To Heal the Eyes of the Heart, by Robert Royal

By Robert Royal, The Catholic Thing, Dec. 6, 2021

Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent books are Columbus and the Crisis of the West and A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century.

Note: Our deep gratitude to all of you who have made our end-of-year fundraising campaign a success. We can see from commitments made and projected gifts between now and the end of the year that we’ll be in good shape going into 2022. We have great confidence in TCT readers – and you continue to show that it’s justified. Many thanks.  – Robert Royal

In the spring of 430 AD, the Vandals – a Germanic horde numbering in the tens of thousands – began a siege of Hippo Regius, an affluent and important city on the North African coast (modern Annaba in Algeria). Today, that might seem an obscure episode within the movements of various “barbarian” peoples in the waning days of the Roman Empire (which “fell” just fifty years later), if not for the fact that the bishop of the city at the time was the great St. Augustine.

Augustine was 75 by then, and died within a few months, no doubt partly from the stress produced by the siege. The Vandals subsequently ransacked the city but left standing Augustine’s cathedral and library. Still, they destroyed almost everything he had labored to build as a bishop for over three decades. …