Book IX: what St. Augustine wrote down about the window at Ostia

HIPPO REGIUS, Numidia, about 397 AD — Book IX of the Confessions ends with a burial. Saint Augustine wrote the thirteen books at Hippo Regius about 397 AD; the events in Book IX run from August 386 AD to late 387 AD. He was thirty-two at the window at Ostia and a bishop past forty at the desk. Everything in the book reaches the reader through one witness, about ten years after the fact.

Reviewing his own works late in life, he wrote that the thirteen books “praise the just and good God, and stimulate the heart and mind of man to approach unto Him”. Every page is addressed to God rather than to a reader.

In the summer of 386 AD he was the professor of rhetoric at Milan and had decided to give the post up. “This very summer, from too great literary labour, my lungs began to be weak, and with difficulty to draw deep breaths; showing by the pains in my chest that they were affected, and refusing too loud or prolonged speaking” (IX.2.4). He does not present the illness as a sign. He calls it convenient, and says he was glad of an excuse, “and that not a feigned one”. He sat out the last weeks of term, then told Milan to find “another seller of words” (IX.5.13).

He raises the accusation against himself before a reader can: “Some of Your servants, my brethren, may perchance say that I sinned in this… I permitted myself to sit a single hour in the seat of falsehood. I will not contend” (IX.2.4). The Latin is cathedra mendacii: the seat of falsehood is the professor’s chair he was paid to sit in.

At Ostia in the autumn of 387 AD, Saint Monica and her son were waiting for a ship to Africa. “She and I stood alone, leaning in a certain window, from which the garden of the house we occupied at Ostia could be seen… we were resting ourselves for the voyage, after the fatigues of a long journey” (IX.10.23). The Latin fixes both the layout and the quiet: hortus intra domum, a garden inside the house (IX.10.23), and remoti a turbis, away from the crowds. The window looked inward, onto the garden, not onto the town.

What follows moves upward in stages: through the pleasures of the senses, past sun, moon and stars, past their own minds, to the Wisdom that made all of it. Then it ends: “we slightly touched her with the whole effort of our heart; and we sighed… and returned to the noise of our own mouth” (IX.10.24). The paragraph after it turns on one long sentence that takes things away in turn — flesh, earth, water, air, the poles, and the soul falling silent to itself — until “were not this Enter into the joy of Your Lord?” (IX.10.25).

That is St. Augustine’s own composition rather than a record of the words spoken, and he says so in the next line: “if not after this manner, and in these words, yet, Lord, You know, that in that day… this world with all its delights grew contemptible to us” (IX.10.26). His mother’s answer he gives as her own words: “Son, for myself, I have no longer any pleasure in anything in this life… What do I here?”.

Less than a week later she fell ill with a fever. She lost consciousness, came round, looked at her two sons and asked where she had been: “Here shall you bury your mother”. His brother Navigius said it would be better for her to die at home; she stopped him with a look and turned to St. Augustine — “Behold, says she, what he says”. She had prepared a grave beside her husband Patricius and had wanted it for years. Now she told them both: “Lay this body anywhere, let not the care for it trouble you at all. This only I ask, that you will remember me at the Lord’s altar, wherever you be” (IX.11.27).

In the last passage he blames himself. St. Monica died on the ninth day of the illness. “I closed her eyes; and there flowed a great sadness into my heart, and it was passing into tears, when my eyes… sucked back the fountain dry” (IX.12.29). Adeodatus cried out and the others quieted him; the reason St. Augustine gives is doctrinal — “she neither died unhappy, nor did she altogether die”. St. Evodius picked up the psalter and began to sing, and everyone in the house answered him: “I will sing of mercy and judgment: unto You, O Lord” (IX.12.31).

He walked to the burial and back without crying, and was angry with himself for minding: “with a new sorrow I sorrowed for my sorrow, and was wasted by a twofold sadness” — alio dolore dolebam dolorem meum et duplici tristitia macerabar. The baths did nothing: “I bathed, and felt the same as before I had done so”. He slept, and afterwards, alone, let the tears come. Then he addresses the reader directly: “Read it who will, and interpret how he will; and if he finds me to have sinned in weeping for my mother… let him not laugh at me” (IX.12.33).

He did fault himself elsewhere. Going back over the Confessions in the Retractations, he picked out his account of grief for a dead friend in Book IV, which “seems to me as if it were a light declamation rather than a grave confession”, though he let it stand and allowed that the folly is softened by the “perchance” in his own sentence. That review names two passages, Book IV and a line about the firmament in Book XIII, and nothing else. It says nothing about Book IX.

The book closes with the request his mother made. He asks his readers “that so many of them as shall read these confessions may at Your altar remember Monica, Your handmaid, together with Patricius, her sometime husband” (IX.13.37), so that her last request will be “more abundantly fulfilled to her through the prayers of many”.