Saint Monica - 27 August

The Mother of Saint Augustine

Among the many personalities who appear in the course of Augustine’s life no one gets more space or more affection in his Confessions than does Monica, his mother. An intellectual reading of that work often omits Book Nine, more than half of which is an account of Monica’s life, her influence on him, and her death and funeral at Ostia. ‘I am passing over many things because time is short’, Augustine himself says, ‘but I will not pass over anything that my soul brings forth concerning that servant of yours who brought me forth from her flesh to birth in this temporal light, and from her heart to birth in light eternal’.

Augustine is as honest in recounting his memories of his mother’s life as he is in recounting those of his own. God’s providence used an angry servant to give Monica a shock which saved her from becoming even more addicted to alcohol than she was as a young woman. Her strategy for dealing with her unfaithful and potentially violent husband was to see him always in the light of God, to give him the example of her own way of living, and to wait patiently and mercifully for his conversion to the faith and so to chastity. (One wonders how like his father Augustine might have thought – and perhaps feared – he himself was.) Monica used the same virtues of devotion, patience and gentleness to win over her mother-in-law whose relationship with her was being poisoned by others in the household. Instructed by God in the school of her heart, Monica acted as a peacemaker and reconciler when tensions and hatreds exploded between people. The way in which Augustine speaks about this makes one think of Monica as a saint for our time, one who was able to chart a steady course through a sea of malicious gossip, lying slander and angry people. In the immediate aftermath of Augustine’s conversion Monica took care of him and his friends ‘as though all had been her children and she served us as though she had been the daughter of all’.

Most famously Augustine and Monica get locked down in Ostia, trying to find a boat to get back to North Africa, but hindered by a war which effectively shut down the port. Together they talk about eternal life and what it would be like. There follows the kind of intellectual / spiritual ascent which is familiar from other places in Augustine’s writings, ‘lifting off’ from the beauty of the cosmos, travelling ‘by inward thought and wondering discourse beyond the summit of our own minds, to touch the land of never-failing plenty where God pastures Israel for ever with the food of truth. That Life is the Wisdom through whom all things were made and, says Augustine, as we talked and panted for her (Wisdom) ‘we just touched the edge of it by the utmost leap of our hearts’. Sighing and unsatisfied ‘we left the first-fruits of our spirit captive there and returned to the noise of articulate speech’. And how beautiful that articulate speech is as Augustine takes off again into one of the most poetic passages in the Confessions, retracing the ascent to Wisdom and speaking of how desirable it is.

Monica, perhaps getting a bit concerned at the other-worldliness of her son’s discourse (and Augustine himself says ‘well I didn’t actually use those exact words in that moment’) is characteristically concrete and concerned for others: she has now received the last gift for which she had prayed, she says, to see Augustine a Catholic Christian before she died. ‘What now keeps me here?’, she asks. Five days later she became ill, Augustine and his brother were distraught, hoping that she might survive to return to Africa and be buried there alongside her husband. But she said it did not matter and in words that have become classic in Catholic piety concerning the dead added ‘one thing only do I ask of you, that you remember me at the altar of the Lord wherever you may be’. ‘Nothing is far from God’, she said, ‘There is no danger that at the end of the world he will not know where to find me and raise me up’.

What a contrast the practical mother is in these last moments compared with her ever so intellectual son who is immediately thrown into a fierce inner conflict as he tries to contain the grief that fills him. He was profoundly displeased to find how powerfully he could be affected by these human experiences! What a consolation to us that he was so powerfully affected – the practical wisdom of our time would simply say to him ‘let it out, let the tears flow’. He thinks a bath might help but it doesn’t. Sleep does though and some words of Saint Ambrose which he recalls as he falls asleep: ‘I went to sleep and on awakening felt a good deal better’. It brings to mind an earlier moment in his journey when God soothed his head (the Latin term is the one used to describe a mother turning her infant towards her breast) and closed his eyes, he slept in God and woke to a new vision of things (Confessions VII 14.20). There it seems to have a deeper significance, a moment of insight or realisation about the reality of God. Here it seems more like a more ordinary human breakthrough as Augustine finally gives himself up to tears, though privately, in the presence of God alone. ‘If only humans would acknowledge that they are human’, he says, which is a bit rich considering the effort he was making not to cry and the efforts his friends were presumably making to help him acknowledge the very same thing, that he too was a member of the human race!

And he finishes with a wonderful prayer for his mother, that the Lord will be merciful to her, and to his father, as he asks all those who read his Confessions to join him in praying for them.

As we remember Saint Monica we remember those we have loved and who have died, and in a particular way our mothers, who from their flesh brought us to birth in this temporal light and who from their hearts would bring us to birth in the eternal light.

I have used the very beautiful translation of Augustine's Confessions done by Sister Maria Boulding OSB and published by New City Press, New York in 1997.