Sometime in the early fifth century, in a basilica in Roman North Africa, Augustine of Hippo preached on the oddest ghost story in the Bible and then refused to tell his congregation what it meant. He laid out the problem, sketched the possible readings of it, and sent everyone home to think about it. The follow-up came the following Wednesday, and even then he weighed the options without issuing a particular verdict, it seems.1
We learned that this all happened just recently.
In 2024, Christian Tornau, a Latinist at the University of Würzburg, took a phone call from an employee of the Bad Doberan Monastery Association in northern Germany. The ask was whether he would help decipher a twelfth-century manuscript, copied at Bad Doberan Abbey and now held in the diocesan library at Pelplin, Poland. The manuscript happened to contain six sermons that were attributed to Augustine. Four of the sermons were already known to scholars, but two of them were not.2
Skepticism was surely the correct first response, and Tornau had it. Medieval scribes attached Augustine’s name to texts he never wrote with the same enthusiasm a modern publicist might, because his name was the surest way to get a text taken seriously. So Tornau assembled roughly twenty Latin scholars in Vienna to subject the two unknown sermons to testing, and the panel agreed they are indeed authentic. The style, the humor, the distinctively North African tenor of the prayers all pointed to the bishop himself.3
A critical edition, prepared with Dorothea Weber and Clemens Weidmann, is expected from CSEL, the Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, by the end of this year.
Both of the new (to us) sermons concern the Witch of Endor. As it turns out, she’s not from the LOTR Universe either.
The séance in the canon
First Samuel 28 is the passage preachers likely hope the lectionary skips. Saul stands on the eve of battle with the Philistines, and God has basically ghosted him. No dreams, no Urim, and no prophets. Desperate, the king who once expelled the mediums from Israel disguises himself, travels by night to Endor, and asks a medium to bring up the prophet Samuel from the dead.
So she does, as one would. Or something does. A figure rises, identifies itself as Samuel, and delivers the worst oracle in Israel’s story: the kingdom is torn away, the army will fall, and “tomorrow you and your sons shall be with me” (1 Sam 28:19, NRSVue). Saul collapses on the floor of the medium’s house, and the next day he dies on Mount Gilboa.
The passage absolutely tormented ancient interpreters, and for good reason. Torah bans necromancy outright, yet here sits a séance inside the canon, and it actually works. Every available reading costs you a doctrine in exchange somewhere to make it all fit. If the figure really was Samuel, then a forbidden practice successfully summoned a true prophet of God. If it was a demon impersonating Samuel, then a demon delivered accurate prophecy and we have folks summoning demons in the name of Israel. If God permitted the whole scene as some sort of judgment on Saul, the question only moves upstream a little way and remains a problem.
Why would a good and sovereign God let a diabolical act like this succeed at all? That is the theodicy problem in miniature, and it is exactly where, according to Tornau, the first of the newly recovered sermons ends. Augustine posed the question, laid out the understood interpretations, and then stopped. The congregation carried the problem home with them. On Wednesday he took it up again and weighed the readings against each other, still declining at that point to force a singular conclusion. Tornau describes the method as characteristic of Augustine. Present the options, withhold the final judgment, and allow the audience to actually do some of the thinking for themselves.4
A quick note on sources before going any further. The sermons themselves remain unpublished until the CSEL edition appears, so everything above rests on the University of Würzburg’s announcement and Tornau’s public comments thus far. The Latin is still in Pelplin. Whatever else those texts contain, we will find out in their totality when the scholars do their work to completion, and any conclusions drawn here obviously stand ready to be corrected by the texts themselves. That’s my obligatory disclaimer.
The Augustine we got instead
Here is the difficulty, though, from what we do know so far of this new discovery. The Augustine who largely shaped Western Christianity is not the man in that pulpit. That’s a pretty big statement but hear me out.
The Augustine the West assimilated is the anti-Pelagian controversialist of the later published works. From him we received guilt transmitted biologically from Adam to every infant ever born, a doctrine that has become virtually undisputed Christian orthodoxy even though it shouldn’t have. Humanity as a massa damnata, a condemned lump from which God rescues some and passes over the rest. Unbaptized babies excluded from salvation, by the way. Election settled by decree before the foundation of the world, with no reference to anything a person would ever do or choose. Luther, in the 16th century, absorbed that Augustine through his Augustinian priestly order and built the Reformation’s doctrine of the bondage of the will on its foundation. Calvin further systematized it. American evangelicalism still runs on this same fuel, even in congregations that have never read a page of him and couldn’t articulate the doctrines in any cogent way.
The tempting move now is to claim the newly found sermons as some sort of evidence of a secret Augustine, a generous soul hiding behind the doctrinaire, but the evidence will not likely go there. The Endor preacher and the theologian of the massa damnata occupied the same skull, often in the same decade. He returned to the Endor passage elsewhere in his writings and worried over it there too.5 What the recovered sermons do expose is a particular method rather than a hidden theology. A question held open across three days, interpretations offered as viable options, and a congregation trusted to reason alongside its bishop. Tornau even reads in these sermons Augustine’s willingness to consider that everyone, including those who appear most evil, remains capable of salvation through God’s grace, a pairing of “intellectual honesty and episcopal humility” he considers very Augustinian.6 The tradition chose to keep his verdicts and discard his patience, unfortunately, and that editorial decision was made everywhere, over centuries, by people who found particular verdicts easier to enforce.
The crack in the Augustinian foundation
There is a further problem with the verdicts themselves, and that exists in the text Augustine was reading.
Augustine worked from Latin translations of Paul’s writings. In Romans 5:12, Paul wrote that death spread to all eph’ ho all sinned, a Greek phrase meaning “because” or “inasmuch as” all sinned. Augustine’s Latin text rendered it in quo omnes peccaverunt: “in whom all sinned.” In whom. On that reading, all of humanity sinned in Adam, guilt passing down the bloodline almost like a title deed. David Bentley Hart has argued that this mistranslation ranks among the most consequential errors in all of Christian history; a defective pronoun that helped generate the entire Western architecture of inherited guilt.7 Augustine was arguably the most formidable mind Latin Christianity ever produced, and he built brilliantly, but he built where his available text pointed. Eleven centuries later, Luther read Paul through an Augustinian lens and inherited the direction along with the doctrines.
That argument is quite substantial and it calls for more room than this essay can give it, and it will get that room here soon and include in a forthcoming essay.
Wednesday
The tradition had two Augustines available to it and it chose the one with the pat answers. That choice is understandable. Answers travel well, fit neatly in catechisms, and give institutions something specific to enforce. Questions and open-ended problems require a congregation you trust, a bishop willing to wait, and one that will be okay with the eventual conclusions.
The other Augustine survived anyway, as it turns out, the way texts survive: copied at a Baltic abbey in the twelfth century from an exemplar now lost, shelved in a Polish diocesan library, unread for eight hundred years until someone picked up a phone. What came back is a small thing in the big scheme, two sermons on an obscure and troubling passage, but for three days in Hippo, the hardest question in the room belonged to the people in those pews. Their bishop handed it to them and let them noodle on it until the following Wednesday. Sixteen centuries on down the road, that may end up being the most radical thing discovered in the manuscript.
Endnotes
1. University of Würzburg, “Two New Sermons by St Augustine Discovered,” einBLICK, 2026, https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/einblick/single/news/two-new-sermons-augustine-discovered/ (accessed July 2026).
2. Pelplin, Diocesan Library, Codex 114 (195). Details of the discovery from the Würzburg release and subsequent reporting.
3. Tornau organized a summer school in Vienna in autumn 2025 at which twenty additional Latin scholars examined the sermons; all agreed they are authentic. University of Würzburg release.
4. Tornau, Würzburg release, on the two-sermon structure (Sunday service ending with the theodicy question; options weighed the following Wednesday) and on the open-ended didactic approach as typical of Augustine.
5. Augustine’s earlier treatments of 1 Samuel 28 include De diversis quaestionibus ad Simplicianum 2.3 and De octo Dulcitii quaestionibus 6. In the latter, following Tertullian, he leans toward reading the apparition as a diabolical likeness of Samuel rather than the prophet himself.
6. Christian Tornau, quoted in “Lost Sermons from One of Christianity’s Greatest Saints Discovered After 1,600 Years,” Fox News, July 2026, https://www.foxnews.com/travel/lost-sermons-christianitys-greatest-saints-discovered-after-1600-years.
7. David Bentley Hart, “Traditio Deformis,” First Things, May 2015.
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