A dream tells St. Monica her son will stand where she stands

TAGASTE, Numidia, 375 AD — This year at Tagaste, Saint Monica, the widow of a town councillor, refused to let her son, Saint Augustine, live in her house or eat at her table. Tagaste is a small inland town of Numidia, about sixty miles from the coastal city of Hippo. St. Augustine had come home a Manichee and was spreading the sect’s teaching in the town where he was born. St. Monica kept him out and wept for him until a dream changed her mind.

St. Monica was about forty-four. Her husband had been one of Tagaste’s town councillors, from a family that was respectable but not rich, and he had died about four years earlier, soon after he was baptized. Hers was a household of that class, with servants, a storeroom and a wine cellar.

St. Augustine, about twenty-one, had come back from his studies at Carthage to teach. Two years earlier, at Carthage, he had joined the Manichees. They followed the Persian teacher Mani: they held that evil was a power of its own, at war with the good, and they attacked the Scriptures as full of contradictions. St. Monica wanted her son back in the Church. He would not come, and he was taking others with him. What she could refuse him was her house and her table.

In Tagaste St. Augustine made a close friend of a young man his own age, whom he had grown up with and been at school with. He drew the young man out of the Catholic faith and into the sect.

St. Augustine wrote that his mother kept away from him because she was “hating and detesting the blasphemies of my error”. Her faith told her that her son was dead in spirit, so she mourned him harder than mothers mourn a child who has died. Her tears, St. Augustine wrote, “watered the earth under her eyes in every place where she prayed”.

Then St. Monica had a dream. She saw herself standing on a wooden rule, grieving and bowed down, and a bright young man came towards her, joyful and smiling at her. The young man asked her why she was so sad and wept every day. She told him she was grieving because her son was lost. He told her to be at peace, and to look: where she was, St. Augustine was too. She looked, and saw her son standing beside her on the same rule.

St. Monica told her son about the dream. St. Augustine tried to read it the other way round: it meant, he said, that she should not give up hope of one day believing what he believed. St. Monica answered him at once, without stopping to think: “No; for it was not told me that ‘where he is, there shall you be,’ but ‘where you are, there shall he be’.”

St. Augustine wrote that her answer moved him more than the dream did, because she “saw in a moment what was to be seen, and which I myself had not in truth perceived before she spoke”.

After the dream St. Monica let her son live with her again and eat at her table. St. Augustine described his mother in those years as “that chaste, pious, and sober widow”, “now more buoyed up with hope, though no whit less zealous in her weeping and mourning”. He stayed with the Manichees until about 382 AD.

Tagaste is now Souk Ahras, in Algeria. Pope Benedict XVI named it as St. Monica’s birthplace when he spoke of her at the Angelus on August 27, 2006 AD, her memorial.