Saint Augustine dies at Hippo in the third month of the siege

HIPPO REGIUS, Numidia, 28 August 430 AD — Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo Regius, died here today in the third month of the Vandal siege, with the bishops sheltering in the city standing at his bed and praying. He was seventy-five.

He took to his bed with a fever. “And lo, in the third month of the siege he succumbed to fever and began to suffer in his last illness,” said Saint Possidius, Bishop of Calama, who has been in the city throughout and was at the bed at the end.

Until the day the fever took him he was still preaching. St. Possidius said he preached in the church “incessantly, vigorously and powerfully, with a clear mind and sound judgment,” and that this went on “up to the very moment of his last illness.”

He died with his body whole and his senses working. “With all the members of his body intact, with sight and hearing unimpaired, while we stood by and watched and prayed,” St. Possidius said, “he slept with his fathers, as it is written, well-nourished in a good old age.”

He had lived seventy-six years, by St. Possidius’ count, almost forty of them as a priest or bishop.

The last ten days

About ten days before the end, St. Augustine asked the men in the house not to come in to him except at the hours when the physicians came to examine him or when his food was brought, so that nothing would break into his prayer. The request was kept, and he had the rest of the time to himself.

He had ordered the shortest of the penitential psalms of David copied out for him. The sheets hung on the wall by the bed where a man lying down could read them, and he read them there through the days of the sickness. “He wept freely and constantly,” St. Possidius said.

He had told the household more than once that no Christian, and no priest, however well he had lived, should leave this life without proper repentance. He did it himself in the illness he died of.

Who was in the room

The men at the bed are bishops from the neighbouring regions. They took refuge in Hippo and have stayed in the city through the whole siege. St. Possidius is one of them: Calama, his own city, fell to the invaders in 428 AD, and he came here to St. Augustine. He has known him, he said, “on terms of intimate and delightful friendship, with no bitter disagreement, for almost forty years.”

Count Boniface is also inside the walls, with an army of allied Goths. The defence of the city is in his hands; his reconciliation with the court came too late, and he has not been able to stop the enemy.

The Vandals reached the city about the end of May and have held it since, closing the coast by blockade. Through those weeks the bishops met often and prayed together. “In our common grief, with groanings and tears, we besought the Father of mercies and the Lord of all consolation that He vouchsafe to sustain us in this tribulation,” St. Possidius said.

What was said

At table during the siege, St. Augustine told the bishops what he was asking of God. “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.” He taught them the words, and they prayed them with him for themselves, for their fellow bishops and for everyone else in Hippo.

In his last years he came back often to the way other men had died. He admired the answer Saint Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, gave when the leading men of his church stood round his bed and begged him in tears to ask God for more time: “I have not so lived that I should be ashamed to live among you, yet I do not fear to die, for we have a Lord who is good.” St. Augustine used to point out that St. Ambrose added the second half so that nobody would take the first half for confidence in the purity of his own life.

He repeated as often the answer of a fellow bishop and close friend, whom he had visited several times as the man was dying. St. Augustine told him he could still do the Church a great deal of good alive. The bishop answered: “If I were never to die it would be well; but if I am ever to die, why not now?” He praised the man for it, and noted that he came from a small town and was no great reader.

Against those two he set a third case, from Saint Cyprian’s letter On Mortality: an ailing bishop who prayed for an extension of his life, and the figure who stood over him and said, “You fear to suffer, you do not wish to die; what shall I do with you?”

A man healed at the bedside

While St. Augustine was confined to the bed, a man came to the house with a sick relative and asked him to lay his hand on him. St. Augustine answered that if he had any power in such things he would have used it on himself first.

The man then said he had been told in a dream: “Go to the bishop Augustine that he may lay his hand upon him, and he shall be whole.”

St. Augustine did it without delay, and the sick man went away healed.

The burial

The bishops who had watched with him buried him the same day. The sacrifice was offered to God for the repose of his body, and he was buried in their presence — the same rites he described in his own account of the burial of his mother, Saint Monica, who died at Ostia in the autumn of 387 AD, forty-three years ago.

There was no will. “He made no will, because as a poor man of God he had nothing from which to make it,” St. Possidius said.

He had given one instruction repeatedly, and it stands: the library of the church and all its books are to be carefully preserved for future generations. Whatever the church holds in possessions or ornaments he left in the charge of the presbyter who has care of the building. Eraclius, whom he named as his successor before the whole congregation in the Church of Peace on 26 September 426 AD, has had the daily business of the see since that day, on St. Augustine’s own instruction that everything formerly brought to him be brought to Eraclius instead.

What he leaves the Church, St. Possidius said, is “a fully sufficient body of clergy and monasteries of men and women with their continent overseers, together with the library and books containing treatises of his own and of other holy men.”

What follows

The siege is not lifted. Of all the churches of Africa, St. Possidius said, three are still standing — Carthage, Hippo and Cirta.

St. Possidius, writing his account of St. Augustine’s life afterwards, records what came next here: the people abandoned Hippo and the enemy burned it, in 431 AD. The library survived, and he directed anyone looking for St. Augustine’s books to Hippo, where the best copies were to be found — to copy them, keep them, and lend them to whoever else wanted a copy.