He spent only a few days in sacking the city and then marched southwards, intending to invade Africa. While his army was embarking, however, he fell ill and died, and so great was his loss that all thought of the campaign was surrendered. Alaric was mourned by his people as a national hero, and, unable to bear the thought that his enemies might one day desecrate his tomb, they dammed up a river in the neighbourhood, and dug a grave for their general deep in its bed. When they had laid his body there, they released the stream into its old course, and so left their hero safe from insult beneath the waters.
The sack of Rome that moved the civilized world profoundly made little impression upon the young Emperor. He had named one of his favourite hens after the capital; and when a messenger, haggard with the news he had brought, fell on his knees, gasping, ‘Sire, Rome has perished,’ Honorius only frowned, and replied, ‘Impossible! I fed her myself this morning.’
St. Jerome, in his hermit’s cell at Bethlehem, was stupefied at the fate of the ‘Eternal City’. ‘The world crumbles,’ he said. ‘There is no created work that rust or age does not consume: but Rome! Who could have believed that, raised by her victories above the universe, she would one day fall?’
Why had Rome fallen? This was the question on everybody’s lips. We know to-day that the process of her corruption had been working for centuries; but men and women rarely see what is going on around them, and some began to murmur that the old gods of Olympus were angry because their religion had been forsaken. It was affirmed that Christ would save the world, but what had He done to save Rome?
Christianity was not long in finding a champion to defend her cause—an African monk, Augustine, to mediaeval minds the greatest of all the ‘Fathers of the Church’. Augustine was the son of a pagan father and a Christian mother and grew up a wild and undisciplined boy. After some years at the University of Carthage, spent in casual study and habitual dissipation, he determined to go to Rome, and from there passed to Milan, where he went out of curiosity to listen to the preaching of St. Ambrose. It was obvious that he would either hate or be strongly influenced by this fiery old man; and in truth Augustine, who secretly repented of the way he had wasted his life, was in a ripe mood to receive the message that he had refused to hear from the lips of Monica his mother. Soon he was converted and baptized, and later he was made Bishop of Hippo, a place not far from Carthage.
It is difficult to give a picture of Augustine in a few words. Like St. Ambrose and others of the early ‘Fathers’ he was quite intolerant of heresy and believed that ordinary human love and the simplest pleasures of the world were snares set by the devil to catch the unwary; but against these unbalanced views, largely the product of the age in which he lived, must be set his burning enthusiasm for God, and the services that he rendered to Christianity.
A modern writer says of him, ‘As the supreme man of his time he summed up the past as it still lived, remoulded it, added to it from himself, and gave it a new unity and form wherein it was to live on.... The great heart, the great mind, the mind led by the heart’s inspiration, the heart guided by the mind—this is Augustine.’
Superior in intellect to other men of his day, his whole being filled with the love of God and fired by the desire to make the world share his worship, he preached, worked, and wrote only to this end. In his Confessions he describes his youth and repentance; but his most famous work is his Civitas Dei.
Here was the answer to those who declared that Rome had fallen because she neglected her pagan deities. Rome, he maintained, was not and never could be eternal; for the one eternal kingdom was the Civitas Dei, or ‘City of God’, towards whose reign of triumph the human race had been tending since earliest times. Before her glory the kingdoms of this world, and all the culture and civilization of which men boasted, must fade away. Thus God had destined; and St. Augustine exerted all his eloquence and powers of reasoning to prove from history the magnitude and sureness of the divine purpose.
Vandal Invasion