Pseudo-Augustine: De Cataclysmo

This sermon, transmitted among the works of Augustine, is addressed to the newly baptized and to those about to receive baptism. It warns that baptism begins a struggle against vice rather than ending it: the baptized Christian is like a ship newly fitted out and launched, which still needs a helmsman until it reaches harbour, for the sea of this world is full of storms, rocks and the beasts of desire. The title refers to the Flood, and the sermon goes on to read the great events of the Old Testament as figures of baptism and of Christ, including the rod of Moses that swallowed the serpents of Pharaoh’s magicians, understood as the cross and the teaching of Christ overcoming heretics.

Modern scholarship generally assigns this sermon, with a group of related catechetical sermons such as De Symbolo, De Quarta Feria and De Tempore Barbarico, to Quodvultdeus, bishop of Carthage in the time of the Vandal invasion. Read in that light it shows how a North African bishop instructed candidates for baptism in the generation after Augustine, using typology from Genesis and Exodus and in polemic against heretics.