The town burned down. The books got out.

HIPPO REGIUS, Numidia, 432 AD — Saint Augustine gave the same order over and over, right to the end of his life. Look after the church’s library. Keep every book in it for the people coming after.

He had almost nothing else to leave. When he died there was no money and no will. He had nothing to make a will out of.

St. Augustine was the bishop of Hippo Regius, a port city on the coast of North Africa. He died there on August 28, 430 AD. An army was camped outside the walls. The Vandals had shut the city in three months before that. They had blocked the coast as well, so nothing could reach Hippo by ship. The siege ran for almost fourteen months in all.

A thousand books, every one written by hand

The list of what St. Augustine wrote comes to more than a thousand books, sermons and letters. And those are only the ones he numbered himself. There were others he never numbered at all. He had written and argued so much that hardly any student could get through all of it.

Every copy of every one of them was made by hand. Someone sat down and wrote the whole thing out, word by word. The pages were parchment. That is animal skin, from a sheep, a goat or a calf. It was scraped and dried until you could write on it. The sheets were cut into leaves and folded down the middle. Then they were gathered into a codex, a book with pages that turn instead of a rolled-up scroll.

Some of the books started out as talking. St. Augustine used to argue in public in the church at Hippo. The people of the town stood round and listened. Men sat there and took the whole argument down in writing.

Then the town emptied

The Vandals gave up in the end. They could not break into Hippo and they could not starve it into giving in. They were running short of food themselves. They pulled back in July of last year.

After St. Augustine died, the people of Hippo walked out and left the city empty. The enemy burned it.

Churches all over Africa had already been wrecked. St. Augustine saw only three of them come through standing: Carthage, Hippo and Cirta.

One friend, one list

One of St. Augustine’s friends was Saint Possidius, the bishop of Calama, an inland town not far from Hippo. The two of them had lived side by side for nearly forty years without one bitter quarrel. When Calama fell to the Vandals, St. Possidius came to Hippo. He stayed in the city right through the siege.

This year he finished a book about St. Augustine. He wrote it out of what he had seen himself over those forty years. At the end he added a list of the books, the sermons and the letters. A reader could run down the list and pick out what they wanted. He called it an Indiculus (a list).

Then he told his readers exactly what to do. Go to the library of the church of Hippo, he wrote, where the best copies are. Or hunt for the book anywhere else you can. Copy it out. Keep it. And lend it to anyone else who wants a copy of their own.

Some copies had already gone a long way from Hippo. While St. Augustine was still alive his books were translated into Greek and read in churches across the sea. And in May of last year Pope Celestine I wrote about him from Rome. He called him one of the best teachers of the Church.