St. Augustine talks about his mother, ten years after her death

HIPPO REGIUS, Numidia, 397 AD — Saint Augustine of Hippo, bishop of this port city for about a year, is the son of Saint Monica, who died at Ostia ten years ago. Almost no one else has written anything down about her. He is at work on an account of his own life addressed to God, and her life is inside it. She speaks here in the words he records, along with the servant who raised her and a bishop he never names.

St. Monica was born to Christian parents at Thagaste, inland from here. She married Patricius, a townsman of the curial class who was not a Christian and had a violent temper; St. Augustine was the eldest of her three children, and she was widowed at about forty. For nine years her son belonged to the Manichees, a sect the Church condemns. She followed him to Italy, saw Saint Ambrose baptize him at Milan at Easter, 387 AD, and died at Ostia later that year.

We spoke in his house; clergy of his sat in, since he does not speak with a woman alone. A couplet on his table warns off any guest who injures the name of an absent friend.

Take me back before Italy, to the house your mother grew up in at Thagaste. The old servant who had carried your grandfather about as a baby brought the girls up there, and would not let them drink even water between meals; your mother was the one sent down to the cask to draw the family’s wine. What happened to her in that cellar?

The servant who raised her had a reason for the water rule. St. Augustine sets it down: “when you have come to be married, and made mistresses of storeroom and cellar, you will despise water, but the habit of drinking will remain.” In the cellar she began tasting before she poured, and worked up to a cup nearly full. The servant who went down with her lost her temper one day and threw the word at her: “wine-bibber”. St. Monica stopped that day, and years later she told her son the story herself.

Men from Thagaste remember your father’s temper. Wives of the town came to her with marks on their faces, wanting to know why she never had any. What did she tell them?

“She had learned that an angry husband should not be resisted, neither in deed, nor even in word,” St. Augustine writes; she waited until Patricius was calm and then gave her reasons. She told the women to think of the marriage tablets read out at their weddings as “instruments whereby they were made servants”. Patricius was unfaithful as well, and she never quarrelled with him over it. No one in the town ever heard that he had beaten her, and she carried no mark of it. After he died she paid for her son’s schooling out of her own means.

In your Manichee years she would not have you in her house or at her table, and she went to a bishop about you. What changed that?

She would not have him living with her or eating at her table, St. Augustine writes, “hating and detesting the blasphemies of my error”. A dream changed her mind: she stood grieving on a wooden measuring rule, and a young man told her to look — her son was standing on the same rule beside her. St. Augustine read that as a promise that his mother would come round to his own position, and she answered at once: “No; for it was not told me that ‘where he is, there shall you be,’ but ‘where you are, there shall he be’”. The bishop refused to argue with St. Augustine at all. St. Monica kept asking and crying until the bishop told her, a little annoyed: “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.

At Milan she kept up her country’s custom of carrying bread, cakes and a watered cup round the shrines of the martyrs, until the doorkeeper turned her away on St. Ambrose’s orders. How did she take that?

She dropped it as soon as she learned the order was St. Ambrose’s. “I myself marvelled how readily she could bring herself to accuse her own custom, rather than question his prohibition,” St. Augustine says. She brought “a heart full of more purified petitions” instead, and gave what she could to the poor.

For years she prayed and you did not turn. What she asked for, by your own account, was not gold or silver but the salvation of her son’s soul. Where did she pray, and how often?

Everywhere: “You heard her, and despised not her tears, when, pouring down, they watered the earth under her eyes in every place where she prayed”. She was in church twice a day, not to gossip but to hear the word and pray, and she let no day pass without her offering at the altar.

The garden at Milan, 386 AD, the year before your baptism. You were in the garden with St. Alypius, and when the two of you came indoors you told her. What did she do?

He had heard a child’s voice chanting “take up and read”, opened the letters of the apostles at Romans 13 and read. St. Augustine’s own account of what followed was the last thing he told us:

“Thence we go in to my mother. We make it known to her — she rejoices… she leaps for joy, and triumphs, and blesses You… And you turned her grief into a gladness, much more plentiful than she had desired, and much dearer and chaster than she used to crave, by having grandchildren of my body.”