Having reviewed in Chapter One the historical background to Antony's writings, and having examined in Chapters Two and Three the traditions of preaching and exegesis in which he worked, it is now time to look more closely at the structure of his written work, and in particular at the Sermones Dominicales (or Opus Dominicale, to give it a more accurate title).

This study is based on the Critical Edition of the Sunday and Festival Sermons of St Antony published at Padua in 1979. This is equipped with full critical apparatus, indices, and a helpful introduction in six parts by the Editors. It is based on no less than seventeen codices, the earliest being of the late thirteenth century, the latest of the fifteenth century. Some other codices are known via earlier editions, although the manuscripts themselves are no longer extant. Printed editions of the Sermons appeared in 1520 and 1641 (Paris), 1634 (Avignon), 1883-5 (Bologna and Padua) and 1895-1913 (Padua). The last is the ‘Locatelli’ edition on which much work earlier this century was based. It seems unlikely that the present edition will be superseded in the foreseeable future.

At the beginning of the Sermones Dominicales, Antony sets out his intentions and methodology in a Prologue, basing himself on this text from the first book of Chronicles:

The key words or phrases which he proposes to examine are ‘gold’, ‘David’, and ‘the chariot of the cherubims’. Under ‘gold’, he discusses the four senses of Scripture, as we saw in Chapter Three. Scripture is, as it were, the ‘gold-mine’ from which he draws his raw material. It is ‘the purest’, refined ‘from every defilement of heretical perversity’. In other words, Antony specifically offers his work in the context of the contemporary struggle against heresy, and especially (I have suggested earlier) against Catharism.

Under the term ‘David’ (who represents Christ), Antony briefly considers the development of the spiritual life:

The soul is a garden, in which Christ, like a gardener, plants the sacraments of the faith, and which he then waters when he makes it fertile with the grace of repentance.

This grace is poured out even upon ‘beginners’. Changing the metaphor, Christ gives birth to us like a mother, in the agony of his Passion. Then,

Although the Opus Dominicale was intended for the guidance of friars who were primarily concerned with preaching repentance, and who were therefore mostly dealing with ‘beginners’ in the Christian life, Antony never loses sight of the ‘pilgrim’s progress’ as a whole. His terminology (of ‘beginners’, ‘proficients’, and ‘perfect’) is conventional, and does not hint at any particular characteristics of these stages, as other writers did by speaking of ‘purgative’, ‘illuminative’ and ‘unitive’ ways. Two beautiful images, of Christ the gardener and Christ the mother, dominate this section.

It is when he comes to speak of ‘the chariot of the cherubims, spreading their wings and veiling the ark of the covenant of the Lord’, that Antony gives us his vision of the nature and purpose of his work. The biblical image of the ‘ark of the covenant’ was a popular one with medieval writers. Richard of St Victor famously uses it in his Benjamin Major (‘The Mystical Ark’) as the foundation for his teaching on contemplation. To understand Antony's use of the image, we need to remember just what the ark was, and what it looked like as described in Exodus. Essentially, it was a wooden chest containing the stone tablets of the Law, Aaron’s staff, and a jar of manna. It was equipped with rings and poles enabling it to be carried, as the Israelites journeyed through the wilderness. But the ark was more than just a container. It was surmounted with a golden structure in the form of two ‘cherubim’. These figures from Babylonian mythology had the form of winged bulls. They seem to have been placed facing inwards, with their outstretched wings covering what was called the ‘mercy seat’: evidently the spot where God was imagined as invisibly enthroned. Thus the ark was also a kind of ‘portable throne’ for God. This at any rate seems to be how Antony envisaged it, and he frequently connects it with the other ‘mobile throne’ described by Ezekiel, although it is not easy to say exactly how this is to be imagined. The base in this case consisted of four winged bull-like creatures (whom we may refer to as ‘cherubim’) and also of four ‘wheels’. Above this was a platform or ‘firmament’ upon which was a throne upon which the Lord sat. In his sermon for Pentecost, Antony interprets the ‘wheels’ as the apostolic preaching upon which the Church goes forward, and connects the whole structure with ‘the chariots of Aminadab’ in Canticles 6.11, and the ‘chariots of the Lord which are salvation’ of Habbakuk 3.8. The word the Vulgate uses in both these cases is ‘quadriga’.

Antony proposes to use the gold of Scripture to construct a ‘quadriga’ of his own. The two cherubim represent the two Testaments, whose wings are ‘spread out’ when they are expounded by the three spiritual senses mentioned before. The ‘ark’ itself is the faithful soul, in the ‘covenant’ of Baptism, protected by the scriptural teaching from the world, the flesh and the devil- or, as Antony puts it more poetically,

The ark of the covenant was carried on poles, but the chariot throne of Ezekiel had wheels, and it is this image that Antony develops.

In this last phrase, Antony neatly uses a common image for the work of a Scriptural commentator, and picks up the image of scriptuire as the ‘grain of wheat’ which he had used at the beginning.

Antony’s use of the term ‘quadriga’ was not original- we have noticed it already in, for instance, Guibert and Chobham. Gregory somewhere speaks of the two Testaments as the two wheels of the Church's chariot, presumably because he still knew that the Roman ‘quadriga’ was a two-wheeled vehicle drawn by four horses. In the middle ages it was imagined as a four-wheeled waggon, like those used in many Italian cities in civic ceremonies. Antony’s originality consisted in using the ‘quadriga’ not as an image of the four senses of Scripture, but to refer to the liturgical readings around which he would build his commentaries. In doing so, he gives his whole work a practical and pastoral framework, relating it to the weekly and annual round of the Church’s worship, as experienced by the ordinary Christian at Mass, and by the preacher in the Divine Office.

This was referred to in passing in Chapter Two. It is a list of texts (auctoritatum huius operis principia) from which ‘elici potest thema sermonis’. In the Critical Edition, it is broken down by the Editors, and printed section by section before the relevant Sunday, so that its significance is not at first sight evident; but in its original form it was a single list, beginning with Septuagesima. In certain mss. the order is different, but internal evidence suggests strongly that this was a later rearrangement, perhaps to follow the liturgical practice of beginning the year with Advent, and, in the case of the Sundays after Pentecost, to accommodate local variations in the Lectionary. The table gives us straightaway some information about the shape and scope of the work as Antony envisaged it. For each Sunday, the Gospel ‘principium’ is given, and subdivided into ‘clausulae’ (usually three or four, occasionally fewer or more). Each division then contains several ‘sermones’, related to a text. In the case of Septuagesima and Sexagesima, the table also gives the Introit, Epistle and ‘History’, as well as the Gospel, but this practice is not continued, and is the main indication that the Septuagesima beginning is original. For Septuagesima, Antony also writes: ‘In the first section of this gospel you will find at least these themes for sermons, or texts for preaching on.’ As this is the most elaborate section of the tabula, I will quote it in full:

Thereafter, the formula is fairly constant:

As the table proceeds, the word ‘sermon’ is often omitted, and we have just: ‘Again (item), on...’. From the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost (the halfway point of the work), a further variation is introduced: ‘A theme for a sermon on...’, ‘A theme on...’, although the earlier forms still occur, especially the simple ‘item’. Possibly this change marks some break in composition (at least of the table).

The tabula gives us an indication of the way Antony intended to relate his Opus Evangeliorum to the needs of individual preachers. In no way was the material compiled for any given Sunday to be regarded as ‘a sermon’. It was a resource from which a number of possible sermons might be drawn, a ‘text-book’ (in several senses) of materia praedicabilis. Before we move on, I would offer one small word of warning about the Critical Edition. As well as breaking up the tabula into sections, the Editors number the paragraphs of the main text, ostensibly according to the sermones suggested in the tabula. While this is true in principle, a close reading of the text suggests (to me at least) that the Editors’ subdivisions are not the only ones possible.

I discussed these at some length in Chapter Three and therefore I will not repeat what was said there. Those prologi which are not specifically addressed (in the tabula thematum) to the work of the preacher (such as those on the Nativity or the Passion, on the Blessed Virgin, on penitence or confession) seem nevertheless to have been intended to give a general orientation to the preacher. J.G. Bougerol has called the prologi a species or subspecies of ‘prothema’, and suggests, with plausibility, that they were written by Antony at the time he was compiling and organizing his material for a given Gospel.

The second part of the prologus consonans is a brief outline of what is to follow: the divisions of the Gospel, the corresponding divisions of the Epistle, the Introit and the source of the Historiae. This is not followed absolutely always: there are exceptions. For instance, in the prologue to the third Sunday in Lent, four parts of the story of Joseph are referred to, but in the main body of the sermon the second of these is divided into two, while the third and fourth are run together.

Neither time nor space permit a comprehensive discussion of every point treated in Antony’s work, so I will limit myself to a reasonably broad survey. As mentioned previously, Antony begins with Septuagesima. This is unusual, since the ecclesiastical year began then, as now, with Advent. In the Festival cycle of sermons (to which we shall return), he begins with Christmas. However, on Septuagesima the Mattins readings returned to the first chapter of Genesis, beginning a course preparing for Easter. By beginning here, Antony was able to start with a consideration of Creation. This may indicate that he saw his work as a comprehensive theological treatment: it certainly reflects the fact that this was a fundamental point of issue between Catholicism and Catharism. Here and elsewhere Antony balances allegorical (Christological or Ecclesiological) and moral interpretations. The allegory based on the Creation story concerns the mysteries of Christ's life- his Birth, Baptism, Passion, Resurrection, Ascension, sending of the Spirit and coming in Judgement. The moral teaching deals with contrition, confession, satisfaction, the love of God and neighbour, the active and contemplative lives and final perseverance. The Gospel of the day is that of the labourers in the vineyard, but on this first Sunday it takes a subordinate place.

Usually, the Gospel is primary. For Sexagesima it is that of the sower. Although the general application of the ‘sower’ image is to Christ (allegory), the interpretation of the types of soil follows a moral pattern. On Quinquagesima, the consideration of the blind man is also predominantly moral, and includes two other blind men, Tobit and the bishop of Laodicea. When we come to Lent, the Editors divide the material for the first Sunday into two ‘Sermones’, but this is not in accord with the tabula thematum; rather, there is first a Christological allegory regarding the ‘desert’ theme, and Adam, followed by a moral treatment of penitence, with some quite detailed advice for confessors. On the second Sunday, there really are two treatments, one of the Transfiguration and the other of the Canaanite woman. This reflects different liturgical practice. At the beginning, the Franciscans followed the liturgical usage of the Roman Curia, whereas the Dominicans followed that of the French dioceses. Here and elswhere, Antony’s approach may reflect partly Franciscan usage, partly that of the Church in the Bologna-Padua region. On this Sunday, the treatment of both Gospels is mainly moral, as it is on the third and fourth Sundays in Lent. On the fifth Sunday, and on Palm Sunday, the emphasis shifts towards a consideration of the Passion of Christ, but moral interpretation is never far away. Only very occasionally do we find any concern for the literal sense, and then it is usually only in passing. For instance, in commenting on the Gospel for the fifth Sunday in Lent (John 8.48-50), Antony explains the origin of the Samaritans; and on Palm Sunday he has a little about the situation of the Mount of Olives relative to Jerusalem, and about apparent disgreements regarding Mary's anointing of Jesus at Bethany; but such literal interpretations are few in number and short in extent. There are rather more instances of anagogic interpretation, such as quotations from Innocent III on the glorified body on Septuagesima and Pentecost IV, but this too is of marginal interest to Antony. This survey of the pre-Easter ‘Sermones’ is sufficient to give an idea of Antony’s approach.

Antony's ‘quadriga’ would seem to be a compilation, in which he combines pre-existing material (quite probably such as he had himself preached) with passages written for the work itself. Bougerol offers an analysis of the sermon for Low Sunday, which seeks to differentiate these two elements; I do not think it is necessary to follow him in any detail here. I am content to agree with his general conclusion, namely that

Antony gives minor prologues to introduce the months in the latter part of the year (June to November), and for Advent. These outline the themes for the period. The Opus Dominicale ends with a brief Epilogue. A recent study suggests some echoes of the 1221 Rule and the ‘Testament’ of St Francis (his final message to his friars), which would fit well with the date of completion of the work.

As the Festival Sermons are of marginal relevance to the study of Antony’s technique of ‘concordance’- it scarcely appears in them- I shall note only that this latter series is incomplete (in the sense of not containing the later festivals of the year) and it may be that even the sermons we have are not in the form Antony would have given them if he had lived longer. For each festival there is an exposition of the Gospel of the day, though less elaborate than those for the Sunday Gospels, followed by what the Editors describe as a ‘sermo allegoricus’ and a ‘sermo moralis’, and occasionally also a ‘sermo anagogicus’. The term ‘festival’ is taken broadly- it includes, for instance, Ash Wednesday and Rogation-tide. It could well be that the material in these sermons is closer to what Antony actually preached than that in the more highly edited Sunday sermons.

 4.2 The theological sources of the Sermones.

If Antony’s ‘Quadriga’ is an assembly or collection, of what materials is it composed? What are Antony’s sources? I will divide them into theological and secular, and try to show how Antony handles them.

The Bible is the first, most extensive and most easily identified of all Antony’s sources. The Scriptural Index of the Critical Edition fills more than one hundred columns, over sixty for the Old Testament, about forty for the New. In general, Antony quotes from the Vulgate, but he not infrequently adopts readings and versions found in the Liturgy or the Fathers. When he cites Scripture in the Sermones Dominicales, he gives only the Book; in the Sermones Festivi he gives Book and chapter, indicating that between the composition of the two sets he became acquainted with the recent developments in the division and referencing of Scripture. In my own translations of the Sermones I have used the Douai-Challenor version, with minor adjustments, as it provides the closest available parallel with the grammatical structure of the Latin. As Chapter Five will be particularly concerned with Antony’s handling of Scripture, I will say no more here.

Antony uses Jerome (over a hundred times) and Isidore (over four hundred and fifty times) to furnish definitions and meanings of words: I will give just a few samples:

Antony makes occasional use of other ancient authors, such as Bede. G. Gasparotto has recently suggested that Antony’s copious use of Isidore was not least because Isidore was a follower of Gregory, and is part of the Gregorian programme followed by Antony.

After the Bible, in terms of volume, comes the Gloss, which is also accorded its own Index in the Critical Edition, of more than twenty columns. Antony does not always refer to it explicitly, but it is a constant presence- in Beryl Smalley's words, ‘Antony turned to the Gloss on almost every quotation which needed some exposition if it were to serve his purpose.’ Of the other standard reference books, the ‘Sentences’ of Peter Lombard and the Historia Scholastica of Peter Comestor are used sparingly, although when they are used, some quite substantial passages are quoted. Antony makes virtually no use of Gratian, whose Decretals were often quarried by other writers for Patristic quotations. He makes a little use of other ‘modern’ authors, such as Beleth and Neckham. At one time, Antony’s use of these works was held to show that he was very much influenced by the spirit of the Biblical renaissance that marked the twelfth century in Paris. More recently, writers such as Pompei and Smalley have stressed that Antony is much more faithful to the monastic ethos in which he was trained at Coimbra, than to the methods of disputatio and dialectic that marked the non-monastic schools.

It is well-known that there was considerable intellectual cross-fertilization between Jewish and Christian scholars in northern France in the twelfth century. The Gloss itself (in its basic conception and lay-out) may be inspired by the Talmud, with its core-text surrounded by comments by recognised authorities. The school of Rashi was untypical of rabbinic scholarship generally in its concern for the literal meaning of Scripture, having this in common with the Victorines. Given the strong Jewish presence in Iberia, it is tempting to ask whether we can detect any similar influence upon Antony. Maimonides was born in Cordoba in 1135, and though he died in Egypt, his influence was strong in the west. T. Lorenzin has recently claimed to find traces of rabbinic methods in the Sermones, although I have to say that I do not find his arguments entirely convincing. Further research in this area would be very welcome.

Regarding these, I have already said much in Chapter Two. In the appendix, Table I shows the frequency of citation from Augustine, Gregory, Bernard and Innocent, demonstrating how much more often Antony uses Gregory than the others. It is also possible to see that Antony quotes these authors substantially more often in the first half of the Sermones Dominicales than in the second; and the frequency drops still further in the Marian and Festival Sermons, apart from St Bernard.

I speak of Antony ‘quoting’ his authorities; in fact, he more often uses them allusively, or in paraphrase possibly relying on his memory. To illustrate, I will give some samples from Augustine:

One can find similar examples from Gregory and Bernard.

 4.3 Secular Sources of the Sermones; the ‘Concordance of Nature’.

As he had noted in his Prologue, Antony ornamented his Sermones with copious illustrations from Natural History- animals, birds and insects, plants and minerals, are in constant evidence. Where did he get this material from, and how did he use it? This would make a fascinating study in itself, but here we can only look at a few examples, in order to give depth and perspective to our understanding of his Biblical technique. To begin with, the identification of his sources is not straightforward, as I will try to show from what I call:

In his Sermo for the third Sunday of Lent, Antony refers to a certain bird, whose name he does not give; in the tabula thematum for this Sunday, however, he offers a sermon ‘de natura avis caladriae’. What was this ‘caladrius’? Another version of the word is ‘charadrius’, and Liddell & Scott gives ‘c a r a d r i o V , a bird dwelling in clefts (c a r a d r a i ), whence its name, the curlew.’ What Antony says about it is:

An obvious place to start looking is that root of most Medieval science, Aristotle’s Historia Animalium. The first Latin translation, by Michael Scot from a ninth century Arabic version, ‘was certainly finished before 1217’, so it could have been known to Antony (and I strongly suspect it was); but all Aristotle says about the curlew is

Pliny calls it the ‘avis icterus’, and adds ‘If it is looked at, they say that a sick person is healed and the bird dies’, while Aelianus gives the further information

This gives us a bird whose gaze has healing properties, but Antony claims more: its averted gaze signifies death. Furthermore, he returns to this curious bird in his Festival Sermon for the Litanies, and tells us more:

 This goes far beyond anything we have found in our sources: we must search further. Among the books in the library of São Vicente was ‘Hugo, de bestiis’, almost certainly the ‘De bestiis et aliis rebus’ of Hugo de Folieto, often attributed (even by Migne) to Hugh of St Victor. In chapter XLVIII we find:

 Here at last we find the ‘averted gaze’ as a sign of death, and a specific parallel with Christ, but we are still not quite at our goal. Antony refers to the curlew ‘drawing out’ the sickness, and flying with it into the sun's rays, where it is consumed. It is in Peter Damian’s ‘De bono religioso statu’ that we find some more about the curlew, including:

We are clearly dealing with bestiary lore that was wide-spread and well-known. It may be that Antony ‘litteris secularibus minus abundaverat’ according to Thomas Gallus’ lights, but he was clearly well-versed in popular science, and knew where to find it.

As I noted earlier, most of such medieval science stemmed, directly or indirectly, from Aristotle; yet Antony is very reticent about his pagan sources, which are referred to by general terms such as ‘Naturalia’, ‘Philosophus’, ‘Poeta’. He mentions Solinus by name four times in all (though he uses him more often), Pliny is never named, and Aristotle (along with Cicero) is named only in a passage about unbelievers whose eloquence or wisdom will not save them: ‘Argentum eloquentiae et aurum sapientiae non liberabit Tullium et Aristotelem in die furoris Domini’ , and even this sounds like a quotation. Unlike Augustine, Gregory and Bernard, the pagans could not be ‘authorities’, and were included only to pander to the ‘fastidiousness’ of contemporary taste. Yet cited they were, and in abundance. While it is not always easy to identify the precise sources, Antony handles them with confidence and freedom. In fact, I am inclined to think that this material was far more than ‘embellishment’, but yet another way of subtly counteracting the Cathars disdain for the created world, as well as a transposition into a mode more characteristic of Antony’s learned background of St Francis’ spontaneous delight in the natural world. Some years after Antony’s death, the Dominican master-general, Humbert of Romans, wrote of him:

The book of creation was second only to the Scriptures themselves as a means to understanding the Divine message. Just as Antony ‘concorded’ the Old Testament with the New in order to exhibit the unity of the Scriptures, so he ‘concorded’ the world of Nature with the Gospel to exhibit the harmony of nature and grace. To see how he did this, and as a point of comparison with the analysis of Scriptural ‘concordance’ in the next chapter, let us look at just a few examples: the Dung-beetle, the Spider, and the Ear, together with the corresponding passages from the Historia Animalium.

Aristotle wrote:

In his Sermon for the feast of St Stephen, Antony writes:

A good Franciscan moral!

Aristotle wrote:

Antony uses this as follows, following Aristotle quite closely:

Aristotle’s description is:

When Antony wants to talk about the sense of hearing to make a moral point, he says:

As I say, it would make a fascinating study in itself to examine how far Antony depends directly on Aristotle, how far on Pliny, Solinus, Hugo or whoever; but I have only wanted to illustrate the very skilful way in which Antony uses ‘Natural History’ in order to make his points, and to hold the attention of audiences who would have had a great appetite for such knowledge.

While Antony's knowledge of the natural sciences seems quite extensive, it is not perhaps this that Thomas Gallus meant by ‘litterae saeculares’. Antony is much less conversant with pagan literature and pagan authors in general. They appear seldom, and usually under the guise of ‘Philosophus’ or ‘Poeta’. ‘Philosophus’ is generally either Cicero, Seneca or Publius Syrus; occasionally Aristotle, and once (surprisingly) Isidore. He is cited twenty times, but there are other quotations from Cicero, for instance, that are not credited. ‘Poeta’ is an even rarer character, making only four appearances; twice (but the same line) for Ovid, once for Horace and once (but only in a quotation from Innocent III) for Vergil. Ovid is quoted in several other places: Antony likes the lines from the Remedium Amoris:

and as São Vicente possessed a copy of Ovid, it is not unlikely that it formed part of Antony's early education; but apart from that he probably knew both ‘Philosophus’ and ‘Poeta’ only from florilegia.

Copyright in this Dissertation belongs to the author, S.R.P.Spilsbury