When Augustine preaches on the Beatitudes

Format and Strategy

Resumen

Augustine’s sermons 53 and 53A deal with the beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5). These texts are two different sermons with different emphases, preached on two separate instances for different occasions. In both sermons, Augustine briefly addresses all the beatitudes, and then singles out one in particular for further discussion. The beatitude selected is then extensively analysed in both sermons in a part that has its own structure. Because the existing, mainly content-oriented division into chapters in Lambot’s edition (CCSL 41) –in 16 and 14 chapters respectively–makes it difficult to identify the rhetorical arrangement of the sermons, the texts have now been examined on the basis of a new method, which does not initially focus on content but on form. This method is based on a two-pronged analysis of linguistic and Scriptural signals. Application of this method has demonstrated that both sermons, despite their differences, are based on one and the same format: a division into four parts, which Augustine himself presented as a kind of standard division in doctr. chr. 4.