'Nothing is far to God': an hour with Saint Monica at Ostia

OSTIA, autumn 387 AD — The house has a garden and an upstairs window over it. That is where Saint Monica and her eldest son, Saint Augustine, stood alone a few days ago and talked their way past everything they could name, and then came back to ordinary speech.

Her son is out today. She sits at the table downstairs, hands in her lap. A cup at her elbow holds the one measure of wine she allows herself, watered until it is barely wine. She has not touched it. She is fifty-five.

What is the house waiting for?

A ship. The company is going back to Africa to live under one roof for a religious purpose, in whatever place they can be of most use. With her are her second son Navigius, her grandson Adeodatus, fifteen, baptized at Milan with his father, Alypius, baptized the same Easter, and Evodius of Tagaste. They came south by road, stopping at Civitavecchia, and took this house to rest in after the journey.

Safe sailing ended in mid-September. From now to the eleventh of November the crossing is uncertain and closer to danger, and after that the sea is shut until March. The fastest run from Africa into this harbour on record is two days, made by a proconsul’s deputy in a very light wind.

You have not touched that cup.

One small cup, and no more. In Africa she carried it round the martyrs’ shrines and passed it in sips to whoever was standing there; she wanted their devotion, not the drink. As a girl, sent down to draw wine, she worked up to drinking a nearly full cup, until a servant called her a “wine-bibber” in a quarrel. She stopped that day, and she tells the story on herself.

They still talk in Tagaste about your husband’s temper, and about the wives who came to you with marks on their faces. What did you do when he lost it?

She never crossed him while he was angry; when he had cooled and she judged the moment right, she gave him her reasons. He was unfaithful and she never made a quarrel of it. No one in that town knew him to strike her, or knew of a day’s fighting in the house, and women with milder husbands and worse faces asked her how it was done. What she told them she does not soften now:

“That from the hour they heard what are called the matrimonial tablets read to them, they should think of them as instruments whereby they were made servants; so, being always mindful of their condition, they ought not to set themselves in opposition to their lords.”

She blamed their tongues rather than their husbands, half in jest so that they would take it. Patricius was baptized towards the end of his life and died soon after, about 371 AD, leaving her a widow at about forty.

You once would not have your own son at your table.

For nine years he was a Manichaean, and she treated him as a man dead, weeping over him more than mothers weep for children they have buried. She would not have him living in her house or eating at her table. A dream ended that: she stood on a wooden rule, grieving, and a young man came to her smiling and told her to look — where she was, he was too. Her son took it for a promise that she would come round to his side. She corrected him on the spot:

“No; for it was not told me that ‘where he is, there shall you be,’ but ‘where you are, there shall he be’.”

You repeat a sentence a bishop gave you. What did he say first?

He refused. He told her to leave the boy alone and pray for him, and said he would find out for himself, by reading, what the error was. She would not accept that. She asked again, and kept asking, and wept, until he lost patience: “Go your way, and God bless you, for it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish.” She took it as a voice from heaven and has repeated it ever since.

At Milan a doorkeeper turned you away from a shrine with your basket.

When she learned the order came from Saint Ambrose, the bishop there, she gave up her African custom the same day and found the fault in her own practice rather than question his ruling. She gave the poor what she could instead. At Milan she was in church twice a day, and let no day pass without her offering at the altar.

What do you ask God for now?

She answered that at the window a few days ago, and has not added to it. “Son, for myself, I have no longer any pleasure in anything in this life. What I want here further, and why I am here, I know not, now that my hopes in this world are satisfied. There was indeed one thing for which I wished to tarry a little in this life, and that was that I might see you a Catholic Christian before I died. My God has exceeded this abundantly, so that I see you despising all earthly felicity, made His servant — what do I here?”

You had a grave ready at home.

Beside her husband, prepared years ago. She had cared about it a great deal: that after all her travelling across the sea, the two of them should lie in one grave, and that people should say so.

Her son was still out. One of his friends in the room asked what nobody asks a woman out loud: whether it frightened her to leave her body so far from her own city.

“Nothing is far to God; nor need I fear lest He should be ignorant at the end of the world of the place whence He is to raise me up.”