen by Stewart-Sykes essentially to underpin the development of
moral exhortation and scriptural exegesis which emerge as normative elements
in the preaching of the fourth century. The homily is thus not a ‘new creation’,
as some have claimed (Merkt ; Schäublin ), but an oral form that has
a long evolution from prophetic traditions and which has absorbed influences
from Jewish synagogue preaching and Hellenistic philosophical pedagogy along
the way.
While this model accords the Hellenistic schools a lesser degree of influence
in the first three centuries of Christian preaching, their influence by the fourth
century was more considerable. After his ordination to the priesthood, Augustine,
for example, maintained his interest in the mode of spiritual guidance adopted
by classical philosophical teachers, and this understanding of ‘psychagogy’ can be
traced clearly in his homiletical theory and practice (Kolbet ). Again, while
Stewart-Sykes shows that one cannot look to the diatribe form for the origins of
the early Christian homily, it is undeniably the case that the diatribe style, utilized
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by classical philosophical teachers, influenced the homiletic techniques employed
by some preachers of the later fourth century (Uthemann ). Indeed, with
the flowering of preaching in both East and West in the later third and fourth
centuries, rhetorical techniques, forms, and exempla learnt by the homilists of
wealthier background during their secular education were readily appropriated and
transformed, becoming an essential and inseparable part of preaching (Hong ;
Schäublin ; Oberhelman ).
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A key problem in dealing with early Christian homiletics is the question of definition. What constitutes a homily? This question has been a particular dilemma for
investigators of the origins of Christian preaching, for whom the greatest difficulty
has surrounded the task of identifying homilies among early literary remains. For
the period prior to Origen, the task involves a great deal of circularity in argument,
since what we tend to identify as a homily in the later third and fourth centuries
and beyond does not identifiably exist at that earlier time. Scholars who engage
with homilies from this later period, on the other hand, have tended not to ask
the question at all, on the assumption that the characteristics of a homily are by
this later period self-evident. However, if we believe that a norm has developed
by the fourth century, or look to the works of the major preachers of the Latinand Greek-speaking worlds as our models, the idea of what constitutes a homily
that results is misleading, since in the Syriac-speaking East, homiletics developed
in a more fluid way. Within a liturgical setting, the blurred boundaries that existed
between instruction that was spoken and that was chanted, and the development of
the mimre or verse homily, not dissimilar to the madrashe or teaching songs, both
of which served to instruct the audience in the teachings of the church (Griffith
: –), negate the effectiveness of a definition of preaching derived from a
strictly Graeco-Roman setting. The difficulty with definition is intensified when
local practice is transferred to another context, as in the case of Romanos Melodos,
a native of Emesa whose works were delivered in the churches of Constantinople.
His kontakia are usually seen as a category of hymn, so different are they from the
Greek homiletic ‘norm’ of the fourth and fifth centuries, but can also be identified
as homiletic (Hunger ). At the most basic level, then, all that we can claim
is that a homily is something that conforms to a few essential conditions, but
whose shape is elastic and changes with regional cultural conditions and with
time.
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What conditions are essential, however, is a matter of debate. In terms of setting,
investigators of the origins of preaching point out that the communication of
God’s word to believers within the Christian assembly, whether within a house
or a church, is only one of three options, which include catechesis and missionary preaching. A broad definition that embraces all three homiletic settings and
audiences is required, if it is to describe the full range of what occurs as preaching
develops over the first six centuries. Orality, on the other hand, has been put
forward as a defining characteristic of the Christian homily (Merkt ). The words
homilia in the Greek tradition and sermo in the Latin both indicate a conversation or
dialectic, while the verbs didaskalein and praedicare indicate instruction or teaching,
and speaking in front of an audience or proclaiming, respectively. The full range
of terms used by homilists of their own activity fall within this general pattern
(Olivar : –). Unfortunately, retrieving definitive marks of ‘orality’ from
what has come down to us as a written (and often edited) text can prove difficult,
and involves the kinds of circular arguments that are required when one tries to
identify a ‘homily’ in the period prior to Origen, when the ‘norm’ used to test what
one has found itself derives from a later century. In some cases, what are considered
characteristic features of orality (direct address, use of the second person, remarks
on audience response and behaviour, topical references) have been edited out in
the subsequent process of transmission (Merkt : on Augustine and Maximus
of Turin). In others, there is evidence that preachers wrote out their homilies beforehand and memorized them before delivering them themselves, or intentionally
wrote homilies for dissemination to, and delivery by, others (Deferrari ; Olivar
: –). When the arguments for ‘orality’ are carefully scrutinized, it can be
seen that what they really seek to identify is spontaneity (evidence that material
has been added ad hoc, without prior meditation). Yet, when Syrian preaching,
with its formal poetic structures, is included, marks of spontaneity fail entirely as a
criterion. It is delivery, rather than ‘orality’, that is in most of the instances adduced
the common feature.
That delivery before an assembly of some kind has been considered an important
criterion is shown by the development within the literature of categories such as
‘desk homily’ and ‘commentary’ (Junod ). These are usually used to distinguish between something with homiletic features that was delivered (regardless of
whether it was written out beforehand) and something with the same or similar
features that was written but not delivered (at least not in a liturgical, catechetical
or missionary setting). Here we arrive at much the same problem as before. If what
has been passed down to us is in the form of a written text, how do we know
whether or not it was ever delivered? At the same time, in a culture of relatively
low literacy levels it cannot be assumed that a ‘commentary’ on scripture was not
in fact produced for reading out loud to a Christian assembly of some kind, and
can therefore be said to qualify as orally delivered instruction. These questions
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are brought to the fore by a work such as Augustine’s Enarrationes in psalmos, a
‘commentary’ put together by Augustine himself, which contains material which
he had written in the style and form of a ‘homily’, but apparently never delivered,
to supplement homilies that he had actually preached (Olivar : ). In the end,
the usefulness of artificial distinctions of this kind needs to be questioned, and
we should perhaps accept that the term ‘homily’ covers a much broader range of
possibilities than is usually admitted. In this respect, medieval sermon studies, a
field which is more advanced, may have something to offer (e.g. Howard , who
introduces the idea of an ‘oral artifact’).
Criteria based on length, structure, intended audience, and the existence or
otherwise of features such as scriptural exegesis and moral exhortation are equally
problematic, since some of the features assumed to be homiletic are also characteristic of other early Christian literary forms, and the arguments used to support
such criteria are again often circular. That a criterion such as length is dependent on
norms based on what survives can be demonstrated by the reappraisal of the length
of Augustine’s preaching occasioned by the discovery of the Dolbeau sermons. In
the case of these sermons, which are doublets of ones already known, the previously known sermons on which such assumptions were based have proved to be
drastically shortened due to editing, such that Dolbeau is five-sixths longer than
Sermon , and Dolbeau contains more than , lines compared to some sixty
in Sermon (Hill ). This finding has implications for distinctions that have
been made between tractates and homilies, which have their basis in large part in
assumptions about length.
Even if we restrict ourselves to preaching in the post-Constantinian era, when
it is presumed that homiletics has settled down into a set of norms, and focus
on preaching in the Latin- and Greek-speaking worlds alone, classification of the
homiletic subtypes, too, fails to be straightforward. Of the categories proposed
(Olivar : –)—exegetical (continuous series, as well as independent homilies) and thematic (catechesis, homilies following the liturgical cycle, panegyrics of
persons both living and dead, moral exhortation, and circumstantial homilies)—
these types, based on content, are inadequate for describing every possibility. As
a result, Olivar is forced to resort to locating together a range of disparate, nonconforming homilies under ‘other’. If study of early Christian homiletics is to continue to progress in a scientific way, a clearer and broader definition of the category
‘homily’ and an alternative classification of its subtypes are an urgent desideratum.
Of equal urgency to early Christian homiletics is a detailed study of how preaching
developed in the third to sixth centuries from Origen onwards, with the virtuoso
homilists relegated to the background, preaching in languages other than Latin and
Greek accorded equal status, and careful attention paid to regional variation and the
progressive absorption or loss of different influences. A small step has been taken
along this path by Topaz (), with his study of the development of homiletic
discourse in late antique and Visigothic Spain.
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Two reference works are essential to any study of early Christian homilies within
the Latin or Greek tradition. For homilists of the first six centuries who preached
in languages other than these, tracking down individual works or gaining a quick
overview of their corpora is more problematic. Of the two key works of reference,
one, the Clavis Patrum Latinorum (CPL) can be frustrating, because of the failure
to assign individual homilies a unique number and entry. It remains, however,
the primary place to look, if one wishes to track down the authorship of a particular homily or to check its authenticity. Of particular use is cross-referencing,
where new editions now exist, to earlier editions in Patrologia Latina (PL) and its
Supplement (PLS). Information concerning the most recent edition, at the time
of the publication of CPL, is always supplied. For the Greek homiletic tradition,
the more detailed, and more helpfully organized, Clavis Patrum Graecorum (CPG)
is an essential reference, although it is important to constantly cross-check the
Supplement with the original volumes in order to ensure the most up-to-date
information. CPG, in particular, assigns uniquely numbered entries to individual
homilies or homiletic series, gives information about the editio princeps, inedita, or
new editions in progress, and, like CPL, provides a cross-reference to older editions
in Patrologia Graeca (PG), where they exist. It also provides references to versions
of homilies in other languages (Syriac, Latin, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Slavic,
Old Russian, Palestino-Aramaic, Arabic), including cataloguing survivals in other
languages when a Greek original is missing. Information about authenticity is an
important feature of both CPL and CPG, since in the process of transmission many
homilies were passed down under the names of a variety of authors.
Establishing and finding the best edition of a homily to use can be a difficult
process. Despite the assistance of CPL and CPG, and the steadily increasing number
of new editions located in major series such as CCSL, CCSG, SC, and Patrologia
Orientalis (PO; – )—occasionally also in Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum
Latinorum (CSEL)—isolated homilies are just as often edited in locations that are
difficult to access, such as doctoral dissertations, articles in journals, and isolated
monographs by less well-known academic publishers. The large numbers of manuscripts which can be involved in establishing a reliable stemma, especially for
major homiletic authors, has tended to lead to the appearance of new editions
of small clusters of homilies or small exegetical series first. With the attention of
editors tending to focus on the more major authors, it is often the case that no
new edition has been attempted since those that appear in PG and PL, which are
themselves simply reprints of editions which were undertaken in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. While a few small corpora have been edited in recent
decades in a single location (Leontius of Constantinople, Leo I, Asterius of Amasea,
Amphilochius of Iconium), in the majority of cases the difficulties just described
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prevail. In the case of Ephrem, whose works (both authentic and dubious) appear
in a variety of languages, the editions by Assemani (–) and Lamy (–),
neither satisfactory, remain the default, while improved editions of some of the
homilies and hymns have appeared subsequently in the series Corpus Scriptorum
Christianorum Orientalium (CSCO; – ) and elsewhere (Griffith : –). In
the case of Severus of Antioch, a sixth-century homilist whose output, originally
preached in Greek, survives mainly in Syriac and occasionally in Coptic translation,
the text available in PO is a diplomatic edition without critical apparatus. In the case
of John Chrysostom, not only is less than per cent of his corpus available in new
scientifically edited texts, but in the case of his exegetical series on the Pauline letters
(a group of homilies), an edition which improves upon that of Montfaucon
(reproduced in PG) was published by Field in the mid-s, but rapidly went out of
print and, due to problems of access and awareness, is only rarely used in preference.
The Montfaucon edition itself (–), upon which one is obliged to rely for the
bulk of Chrysostom’s homilies, is often based on a limited collation of manuscripts,
contains lacunae which can now be filled from elsewhere, and on occasion groups
homilies together as a series without support of the manuscript tradition. The
situation with Augustine is little better, with editions of some homilies in CCSL,
some in Dolbeau, some in articles in Revue Bénédictine and other journals, and yet
others still in PL and PLS. In the majority of cases, consulting CPL and CPG is
indispensable, and immersing oneself in the modern history of the editing of the
homilies of the particular author in which one is interested essential.
A final point to be kept in mind is the issue of the clear identification of individual
homilies. When homilies are cited by those who do not work intimately with
homiletics as a field, this is often done idiosyncratically, which can result in confusion. Because we owe a great deal to European scholarship in this field, Latin was
adopted at an early date as the standard for labelling homilies. Even if this protocol
is observed, since homilists often preached on the same topic more than once, there
often exist in the larger corpora more than one homily with the same or a similar
title (such as In martyres, Hom. in martyres, In martyres omnes). If clear reference
to the editio princeps or to CPG is not also supplied, it can be difficult to distinguish
them. In a corpus such as that of Chrysostom, with move than genuine homilies
and some , dubious or spurious homilies that survive under his name, the
necessity for supplying as much detail as possible when citing an individual homily
is urgent. This is also the point at which the lack of individually numbered entries
for homilies in CPL becomes problematic. In the case of Augustine, with editions
occurring in a number of different locations, clear reference to the edition along
with the sermon number is essential. It is in any case important to be aware that
the order in which a group of homilies is presented, or indeed the grouping of a
number of homilies together, can be unique to a particular edition, with changes
in numbering or grouping occurring between some of the former seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century editions that were commonly used and recent modern editions.
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Aside from problems of definition, the status of editions, and problems of identification, the sheer weight of the methodological issues that face anyone attempting
to use an early Christian homily can be overwhelming. This is due in no small
part to what happened to a homily after it had been delivered. In the case of
Augustine, Origen, Basil of Caesarea, John Chrysostom, Gaudentius of Brescia, and
Gregory the Great, we know that notarii, or stenographers, were often present in the
audience and recorded the homilies verbatim in shorthand as they were delivered
(Olivar : –). In some cases, the homilies were subsequently written out
in full and published without alteration. Some homilies were written down by the
author beforehand and later distributed. In yet other cases, the homilist appears to
have collated his own homilies exegeting the same book of scripture, edited them,
and published them as a commentary. This might even necessitate the production
of new homilies (written, but not delivered) to fill in the gaps. Of Augustine’s
Enarrationes in psalmos, for instance, it is estimated that were actually delivered,
while a further were dictated in the form of a homily (Olivar : ). The
editorial process in such cases could also be undertaken by a colleague of the
homilist, as the title to Chrysostom’s homilies on Hebrews suggests.
The degree to which the homilist had control of what happened to the homily
after it was preached could vary considerably. In the case of John Chrysostom,
the titles appended to a set of homilies he preached in response to major political events are clearly not from his own hand, since in some cases the summary
of the contents and identification of the individuals involved are mistaken (Alan
Cameron : –). This is thought to have occurred early enough that the events
were within memory of the author of the titles, but not so early that they were
remembered accurately. In the case of Chrysostom’s numerous exegetical series,
those on Colossians and Hebrews, at least, were not assembled in their final form
until long after the homilies that constitute them were preached, since they contain
homilies from two separate locations and therefore two different periods in his
career (Allen and Mayer ; ). Homilies could, on the other hand, be edited
quite substantially by later copyists, as homilies were reused in later centuries and
as needs and audiences changed. The significant differences between some of the
Dolbeau sermons of Augustine and previously known versions of the same sermons
have already been mentioned. The alteration could be subtle, with the removal
of difficult words, technical discussions, and references to events and controversies local to the time of Augustine, performed in such a way that the tone was
preserved intact, making it difficult to discern their removal (Hill : ). Such
material, of great interest to us, was clearly of little interest to the medieval copyists
and their intended audience. In the case of Chrysostom’s fifty-five homilies on
Acts, Byzantine editors of the eleventh century added material that they thought
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Chrysostom should have said, and smoothed out his Greek to suit their taste, with
variations between what is thought to be the oldest version (the rough recension)
and the later, smooth recension of up to per cent (Gignac ). In the case of his
homily De resurrectione, a long and a short recension survive, which are identical in
part but otherwise differ substantially. Determining the authenticity of each, which
came first, and their relationship is a difficult and subtle process, and even the most
recent conclusions are provisional (Rambault ).
The categories of ‘dubious’ and ‘spurious’ homilies complicate the picture even
further. The category ‘dubious’ describes those homilies which are a later composite
of material original to an earlier author such as Augustine, extracted and linked in
ways which suited users of the seventh to ninth centuries and later. Worthy of study
in their own right, they also offer a witness to at least fragments of the original compositions. The category ‘spurious’ describes a much more diverse and complicated
body of work. Passed down under another author’s name for a variety of reasons,
these homilies were usually wholly authored by someone else. The corpora of a
number of lesser-known preachers have survived in this manner, such as Leontius
of Constantinople (Datema and Allen ) and Severian of Gabala (Datema ),
usually by attribution to the much more famous Chrysostom; while in the case
of Caesarius of Arles and Maximus of Turin, survival of many of their homilies
depended on the name of Augustine. The case of Ephrem is even more complex.
The relationship between the works attributed to him that survive in Greek and
those that survive in Syriac is distant, and the biographies demonstrate two distinct
personae (Griffith : ). Identifying an ‘author’ or even discussing authenticity
in this instance is problematic, and so we talk of ‘Ephraem Graecus’ and ‘Ephraem
Syrus’ to distinguish the two corpora. To further complicate matters, monks of
the Graeco-Syrian communities of the sixth century, in addition to transmitting
the works of Ephraem Graecus in both Greek and Syriac, composed new mimre
and madrashe in his style and under his name (Griffith : ). Falsification of
a quite different and more malicious kind appears to have occurred towards the
end of John Chrysostom’s career, with at least one homily attributed to him (Sermo
cum iret in exsilium), of which fragments survive, in which the empress Eudoxia is
slandered. This is probably only one of a number of spurious homilies circulated
by his enemies with the intent of exacerbating an already difficult situation, among
which the famous Herodias homily cited by Socrates (Hist. eccl. . ) can probably be numbered (Voicu ). From this it can be seen that knowledge of the
transmission history of a homily or set of homilies and of the relationship between
author and homily is vital, if homilies are to be used with care. It is an unfortunate
fact of working with homilies that certainty in either case is not always achievable,
although it is a goal always to be pursued.
Translation is another means by which the gap between homilist and the homily
handed down to us can widen. We have seen that the corpus attributed to Ephrem
has been passed down from an early period in both Greek and Syriac, and we
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have also seen that the corpus of Severus of Antioch, originally preached in Greek,
survives now almost entirely in Syriac, with a few homilies surviving also in Coptic.
The reasons for translation, and for the particular languages in which the works
of an individual homilist survive, are various. In the case of Severus, the cause is
twofold. In regard to the survival of his works in Syriac, he maintained a Monophysite Christology against the Chalcedonian view which was supported by the
eastern emperors and the West. On his exile in , his works, now labelled heretical,
were at risk, and his supporters moved quickly to preserve them by translating them
into Syriac, the local but less widely known language. Two separate translations are
known: one by Paul of Callinicus produced within ten years of Severus’s departure
into exile, and another by Jacob of Edessa, produced in the first half of the seventh
century. That the strategy worked is indicated by the survival of homilies in
Syriac, while only a few fragments in Greek remain. In the case of their survival in
Coptic, Severus fled in exile to Egypt, where the local church embraced his beliefs
and thus translated his works into the local language for its own benefit (Allen and
Hayward ).
While the works of homilists from the Latin-speaking world were rarely translated into anything other than later western languages, those of homilists from the
Greek-speaking world were frequently translated into Latin as well as a variety of
eastern languages. In the case of John Chrysostom, translations of his homilies and
treatises into Latin occurred at a very early date, such that Jerome, Augustine, and
others were familiar with them. Of other eastern preachers, both genuine and spurious homilies of the Cappadocians, Amphilochius of Iconium, Asterius of Amasea,
Eusebius of Emesa, Athanasius, Theophilus of Alexandria, and many others have
been passed down to us variously in Armenian, Syriac, Georgian, Arabic, Ethiopic,
and Old Slavic. In some cases the translation occurred at a sufficiently early date
that the translation bears witness to a version of the homily older than the Byzantine
manuscripts in which the Greek ‘original’ often survives. Precisely because of this
phenomenon, more serious attention needs to be paid to the surviving translations
of homilies in languages other than Greek and Latin than has hitherto been the case.
The issues of provenance (in which town or city a homily was delivered) and
chronology (sequence and date) are equally critical, and here the peculiarities of
the careers of individual preachers, rather than the problem of what happened
to the homilies once they were out of the preacher’s mouth or hand, play a role.
Throughout their careers homilists did not always preach in the one location, with
Augustine moving between Hippo and Carthage, Chrysostom from Antioch to
Constantinople, and Gregory of Nazianzus from Nazianzus to Constantinople and
back again. Even homilists whose preaching career is largely tied to the one location,
such as Severus of Antioch, did regular circuits out into surrounding towns and
villages, and preached to congregations there, an activity which Basil undertook in
the vicinity of Caesarea and Pontus, and which the Dolbeau sermons show that
Augustine also undertook in the towns of the Medjerda Valley in the vicinity of
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Carthage. Theodoret of Cyrrhus preached at Antioch on several occasions when he
visited there, as too did Eusebius of Emesa. We know from Chrysostom’s remarks in
a homily preached at Constantinople (In illud: Pater meus usque modo operatur) that
the bishop of Galatia had preached in that city on the previous Sunday. Numerous
bishops visited Constantinople during the latter decades of the fourth century,
who presumably also took advantage of the opportunity to deliver a guest homily.
Severian of Gabala preached the majority of those homilies which survive during
his periods of residency in Constantinople, but must also have preached other
homilies in Gabala, his own see. John Chrysostom, Palladius implies, even preached
in Armenia while in exile (Dialogue on the Life of John Chrysostom, ). The issue of
date is thus dependent to a large degree on an accurate map (over space and time)
of an individual homilist’s movements. This necessitates a careful understanding of
the homilist’s life and how his preaching career fitted into it, in addition to knowing
about the history of an individual homily and understanding how it fits into the
corpus.
Because of its dependency on provenance, and because titles to homilies are not
always reliable and we are thus thrown on to internal evidence for determining the
sequence in which homilies were preached (when a large enough corpus exists to
attempt this), the issue of dating homilies is far more complex than has hitherto
been appreciated. In the case of the two largest corpora of homilies which survive,
those of Augustine and John Chrysostom, publications of only very recent appearance have begun to challenge long-accepted schema for dating these homilies.
In the process they have called the fundamentals of the methodology previously
employed into question (Drobner , , ; Mayer , ). What is
remarkable in the case of Augustine is that a complete reappraisal of the dating of
his homilies, taking the Dolbeau sermons into account, which is itself now brought
into question by Drobner, had only just been published (Hombert ). So rapid
has this overturning of the chronology of Augustine’s sermons been that Brown in
his epilogue to the new edition of his Augustine biography, penned in , refers
to the new advances in chronology not of Hombert, but of La Bonnardière (Brown
: ), which emerged as the new authority after the writing of Brown’s original
biography in . The major argument in the work of Drobner and Mayer is that
the methodology previously applied was insufficiently rigorous, and as a result
a completely new methodology for dating homilies needs to be developed. This
requires being more honest about how much weight particular kinds of internal
evidence can bear, and being more scrupulous about matching internal with external evidence. The reappraisal being undertaken in both these corpora has profound
implications for the dating of homilies across the board, and it may prove the case
that achieving an accurate date for homilies within much smaller corpora, except in
isolated cases, will prove impossible. What this latest upheaval counsels is caution
when approaching the conclusions of previous scholars regarding both chronology
and provenance, and the acute necessity of reconsidering the evidence for oneself.
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The growing utilization of homilies as a historical source leads to a further
methodological issue that complicates how we read the evidence. The homily from
Origen onwards is in essence a rhetorical medium. At the same time, one of its
primary purposes is pedagogical. As a result, whatever data relevant to daily life
or to a historical event that a homily contains are often only piecemeal and have
been selected and presented in a way that suits the homilist’s agenda. Reading
such data at face value is ill-advised, and a careful consideration of the context in
which the data occur, as well as the rhetorical medium, is essential (Mayer :
–; ). In addition, distinguishing between an exemplum that is a standard
part of the rhetorical repertoire and an exemplum that has a basis in the realia of
local conditions can be extremely difficult, while the vagaries of the transmission
process (as seen in the case of the Dolbeau sermons, with their restoration of large
slabs of information about the local Donatist situation) can mean that information
that might otherwise change our interpretation of the evidence that we do have is
unfortunately missing.
While the difficulties that attach to utilizing early Christian homilies can be
considerable, this should not be seen as a stumbling block, but as a challenge. The
study of early Christian homiletics, still in its infancy, has much to yield the sensitive
investigator as it is explored in more scientific and novel ways in the years to come.
S R
Despite its antiquity, the best starting point on this topic for the English-language reader
remains Bingham –, bk XIV, ch. iv (in any edition). While some of the specifics
are no longer accurate, the wide-ranging topics give the reader a broad awareness of the
context of preaching in the early Christian era and of some of the local peculiarities. Olivar
(, in Spanish) is the most up-to-date reference on the topic, but is not readily accessible. For discussion of the origins of Christian preaching, Stewart-Sykes () provides a
useful introduction, now supplemented by Maxwell (: ch. ). Cunningham and Allen
() provide the most comprehensive discussion of the relationship between preacher and
audience in the East. A comparable study is still awaited for the West.
B
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Wendy Mayer, FAHA