At an Ostia window, St. Monica has nothing left to want

OSTIA, Roman Italy, autumn 387 AD — The window is upstairs in the house the party has taken at Ostia, and it looks down on the garden. This month Saint Monica and her son Saint Augustine stood at that window alone, leaning in the opening, away from the rest of the household, and talked.

Milan is about three hundred and eighty miles behind them by road, and St. Augustine calls the trip a long journey; at Ostia they were resting from it, for the voyage. The company — St. Augustine; his brother Navigius; his son Adeodatus, who is fifteen; his friend Alypius; and Evodius, a young man from their own town who left the imperial service and was baptized before them — mean to go back to Africa together and find the place where they can be of most use in God’s service. They are waiting for a ship. The ship has not come.

There is a town to wait in. The warehouses are out of use; along the Tiber the streets have been abandoned and packed with rubble, in places higher than a man, to hold the river off the south of the city. The living is comfortable enough — expensive houses fitted inside older buildings. Constantine gave the place a basilica, and it is the bishop of Ostia who consecrates a new bishop of Rome.

At the window, away from the crowd, the two of them were asking each other, in the presence of Truth, what the eternal life of the saints would be — which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither has entered into the heart of man. What they said to each other, St. Augustine gives in this form: “If to any man the tumult of the flesh were silenced — silenced the phantasies of earth, waters, and air — silenced, too, the poles; yea, the very soul be silenced to herself…”

By then the greatest pleasure of the bodily senses, in the brightest material light, seemed to them not worth comparing with that life, or worth mentioning beside it. They went by stages through all bodily things, and through the sky itself, where the sun and the moon and the stars shine down on the earth, and came to their own minds, and went past them. They “slightly touched her with the whole effort of our heart” — her being that Eternal Wisdom which is not made. Then they sighed, and “returned to the noise of our own mouth, where the word uttered has both beginning and end.”

She had been asking for one thing for a long time. Her son spent about nine years as a hearer of the Manichaeans. In those years she dreamed she was standing on a wooden rule, grieving, and a bright young man came to her smiling and asked why she was crying; she said she was mourning her son’s ruin, and he told her to look: where she was, he was too. She looked, and he was on the same rule. A bishop, worn down by her pleading and her tears, sent her away with a sentence the family has kept: “Go your way, and God bless you, for it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish.” She followed her son across the sea. At Milan she found him no longer a Manichaean and not yet a Catholic, and she did not celebrate; she answered calmly that she believed in Christ she would see him a Catholic believer before she died.

The other things she asked for she has given up one at a time. She took the greatest trouble over the marriage at Milan, so that once he was married he could be washed clean in baptism; the girl was two years short of the age. She used to want grandchildren of his body. At Easter this year the bishop of Milan, Saint Ambrose, baptized him, together with Alypius and the boy Adeodatus. Since then she has looked after the baptized household as though she were mother to all of them and daughter to all of them, and those who know her recognise God present in her heart.

And there was a grave. She had arranged and prepared one for herself in Africa, next to the body of her husband Patricius, and she had wanted it known that the two of them, so joined in life, should lie in the same ground.

At the window she said this:

“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?”

What he answered her he does not clearly remember.

Less than a week after the window, the fever took her. She died on the ninth day of it, at fifty-five. The household did not keep the funeral with weeping and groaning, holding that such mourning is for those who die unhappy or die altogether, and she did neither.

The window is where it was, and the garden under it, and out at the river mouth the ship they were waiting for still has not come.