“At length events hastened on to a close. Fugitive multitudes betook
themselves to Hippo. Boniface threw himself into it. The Vandals appeared
before it, and laid siege to it. Meanwhile, Augustine fell ill. He had about
him many of the African bishops, and among other friends, Possidius, whose
account of his last hours is preserved to us. “We used continually to converse
together,” says Possidius, “about the misfortunes in which we were involved,
and contemplated God’s tremendous judgments which were before our eyes, saying,
‘Thou art just, O Lord, and Thy judgment is right.’ One day, at meal time, as
we talked together, he said, ‘Know ye that in this our present calamity, I pray
God to vouchsafe to rescue this besieged city, or (if otherwise) to give His
servants strength to bear His will, or, at least, to take me to Himself out of
this world.’ We followed his advice, and both ourselves, and our friends, and
the whole city offered up the same prayer with him. On the third month of the
siege he was seized with a fever, and look to his bed, and was reduced to the
extreme of sickness.”
Thus, the latter part of his prayer was put train for accomplishment, as
the former part was subsequently granted by the retreat of the enemy from
Hippo. But to continue the narrative of Possidius: - “He had been used to say,
in his familiar conversation, that after receiving baptism, even approved
Christians and priest ought not to depart from the body without a fitting and
sufficient course of penance. Accordingly, in the last illness, of which he
died, he set himself to write out the special penitential psalms of David, and
to place them four by four against the wall, so that, as he lay in bed, in the
days of his sickness, he could see them. And so he used to read and weep
abundantly. And lest his attention should be distracted by any one, about ten
days before his death, he begged us who were with him to hinder persons
entering his room except at the times when his medical attendants came to see
him, or his meals were brought to him. This was strictly attended to, and all
this time given to prayer. Till this last illness, he had been able to preach
the word of God in the church without intermission with energy and boldness,
with healthy mind and judgment. He slept with his fathers in a good old age,
sound in limb, unimpaired in sight and hearing, and, as it is written, while we
stood by, beheld, and prayed with him. We took part in the sacrifice to God at
his funeral, and so buried him.”
Though the Vandals failed in their first attack upon Hippo, during
Augustine’s last illness, they renewed it shortly after his death, under more
favourable circumstances. Boniface was defeated in the field, and retired to
Italy; and the inhabitants of Hippo left their city. The Vandals entered and
burned it, excepting the library of Augustine, which was providentially
preserved.
The desolation which, at that era, swept over the face of Africa, was
completed by the subsequent invasion of the Saracens. Its five hundred churches
are no more. The voyager gazes on the sullen rocks which line its coast, and
discovers no token of Christianity to cheer the gloom. Hippo has ceased to be
an Episcopal city; but its great Teacher, though dead, yet speaks; his voice is
gone out into all lands, and his words unto the end of the world. He needs no
dwelling-place, whose home is the Catholic Church; he fears no barbarian or
heretical desolation, whose creed is destined to last unto the end”.
(J.H. Newman, The Church of the Fathers. Burns Oates
& Washbourne Ltd. 1908, 135-137)
