Bishop who lived beside Saint Augustine for forty years writes his life

NUMIDIA, Roman Africa, 432 AD — Saint Possidius, bishop of Calama, has finished a book about his friend, and the first thing it does is refuse a subject. He resolved, he says in the preface, “not to keep silent concerning the life and character of the most noble Bishop Augustine… the things that I have seen in him and heard from him”. Then he rules out the years his friend had already written about: “It is not my purpose to touch on all those things which the blessed Augustine noted about himself in his books of the Confessions, telling what his life was before receiving the divine grace and what it became on his conversion”.

What the refusal buys is the rest: nearly forty years no one else was placed to write down, and the last days.

St. Augustine was bishop of Hippo Regius, the port city on the Numidian coast, and he died there on August 28, 430 AD. St. Possidius came out of the monastery St. Augustine kept at Hippo, and was one of about ten men from that house whom St. Augustine sent out to other churches as bishops. He was made bishop of Calama, inland from Hippo, between it and Cirta. When Calama fell to the Vandals he took refuge with St. Augustine at Hippo, was in the house through the last illness, and stayed until the enemy gave up the siege. They gave up in July of last year: they could neither storm the city nor starve it into surrender, and hunger was pressing them too.

St. Possidius says in the preface why he took the work on. Devout men of the Church had done the same before him, and “spoke and wrote like histories for the ears and eyes of those who wished to learn”. He closes the preface on words he attributes to the angel in Scripture: “It is good to hide the secret of a king: yet it is honorable to reveal and confess the works of God”.

The reason for leaving the Confessions alone is in the preface too, and it is St. Augustine’s reason rather than his biographer’s. He wrote that book, St. Possidius says, so that “no man should believe or think him to be above that which he knew him to be or heard of him”. Near the end of his life St. Augustine asked which of his works had more often been known and loved than the books of his Confessions. So four short chapters carry the birth, the conversion, the sale of the family property at Thagaste and the seizure in church at Hippo that made St. Augustine a presbyter.

The twenty-ninth chapter turns on a conversation at table. Bishops from the neighbouring towns had crowded into Hippo for shelter, and one day St. Augustine set out for them what he was asking 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”. In the third month of the siege he took fever.

The thirty-first chapter is the death. St. Augustine had the shortest of the penitential psalms of David copied out and hung on the wall where he could see them from the bed, and read them there, weeping freely and constantly. About ten days before the end he asked the men with him to let no one in except the doctors at their hours and whoever brought his food, so that nothing would interrupt him. Then, St. Possidius writes, “with all the members of his body intact, with sight and hearing unimpaired, while we stood by and watched and prayed,” St. Augustine died. He left no will, having nothing to leave.

St. Possidius bound one more thing in with the Life. St. Augustine had dictated, published and argued so much in church, he writes, that “scarcely any student would be able to read and know them all”. So at the end of his own little work he added an Indiculus (a list) of the books, homilies and letters, for a reader to choose from. The catalogue runs to more than a thousand titles that St. Augustine numbered, besides others he never numbered. Then the instruction: look for the books “either from the library of the church of Hippo, where the more perfect copies can probably be found, or search wherever else he can,” and, having found them, “copy and preserve them and also lend them willingly to anyone who wishes to make copies”.

The last sentence of the book asks the reader for a prayer, and gives the ground of the whole of it: that “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”.