Feast and Relics

Augustine died at Hippo on 28 August 430 as the Vandals besieged the city. His relics did not rest where he died: to escape the Arian Vandals they were carried across the sea to Cagliari in Sardinia, and centuries later, to keep them from Muslim raids, translated again to Pavia in northern Italy, where they rest today in the basilica of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro. This file traces the journey of the relics and sets out the feast — kept on 15 June in the Orthodox East and on 28 August, the day of his death, in the West — and the forms of his veneration.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism West; “Blessed Augustine”)

Death at Hippo

Augustine died on 28 August 430, in the third month of the Vandal siege of Hippo Regius, aged seventy-five, after thirty-five years as bishop (Possidius, Vita 31; see Pastor and Preacher). Possidius, who was with him, records that he spent his last days in penitential prayer, having had the penitential Psalms of David copied out and fixed to the wall where he could read them from his sickbed, weeping over them (Possidius, Vita 31; trans. Hoare 1954). He left no will, having no property, but bequeathed the library of Hippo to the Church. Hippo fell to the Vandals soon after his death and was largely burned; Possidius notes, with evident providential meaning, that the church and its library — and so Augustine’s works — were spared the fire (Possidius, Vita 28, 31).

The First Translation: Hippo to Sardinia

The fate of Augustine’s body in the immediate aftermath is not recorded in detail, but the relics were in time removed from Africa. The traditional and widely reported account is that, to preserve them from the Arian Vandals who controlled North Africa — and perhaps in the course of the later persecution of catholic clergy under the Vandal kings — the relics were carried across to Cagliari in Sardinia, then under more secure (Byzantine) control, where they were venerated (Brown 2000, epilogue; the translation to Sardinia is reported by the Venerable Bede, De Temporum Ratione, and in later medieval sources [Disputed: the precise date and circumstances of the translation of Augustine's relics from Africa to Sardinia are not securely documented in a contemporary source; the tradition, attested by Bede and later writers, places it in the period of Vandal/Arian control of Africa (later fifth or early sixth century), commonly associated with the exile of catholic African bishops to Sardinia under the Vandal king Thrasamund (c. 508); the broad outline (Africa → Sardinia → Pavia) is firm, the exact dating of the first stage is reconstructed rather than documented]).

The Second Translation: Sardinia to Pavia

The second and better-attested translation moved the relics to their present home. In the early eighth century, to protect them from Muslim (Saracen) raids on Sardinia, Liutprand, king of the Lombards, purchased the relics and had them brought to Pavia, his capital in northern Italy, where they were enshrined in the basilica of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro (“St. Peter in the Golden Sky”) — an event traditionally dated to around 722/725 (Brown 2000, epilogue; the Pavia translation under Liutprand is attested by the eighth-century Lombard historian Paul the Deacon, Historia Langobardorum 6.48). There the relics of Augustine remain, in an elaborate marble shrine (the Arca di Sant’Agostino, the medieval reliquary-tomb), the goal of pilgrimage and the enduring center of his cult in the West. The continuity of the Pavia relics was confirmed by ecclesiastical examinations in later centuries (notably in 1695 and again in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries).

The Feast: 15 June and 28 August

Augustine is commemorated on two principal dates, reflecting the two traditions:

In the Orthodox East, his feast is kept on 15 June (Rose 1983/2007; the date in the Eastern calendars and synaxaria). In some Orthodox calendars he is commemorated together with his mother, St. Monica.
In the Western Church, his feast is the day of his death, 28 August, kept since antiquity; his mother St. Monica is commemorated the day before, 27 August (in the modern Roman calendar).

In the Roman Catholic tradition Augustine is honored as one of the four great Latin Doctors of the Church and is invoked as a patron of theologians, of the Augustinian religious orders that follow the Rule bearing his name, and of a number of cities and dioceses. In the Orthodox tradition his veneration, as examined in Section 07, is real but qualified by the title “Blessed” and by the reserve about parts of his theology; his icons are written and venerated, and his feast is kept on 15 June (see Blessed Augustine).

The Cult and the Memory

The cult of Augustine in the medieval West was immense, sustained by the Pavia relics, by the Augustinian canons and friars (the Order of Saint Augustine, the Augustinian Hermits, the Augustinian Canons) who took him as patron and lived by his Rule, and by the unrivaled authority of his writings in the schools (see Augustine East and West). A celebrated gesture of the modern Catholic Church marked the return of his memory to his homeland: in 1842 the (then) Bishop of Algiers obtained a relic of Augustine (a bone of his right arm) from Pavia to be enshrined at Hippo — at the basilica later built near the ruins of his city, the Basilica of St. Augustine at Annaba — symbolically restoring the saint to the African soil from which the Vandals had driven his relics fourteen centuries before.

The Relics as a Witness to a Vanished Church

There is a further significance to the journey of Augustine’s relics that is easy to miss. The removal of his body from Africa is bound up with the destruction of the Latin African Church itself. The Vandal kingdom that besieged Hippo was Arian, and its rulers persecuted the catholic clergy — Thrasamund’s exile of the African bishops to Sardinia (c. 508) is the very event with which tradition associates the first translation of the relics. The Byzantine reconquest under Justinian (533–534) restored catholic Africa for a time, but the province never recovered its old vigor, and the Arab conquest of the seventh century swept away both the catholic and the Donatist Churches of Augustine’s homeland almost entirely (Brown 2000, epilogue). The relics that left Africa for Sardinia and then Pavia were, in effect, rescued from a Church that was dying; and the survival of Augustine’s body, like the survival of his library (see The Vast Corpus), is a fragment carried out of a world that perished. The shrine at Pavia is thus not only the tomb of a saint but a relic of the lost Christianity of Roman Africa, of which Augustine is the last and greatest monument.

Veneration in the Orthodox East

It is worth being specific about how the Orthodox commemoration is actually kept, since it is sometimes doubted that Augustine is venerated in the East at all. He appears under 15 June in the Orthodox synaxaria and is included in the calendars of various local Churches; the Russian Orthodox tradition has been especially consistent in honoring “Blessed Augustine” (Blazhennyi Avgustin), and his name is found among the saints of the pre-Schism West whom modern Orthodox calendars — particularly those serving Western-rite and Western-European Orthodox communities — have taken care to restore to liturgical memory (Rose 1983/2007). Icons of Augustine, written in the Byzantine manner, depict him vested as a bishop and holding a Gospel book or a scroll, and sometimes a flaming or pierced heart, an image borrowed from Western iconography. Where he is commemorated, the reservations examined in Section 07 do not bar his veneration: the Church keeps his feast and honors his memory while leaving his contested doctrines to be weighed, exactly as the title “Blessed” expresses.

The Parable of the Bones

For the Orthodox, the relics and the feast are the concrete signs of a veneration that the doctrinal reservations do not cancel: Blessed Augustine is a saint with a feast-day and venerable relics, honored in the calendar of the Church even as his contested teachings are weighed against the consensus of the Fathers. The journey of his bones — Hippo, Sardinia, Pavia — is itself a parable of the man’s history: driven from the African Church that bred him, preserved across the sea, and at last enshrined in the Latin West that made him its master, while the East that did not read him kept, nonetheless, his name in its calendar of the blessed. The same providence that, in Possidius’s telling, spared the library from the Vandal fire carried the bones out of a perishing Africa; and the man who wrote that the City of God is a pilgrim in this world became, in death, a pilgrim himself, his relics journeying through the centuries to rest at last far from the city he served.

References

Possidius. The Life of Saint Augustine (Vita Augustini). Trans. F. R. Hoare, The Western Fathers. London: Sheed & Ward, 1954. (The death and the penitential Psalms at 31; the sparing of the library at 28, 31.)
Paul the Deacon. History of the Lombards (Historia Langobardorum) 6.48. (The translation of the relics to Pavia under Liutprand.)
Bede. On the Reckoning of Time (De Temporum Ratione). (Notice of the translation of the relics to Sardinia.)
Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. New ed. with epilogue. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Rose, Seraphim. The Place of Blessed Augustine in the Orthodox Church. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1983; rev. 2007. (The feast of 15 June.)