In late August of A.D. 430, as the Vandals massed outside the city walls, the bishop of the provincial North African town of Hippo lay dying. His last instruction to his monastic companions, we are told, was to “see that the church library and all the books are carefully preserved for posterity.” At least since the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410, he had labored under a presentiment that the classical world that he had known was “growing old and waning as an earthly kingdom.”
During the intervening years, he began to write consciously for future generations, although even he did not foresee how imminent was the utter collapse of Roman society. That collapse gave his writings a place equally unforeseen by their creator. For, against all odds, the brethren successfully carried out Augustine’s final command; almost all of his works survived the barbarian onslaught. In the ensuing chaos, Augustine’s writings became a life raft to which the Church clung—they became so central to the reconstruction of the European mind that it is almost impossible to conceive of Western culture without him.
It is only one of the many joys of this illuminating short biography by the late English church historian Henry Chadwick that he observes that Augustine himself would have “deplored” being transformed into this “towering authority,” followed uncritically by succeeding generations—and drily supports the point with Augustine’s own “I have not followed myself in everything.” While writing
