The man who watched St. Augustine die: St. Possidius on forty years

HIPPO REGIUS, Numidia, 28 August 430 AD — Saint Possidius of Calama took the guest’s chair at the bishop’s table a few hours after the burial. He cannot go home: Calama, forty miles off, fell to the Vandals, and he has lived here since.

You have eaten at this table since Calama fell, with the clergy of Hippo. What came to it, and what were the rules?

Herbs and lentils, meat when there were guests or a brother who needed it, always wine. The dishes were earthenware, wood or marble; the spoons were the only silver in the house, and St. Augustine chose them himself. The clergy were fed and clothed at the common expense. Each man’s cups were counted out beforehand, and a man who swore an oath lost one. “At the table he loved reading and discussion rather than eating and drinking,” St. Possidius said. The inscription on the table between us: “Who injures the name of an absent friend / May not at this table as guest attend.”

He never carried the key to the stores and never wore his ring, and the church’s holy vessels were broken up. Who minded the money?

Overseers from the clergy held the keys and the accounts, read to him once a year. For captives and for people with nothing, he had the holy vessels broken up, melted down and handed out. “I would not have mentioned this unless I knew that it was done contrary to the carnal judgment of some,” St. Possidius said.

Before the war he came back from church and asked this table whether anyone had noticed his sermon go wrong. What came of it?

He had left his subject hanging and finished by attacking the Manichaeans, which he had not meant to touch. “Yes, we know it and remember that we wondered at it at the time,” the table told him. “I suppose that perhaps the Lord wished some wanderer among the people to be taught and healed by our forgetfulness and error; for in His hands are we and all our utterances,” he told them. A day or two later a merchant named Firmus knelt in tears at his feet: that digression had pulled him out of the Manichaeans.

A merchant left the Manichaeans because a sermon went off its subject. Say plainly what you take God to have been doing there.

“Wondering and marvelling at the profound plan of God for the salvation of souls, we glorified and blessed His holy Name; for when He wishes and by whom He wishes and in whatever way He wishes, by those who know and those who do not know, He works the salvation of souls.”

Calama is gone, and bishops from the neighbouring sees are sheltering here. How have you passed these three months?

“We ourselves with other of our fellow-bishops from the neighboring regions took refuge in this city,” St. Possidius said. The Vandals closed on the city at the end of May and cut off its sea-coast by blockade. Inside, the bishops “very frequently conversed together and meditated on the awful judgments of God laid bare before our eyes.”

At this table he told you what he was asking of God, and the fever took him soon after. What were the words, and what were the last days like?

“I would have you know that in this time of our misfortune I ask this of God: either that He may be pleased to free this city which is surrounded by the foe, or if something else seems good in His sight, that He make His servants brave for enduring His will, or at least that He may take me from this world unto Himself.” They prayed it with him. The fever came in the third month of the siege. About ten days ago he asked that nobody come in except the physicians and whoever brought his food, so nothing would break into his prayer. He had the shortest penitential psalms of David copied out and hung on the wall by his bed, read them there, and wept over them day after day.

For ten days the house was shut around that room, and at the end you were all standing at the bed. What did you see, and what has he left?

“With all the members of his body intact, with sight and hearing unimpaired, while we stood by and watched and prayed, he slept with his fathers, as it is written, well-nourished in a good old age,” St. Possidius said. The sacrifice was offered for him, and he was buried. He made no will; there was nothing to make one from. What the church owns is with the presbyter who ran the building under him.

Men who never heard him will want an account of him, and you have known him almost forty years. If you set one down, what stays out?

The years he had already told on himself. “It is not my purpose to touch on all those things which the blessed Augustine noted about himself in his books of the Confessions,” St. Possidius said. The reason is St. Augustine’s own: he wanted it so that “no man should believe or think him to be above that which he knew him to be or heard of him.”

One thing more, before he left the table: “as by the grace of God I have lived with this man, who is now dead, on terms of intimate and delightful friendship, with no bitter disagreement, for almost forty years.”