Sixteen hundred years ago today, on 28 August 430, a bishop died in a besieged port on the North African coast. Hippo Regius was under siege by the Vandals; Augustine was about seventy-five, born in Thagaste, in what is now Algeria, and he had spent nearly forty years arguing, preaching and writing letters from that city.
The detail his friend and biographer Possidius kept is small and domestic. In his last illness Augustine asked that the penitential psalms of David be copied out and hung on the wall beside his bed, so that he could look at them and read them as he lay there. Someone ruled the sheets. Someone fixed them where a sick man's eyes would fall. He asked to be left alone with them, apart from the hours when the doctors came or food was brought.
The fresco below gives him the study a scholar would want: shelves, an armillary sphere, an open manuscript with diagrams, a mitre set behind him. Painters were generous that way, lending later centuries' furniture to earlier men. The room Possidius describes had four sheets of psalms on the wall, and that was all.
The Confessions is often called the first Western autobiography, though Augustine would not have used the word. Confessio in his Latin carried acknowledgement and profession as much as apology: confessing sin, yes, but also confessing praise. Four sheets on a wall is the same habit, later on.
Miriam, as a baker I have to note he threw the pears to the pigs — pages of anguish over fruit he never even tasted. Any cook will tell you an unripe pear off a neighbour's tree is punishment enough on its own.