HISTORIC DAY OF COMMEMORATION OF SAINT AUGUSTINE

According to the brilliant discovery of the Italian Swiss scholar Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, unlike the emperor, who has two bodies, his own and his body politic, the pope has only one, his own body, which belongs entirely to him and to the Church. How many bodies does Saint Augustine have, whom the greatest theologian of the 17th century, Cornelius Jansenius, inspired by the Protestant Reformation, called “Father of Fathers” and “Doctor of Doctors,” and who, according to his disciple and biographer, Bishop Possidius of Calama, wrote more than any man on earth, in his entire life, could read?

1 On August 28, 430, Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, in Roman Carthaginian Africa, died in a city besieged by Vandal tribes, where he had been a priest and then bishop for nearly forty years. Since the difference between the Julian and Gregorian calendars is currently thirteen days, the Orthodox Churches, faithful to the old liturgical calendar, celebrate this event on September 10.

2 This is the eve of another great feast, the Beheading of John the Baptist, with which, symbolically, John being the completion of the Old Testament economy of salvation, the Church closes the liturgical year. Many people forget these dates, their significance, these coincidences written by the invisible hand of God, even our most pious and ecclesiastical contemporaries.

3 The city of Hippo, founded around 1200 BC, that is, before David and Solomon, as a colony of Phoenician Tyre, was the residence of the Numidian kings. Annaba, a large Algerian port city, has survived to the present day. However, there is no tomb or relics of Saint Augustine, except for a small fragment, the right ulna, transferred more recently, on October 28, 1848, aboard the steam corvette “Gassendi”. And there never were.

4 In fact, among the Vandals who besieged Hippo, of which it became the capital until the capture of Carthage (439), were many Arians and Donatists, who, during their lifetime, caused much harm to Augustine and with whom he maintained a bitter polemic. Rightly fearing for their master’s body, and like every Father of the Church, these bodies were two: his books, a legacy for the faithful, and his relics, a pledge of universal resurrection, they transferred Augustine to Sardinia.

5 Two and a half centuries later, after the beginning of the first Arab conquest of Sardinia (710-778), Augustine’s relics were transferred to Pavia, in northern Italy, then capital of the Lombards. The translation of the relics took place 1,300 years ago, on February 28, 723, which is once again symbolic. After all, Augustine, a symbol of the end of Antiquity and the transition to the Middle Ages, died on August 28, in the last days of summer and the liturgical year, and on the last day of winter, he reposed as a relic in continental Europe, prophetically foreshadowing its Christian flowering.

6 The Lombard king, Liutprand, who reigned in Pavia from 712 to 744, exchanged Saint Augustine’s body for its weight in gold, an exceptional feat for the time. After all, the relics of saints were neither bought nor sold; this was considered sacrilege. They were stolen, in the belief that, in the absence of a blessing from above, God would intervene and thwart the plan. Thus, even in this, Saint Augustine, through the hand of the sovereigns, was far ahead of his time.

7 On April 24, 387, Easter night, Augustine was baptized in Milan by Saint Ambrose. During his lifetime, according to the Confessions, Augustine always dreamed of speaking to him personally, but never dared. Ten years later, Ambrose died, barely sixty years old. By this time, Augustine was already in Africa, from where he never considered returning. It is astonishingly providential that Pavia is only forty kilometers from Milan, a symbolic biblical number. Thus, the Fathers of the Church rest bodily very close, awaiting the general resurrection of the flesh, the realism and truth of which they constantly reminded the faithful.