In besieged Hippo, St. Augustine asks God for his own death

HIPPO REGIUS, Numidia, these weeks, 430 AD — Saint Augustine, at a meal in his house these weeks, told the bishops sheltering with him that he had been asking God for three things, and that the third was his own death.

Hippo is shut in. The Vandals came up to the walls at the end of May. They hold the ground outside, and they have shut the city off from the sea as well, so nothing gets in or out. The defence is in the hands of Count Boniface, who was beaten by the Vandals in the open field and fell back into Hippo with an army of allied Goths. He had fallen out with the imperial court and made his peace with it too late to keep the invaders out of Africa. The city is well fortified, and it has held so far.

St. Augustine is seventy-five, and he has been a priest or a bishop in this city for almost forty years. The priests of his church live in his house with him and own nothing of their own. The house has taken in the bishops of the country around Hippo as well, who came inside the walls as the invaders took their towns and have stayed since. One of them is St. Possidius, bishop of Calama, whose own city fell to the Vandals. They came in stripped of everything they owned. Three churches are left standing in all Africa: Carthage, Cirta and Hippo.

Since the city was sealed off, the bishops in the house have talked of little else than the judgments of God laid open in front of them. Over and over they have said the same verse to one another: “Righteous art thou, O Lord, and upright are thy judgments.” They have wept, and they have asked God to give them the strength to endure the siege.

They eat with St. Augustine at one table, as the clergy of his house always have. What is on it is plain: herbs and lentils, meat only for a guest or for a brother who needs it, and always wine. The spoons are silver and the dishes are earthen, wooden or marble; St. Augustine could have had better and chose not to. He has always cared more for the reading and the talk at that table than for the food and the wine.

They were eating together, in the middle of a conversation, when St. Augustine broke in. He said: “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.”

Then he taught them the words. Every man at the table prayed them after him — for the men in that room, for their fellow bishops elsewhere, and for everyone else inside the city.