A while back, I found out that my friend and parish priest, who is an authority on Augustine of Hippo, did not own a copy of the Latin text of Augustine’s City of God (De civitate Dei). That clearly had to be remedied. But what text should I find for him?
On this question, I found almost everything I needed to know in an article by James J. O’Donnell, “Augustine’s City of God,” which he was commissioned to write in 1983 but which was never subsequently published. (O’Donnell is a great advocate of “open access” scholarship: whenever he can, he makes his publications available for free online, which has sometimes involved “buying back” the rights to a book from his publisher after the original print run has sold out.) What follows is largely a summary of what O’Donnell reports, with links to public-domain scans of each edition when these are available.
The Maurist edition (1685)
The text prepared by the Benedictines of the Congregation of Saint-Maur (the “Maurists”), which appeared in 1685 as the seventh volume of their eleven-volume edition of the complete works of Augustine (1679–1700), superseded all that had come before. (I have not yet succeeded in finding a scan of the original edition, but a 1700 reprint can be consulted in the digital collection of the Bavarian State Library.) The Maurist text was reprinted many times, with annotations by later scholars, and finally in Migne’s Patrologia Latina 41 (1845).
Two modern critical editions have attempted to replace the Maurist text, and but it retains an independent value of its own. The Maurist edition and the critical edition most commonly used today (that by Dombart and Kalb, described below) between them give variant readings from a total of thirty-seven manuscripts, but only four of these manuscripts were collated in both editions. O’Donnell reports that there 394 manuscripts containing all or part of De ciuitate Dei are known to have survived from Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (more than even of Augustine’s Confessiones). Writing in 1983, he notes that more manuscripts might become known through the “HUWA catalogue,” viz., Die handschriftliche Überlieferung der Werke des heiligens Augustinus, under the general editorship of Clemens Weidmann. I see that the most recent volume held in the University of Toronto library system (vol. 11) appeared in 2010.
Hoffmann’s CSEL text
Of the two modern critical texts, the less influential is that in the Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (CSEL), number 40 (in two volumes), edited by Emanuel Hoffmann:
The first volume of Hoffmann’s edition received negative reviews when it appeared (e.g., that by P. Lejay in Revue critique d’histoire et de littérature n.s. 50, no. 1 [January 1, 1900]: 165–66). Hoffmann responded indignantly to his critics in the preface to the second volume, but he died before he could see them double down on earlier assessment (e.g., P. Lejay in Revue critique d’histoire et de littérature n.s. 51 [January 7, 1901]: 326–28).
The Dombart/Kalb Teubner text
The other modern edition, which in a revised form holds the field today, is that in the Bibliotheca Teubeneriana, originally edited by Bernhard Dombart and later revised by Alfons Kalb:
1st edition (1863) vol. 1, books 1–13
vol. 2, books 14–222nd edition (1877–92) vol. 1, books 1–13 (1877)
vol. 2, books 14–22 (1892)3rd edition: vol. 2 1905) revised by Dombart, who died in 1907; vol. 1 (1908) revised by Alfons Kalb vol. 1 (1908) (requires US IP address)
vol. 2 (1905) (requires US IP address)4th edition (1928–29), revised by Alfons Kalb vol. 1 (1928)
vol. 2 (1929)
(still under copyright, no online access)
A so-called “fifth edition” was published in the Bibliotheca Teubneriana in 1981 (and reprinted again, without alteration, in 1993). This is merely a photographic reprint of the fourth edition, enhanced only by the addition of the text of Augustine’s two “Letters to Firmus,” edited by Johannes Divjak, which were inserted as pp. xxxv–xlix in vol. 1. These letters, which give important information about the genesis and early circulation of the text of De ciuitate Dei, were discovered by Cyrille Lambot and first published by him (from two manuscripts) in 1939. Divjak’s texts of these letters are also available in his contribution to the ongoing CSEL edition of Augustine’s works, Epistulae in duobus codicibus nuper in lucem prolatae (CSEL 88, 1981), as Ep. 1A (pp. 7–9) and Ep. 2 (pp. 9–21).
Re-use of the Dombart/Kalb text
The text of the fourth Teubner edition was reprinted without (deliberate) alteration in the Corpus Christianorum: Series Latina (2 vols., CCSL 47–48, 1955):
- vol. 1 (books 1–10) (free one-hour loan from Internet Archive)
- vol. 2 (books 11–22) (free one-hour loan from Internet Archive)
It was also printed, with a facing French translation and copious learned notes, in the Bibliothèque Augustinienne (5 vols., BA 33–37, 1959–60):
- vol. 1 (BA 33), books 1–5
- vol. 2 (BA 34), books 6–10
- vol. 3 (BA 35), books 11–14
- vol. 4 (BA 36), books 15–18
- vol. 5 (BA 37), books 19–22
It was likewise taken as the basis of the Latin text of the Loeb Classical Library edition (7 vols., LCL 411–17), with a facing English translation made by several different scholars. The few verbal departures from Dombart-Kalb introduced by the translators are advertised in the footnotes. The punctuation of the Latin texts was also modified according to English conventions:
- vol. 1, books 1–3 (trans. George E. McCracken, LCL 411, 1957)
- vol. 2, books 4–7 (trans. William M. Green, LCL 412, 1963)
- vol. 3, books 8–11 (trans. David S. Wiesen, LCL 413, 1968)
- vol. 4, books 12–15 (trans. Philip Levine, LCL 414, 1966)
- vol. 5, books 16–18.35 (trans. Eva Matthews Sanford and William McAllen Green, LCL 415, 1965)
- vol. 6, books 18.36–20 (trans. William Chase Green, LCL 416, 1960)
- vol. 7, books 21–22 (trans. William M. Green, LCL 417, 1972)
Such is the state of play as far as critical texts go.
More recent textual scholarship
The study of the text of De ciuitate Dei has not stood still. I came across the following very interesting and useful article (itself in Latin!):
Bengt Alexanderson, “Adnotationes criticae in libros Augustini de civitate Dei,” Electronic Antiquity 3, no. 7 (May 1997), https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ElAnt/V3N7/alex.html
Alexanderson begins by listing numerous typographical errors in the CCSL presentation of the Dombart-Kalb text. He then considers the textual basis of the CCSL/Dombart-Kalb edition, listing a number of preferable readings found in manuscripts that were undervalued by the editors and a number of erroneous readings transmitted by manuscripts treated by the editors as the most reliable (including the most ancient copy, MS V, which contains books 11–16 and was copied in North Africa in the early fifth century!). He concludes that it will probably be impossible to construct a genealogical stemma of the manuscripts, because there has been too much cross-contamination of variant readings. There follows a lengthy list of corrections (and reasons for them) that Alexanderson proposes for emending the CCSL/Dombart-Kalb edition.
An édition de luxe of 1924
O’Donnell does not mention a very interesting (and extremely sumptuous) edition that was published in 1924 in a deluxe format, printed by the monks of Bremen in a limited run of just 385 copies. The text is that of the 3rd Teubner edition (ed. Dombart, completed by Kalb, 1905–8), but with a number of emendations by Carolus Weyman, drawn mainly from the critical apparatus of both Dombart and Hoffmann. These changes are noted in an appendix (Adnotatio critica), with the variant readings of Dombart and Hoffmann marked under the sigla “D” and “H”.
A high-resolution colour scan of copy number 95 (of 385) of this edition has been made freely available by the University of Heidelberg.
There is also one physical copy in Toronto (copy number ), held by our own Graham Library at Trinity College (Rare Book Upjohn-Waldie 1924b S28 fol.). When I perused this copy in person, I took some photos of it beside a 15″ ruler to capture an idea of its grandeur:
From a purely aesthetic perspective, it’s hard to imagine a more pleasing edition of De ciuitate Dei than this one. And the Latin text is perfectly serviceable. The very generous margins are crying out for annotations incorporating Bengt Alexanderson’s emendations.
So, what do you think I decided to do for my friend? See the sequel!