The Sermon on the Fall of Rome
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Augustine pauses for a moment in his sermon. In the crowd he sees expectant faces, many of which have now become serene. But he still hears some stifled sobs. Very close to him, against the chancel, a young woman looks up at him, her eyes veiled in tears. At first he looks at her with the severe expression of an angry father, but he sees she is smiling strangely at him through her tears, he makes a sign of benediction over her and twenty years later it is this smile that comes to his mind, as he lies there on the floor of the apse while kneeling clerics pray for the salvation of his soul, of which no one is in any doubt.
Augustine lies there dying in his own city to which for three months Genseric’s forces have been laying siege. Perhaps all that had occurred in Rome in August 410 was the shaking of one center of gravity, the setting in motion of a slight swing of a pendulum, the thrust of which finally propelled the Vandals through Spain and across the sea, all the way to beneath the walls of Hippo. Augustine’s strength has ebbed away. He has been so weakened by privation that he can no longer stand. He can no longer hear either the clamor of the Vandal army or the frightened voices of the faithful seeking refuge in the nave. To his exhausted mind the cathedral now seems once more to have become a haven of light and silence protected by the hand of God. Soon the Vandals will be unleashed upon Hippo. They will bring in their horses, their brutality and the Aryan heresy. It may be that they will destroy all that he once loved, with his sinner’s weakness, but he has preached about the end of the world so often that he must not now be concerned by it. Men will die, women will be defiled, the Barbarian cloak will once more be dyed in their blood. The ground upon which Augustine rests is everywhere marked with the Alpha and Omega, Christ’s sign, which he touches with his fingertips. God’s promise is constantly being fulfilled and the soul of a dying man is weak, vulnerable to temptation. What promise can God make to men, He who knows them so little that He remained deaf to the despair of His own son and did not understand them, even when He made Himself one of them? And how may men have faith in His promises when Christ himself despaired of his own divinity? Augustine shivers on the cold marble and just before his eyes are opened to the eternal light that shines on the city no army will ever capture, he wonders in anguish whether all those in tears among the faithful whom the sermon on the fall of Rome failed to comfort had not understood his words better than he understood them himself. Worlds perish, in truth, passing one after the other, from darkness into darkness, and perhaps the succession of them signifies nothing. This unbearable thought burns Augustine’s soul and he heaves a sigh, as he lies there amid his brothers, and tries to turn toward the Lord, but again he sees that strange smile, bathed in tears, that the candor of an unknown young woman had once bestowed on him, bearing witness, before him, to the end and at the same time to the beginning, for it is one and the same witness.
JÉRÔME FERRARI was born in Paris in 1968. He worked as a professor of philosophy in Algiers for four years before moving to Corsica and then to Abu Dhabi. He came to international prominence in 2012 when he won the Prix Goncourt for The Sermon on the Fall of Rome.
GEOFFREY STRACHAN is the renowned translator of Andreï Makine. His translation of Makine’s Le Testament Français was awarded the Scott-Moncrieff Prize.