Saint Monica (332-387)

The mother of Saint Augustine

Monica holds a paradoxical place in Church history: she is immensely famous, yet entirely through another. Had her son not been the greatest Father of the Latin Church, the world would not even know her name. Yet therein lies precisely her glory: she gave Augustine to the Church, not only by giving him life, but by wresting from God's grace, through her prayer, the soul of a man who seemed lost to the faith. Without Monica, no Confessions, no City of God, no doctor of grace.

She thus became, in Catholic tradition, the very type of the Christian mother: the one who prays for her wayward children, who weeps without resigning herself, who hopes against all hope. Generations of mothers have recognized themselves in her and taken her as patroness and model.

The saint of tears and perseverance

The word that recurs most often about Monica is tears. Augustine speaks of her weeping as a continuous river: she wept over him "more than mothers weep for the bodily death of their children"^[5]. But these tears are never despairing: they are tears of prayer, an unceasing supplication lasting nearly two decades.

It is this trait that makes Monica a saint so close to ordinary souls. For most of her life she knew no spectacular ecstasies — except at the very end — nor dazzling miracles. Her holiness is made of daily fidelity: Mass each day, patience in a difficult marriage, fasting, almsgiving, and that obstinate prayer for her own. She teaches that holiness is not reserved for cloisters and deserts, but can flourish at the heart of a home, in the most hidden tasks.

The sources of her life

Almost everything we know of Monica comes from Augustine's Confessions, supplemented by a few mentions in his early philosophical dialogues. It is a rare situation: we see the saint through the eyes of her son, one of the greatest writers of Antiquity.

The main narrative is found in Book IX of the Confessions, written around 397–398, some ten years after Monica's death. Augustine devotes to his mother a long passage (chapters 8 to 13) that is part biography, part funeral eulogy: he recounts her youth, her marriage, her virtues, the ecstasy at Ostia, and her death^[6][7]. Other passages, in Books III, V and VI, show Monica in action during Augustine's years of wandering: her tears, her dream, her pursuit across the Mediterranean^[8][9][10].

To these must be added the dialogues of Cassiciacum, those philosophical conversations Augustine held with his circle just before his baptism. Monica takes part in them, and her son puts into her mouth reflections of such aptness that he declares he wished to keep her name in those books as a mark of honour. The De beata vita ("The Happy Life") presents her as a genuine interlocutor in wisdom^[11].

Birth in Numidia (c. 332)

Monica was born around 331–332 at Thagaste, a modest city of Numidia in Roman Africa — present-day Souk Ahras in Algeria^[12][13]. Her name, probably of Berber origin (perhaps linked to the local deity Mon), recalls that she belonged to that old, long-Christianized African stock: Roman Africa was then one of the most fervent Christian lands, the land of Tertullian, of Saint Cyprian, of the great martyrs of Carthage.

Her family was Christian and respectable. Augustine notes that she was raised not only by her parents, but above all by an old servant of great firmness, who had once carried the master of the house as a child on her back, and who raised the daughters with a severe and holy discipline^[14].

A stern upbringing and the wine anecdote

Augustine reports of his mother a childhood anecdote he had manifestly heard from her own lips, and which says much about the fineness of her moral education. Little Monica, sent to draw wine from the cask for the table, took the habit of tasting a little each time, out of greed, until she was drinking almost full small cups. One day, a servant who accompanied her to the cellar, in a quarrel, flung at her the insult of "wine-drinker" (meribibula). The shaft struck so true that Monica, seized with shame, renounced the habit at once^[15]:

"Stung to the quick by this reproach, she considered her own vileness, condemned it on the spot and rid herself of it." — Saint Augustine, Confessions, IX, 8^[16]

Augustine draws from this scene a spiritual lesson dear to him: God sometimes uses the anger of an enemy, or a mere insult, as a scalpel to heal a soul. The roughness of the servant was, without her knowing it, an instrument of Providence.

Marriage to Patricius

Married young, according to custom, Monica became the wife of Patricius, a citizen of Thagaste, a decurion (municipal councillor) of modest condition and — a capital detail — still a pagan^[17]. He was a man of quick and violent temper, prone to anger, and of dissolute morals. The household could have been a hell; Monica made of it a school of holiness.

The conjugal apostolate: patience and gentleness

The portrait Augustine paints of his mother's conduct toward her husband is one of the finest Christian texts on marriage. Monica bore Patricius's infidelities without ever making him a scene, patiently awaiting God's hour. Above all, she had the art of avoiding his fits of anger: she never contradicted him when he was carried away, and presented her reasons only once the storm had passed^[18].

"She bore the wrongs done to her marriage bed without ever having the slightest quarrel with her husband on that account." — Saint Augustine, Confessions, IX, 9^[19]

The other women of the town, whose husbands, though gentler, bore the marks of blows, marvelled that Monica never had to suffer violence. She shared her secret with them with a grave humour: let them watch their tongues, and regard their marriage contract as the deed that made them servants — and thus, remembering their condition, let them not stand up against their masters^[20]. This was, in her, less resignation than the prudence of a soul bent on winning another soul to God.

The conversion of Patricius and of her mother-in-law

This patience triumphed in the end. Monica won two victories of gentleness which tradition has not forgotten.

She won first her mother-in-law, at first set against her by the gossip of servants, whom she disarmed by such constant deference that the old woman ended by cherishing her and having the slanderous domestics punished^[21]. She won next, and this is the essential thing, her husband: Patricius, conquered by so much virtue, became a catechumen, then received baptism toward the end of his life, and died a Christian, about a year after that conversion (c. 371)^[22][23]. Monica had, by her fidelity alone, saved the soul of the man who had so often made her suffer.

Three children: Augustine, Navigius, Perpetua

From her marriage, Monica had at least three children who reached adulthood: Augustine, the eldest and most famous, born in 354; Navigius, who remained close to his mother and stands beside her at Ostia; and a daughter, whom later tradition names Perpetua, who is said to have ended at the head of a community of consecrated women^[24]. It is upon Augustine, the most gifted and most tormented of the children, that all the drama of her life as a mother would centre.

Augustine astray: Manichaeism and disorders

Brilliant, ardent, insatiable, the young Augustine was also, by his own avowal, idle and carried away by his passions. Sent to study at Madauros and then at Carthage, he led there a dissolute life, took a concubine by whom he had a son, Adeodatus, and — worse still in his mother's eyes — embraced the sect of the Manichaeans, which mingled dualism, contempt for the Old Testament, and intellectual pride^[25][26].

For Monica, a fervent Christian, it was a double wound: her son lived in sin and professed heresy. For a time she went so far as to refuse him her table and her roof, so heavily did the horror of the Manichaean error weigh upon her^[27]. Then love regained the upper hand, and she returned to her weapon of always: prayer and tears.

The dream of the rule

At the darkest point of this period, God consoled Monica by a dream which Augustine reports with care. She saw herself standing on a wooden rule (a surveyor's measure), prey to grief, when a young man radiant with light approached and asked her the cause of her tears. As she answered that she wept for the loss of her son, he bade her look: Augustine stood there, upright on the same rule, beside her^[28].

"Where you are, there he is also." — the word of the dream, reported by Saint Augustine, Confessions, III, 11^[29]

When Monica told her vision to Augustine, he tried to turn it round, suggesting that she too might well join him in his error. But she replied at once, without hesitating: it had not been said to her "where he is, you shall be," but "where you are, he shall be." Augustine avows that he was more struck by the promptness of this answer than by the dream itself^[30]. His mother had, on the truth, a firmness that all his dialectic could not shake.

"The son of so many tears cannot perish"

To about the same time belongs the most famous episode of Monica's whole life. Anxious, she begged a bishop — himself a former Manichaean returned to the faith — to go and argue with Augustine to undeceive him. The bishop refused, judging the young man too puffed up with the novelty of his heresy to listen to reason, and counselled patience and prayer. As Monica insisted, weeping, he flung at her these words, which have remained immortal^[31]:

"Go your way; it cannot be that the son of so many tears should perish." — an African bishop to Monica, reported by Saint Augustine, Confessions, III, 12^[32]

Augustine notes that his mother received this word "as if it had sounded from heaven"^[33]. She made it the rock of her hope for the long years that remained. This sentence — in Latin "fieri non potest, ut filius istarum lacrimarum pereat" — has become one of the great words of consolation in Christian spirituality, repeated for sixteen centuries to every mother weeping for a child far from God.

The pursuit to Rome and Milan

The drama culminated when Augustine, wishing to go to Rome to teach rhetoric there, deceived his mother so as to leave without her. Monica, resolved to follow or detain him, had accompanied him to the port; he pretended he wished to bid farewell to a friend embarking, and used the night to put to sea, leaving her on the shore, praying and weeping on the beach^[34].

"I lied to her, as she followed me along the shore… and that night I secretly departed; she remained, praying and weeping." — Saint Augustine, Confessions, V, 8^[35]

But nothing could stop Monica. She embarked in her turn, crossed the Mediterranean, and ended by rejoining Augustine at Milan, where he had settled. It is there that Providence awaited her: Milan was the city of Saint Ambrose.

Ambrose and the conversion (387)

At Milan, Monica at once placed herself in the school of the great Bishop Ambrose, whom she venerated "as an angel of God" because she knew it was he who was gradually bringing her son back toward the faith^[36]. Docile, she abandoned at a word from the bishop certain African customs — such as offerings of food at the tombs of the martyrs — as soon as she learned that he forbade them^[37][38]. Her very piety was refined by contact with the great Church.

The struggle of her whole life at last found its term. Worked upon by Ambrose's preaching, by the reading of Saint Paul, and by grace, Augustine surrendered: on the paschal vigil of 387, he was baptized by Ambrose at Milan, with his son Adeodatus and his friend Alypius^[39]. Monica saw fulfilled, and beyond what she had dared ask, the vow of her whole existence: not only was her son a Catholic, but he had forsaken all to serve God.

The vision at Ostia

Shortly after the baptism, the little company took the road back to Africa and stopped at Ostia, the port of Rome, while awaiting embarkation. It is there that one of the mystical summits of all Christian literature occurred: the ecstasy at Ostia, which Monica and Augustine lived through together^[40].

Leaning at a window overlooking an inner garden, mother and son conversed “alone, very gently” about what the eternal life of the saints would be. From word to word, rising from creatures to heaven, then beyond heaven, they came to touch, for the space of an instant, eternal Wisdom itself:

“While we were speaking of this Wisdom, and sighing after it, we just barely touched it with the whole thrust of our heart.” — Saint Augustine, Confessions, IX, 10^[41]

This passage has become the model of Christian contemplation: a rising of the soul toward God, lived not by a solitary hermit but by a mother and her son, united in a single desire for heaven.

"My son, nothing now keeps me here below"

Coming out of this grace, Monica spoke words showing that her mission was accomplished. She confided to Augustine that she had no longer any taste for this life: her sole desire, before dying, had been to see him a Catholic Christian; God had granted it to her abundantly, since she now saw him despising all earthly happiness to make himself God's servant. What then was she still doing here below^[42]?

“My son, for my part nothing in this life now delights me. What I am doing here still, and why I am here, I know not: my hope in this world is now fulfilled.” — Saint Monica, reported by Saint Augustine, Confessions, IX, 10^[43]

Five days later she fell ill: a fever seized her.

Death at Ostia (387)

During her illness, Monica one day fainted and briefly lost consciousness. Her sons hastened to her; coming to herself, she looked at them and spoke to them that word astonishing for an African woman so attached to resting beside her own: let her be buried anywhere, and let them not trouble themselves about it^[44].

“Lay this body anywhere. Let not the care of my burial trouble you in any way. Only this I ask of you: wherever you may be, remember me at the altar of the Lord.” — Saint Monica, Confessions, IX, 11^[45]

To her kin, surprised that she did not fear dying so far from her homeland, she answered with those admirable words of faith: “Nothing is far from God” (Nihil longe est Deo)^[46]. She knew that on the last day, God would know how to find her again, wherever her body might be. This woman who had so desired to rest beside her husband now asked only one thing: to be remembered at Mass.

“Nothing is far from God, and there is no fear that at the end of the world He will not know where to find me again.” — Saint Monica, Confessions, IX, 11^[47]

On the ninth day of her illness, in the fifty-sixth year of her age and the thirty-third of Augustine's life, “that religious and holy soul was freed from the body.” It was 387^[48]. Augustine, thunderstruck with grief, struggled to hold back his tears during the funeral, then at last let them flow in prayer — and Book IX of the Confessions closes on that great page of mourning and hope.

The tomb at Ostia and the translation to Rome (1430)

Monica was first buried at Ostia. Her tomb was venerated there for centuries; in the 6th century, her remains were placed in a crypt of the church of Santa Aurea at Ostia^[49][50]. In 1430, Pope Martin V ordered the translation of the relics to Rome, where they were solemnly laid in the church of the canons of Saint Augustine. They rest today in the basilica of Sant'Agostino in Campo Marzio, near Piazza Navona, in a chapel dedicated to her^[51].

The epitaph at Ostia recovered in 1945

Archaeology came to confirm the saint's memory in an unexpected way. In the summer of 1945, children digging a hole to plant a post in the courtyard of the church of Santa Aurea, at Ostia, unearthed a fragment of Monica's original funerary epitaph^[52]. The verses, composed by a former consul, Anicius Auchenius Bassus, celebrate Augustine's mother — a precious epigraphic relic linking our own time materially to the narrative of the Confessions.

The liturgical feast (27 August)

Monica's cult developed above all from the translation of 1430. Her feast, long fixed on 4 May, was moved at the reform of the Roman calendar to 27 August — the eve of Saint Augustine's feast (28 August)^[53]. This liturgical neighbourhood is a stroke of genius: the Church celebrates, two days running, the mother who prays and then the son who was saved, as if to say that one does not go without the other.

Patroness of mothers and wives

Saint Monica is universally invoked as patroness of mothers, and more especially of mothers of wayward children: those who pray for sons or daughters far from the faith, fallen into vice, unbelief or error. She is also invoked for wives and troubled homes, for victims of conjugal violence, for women married to unfaithful or unbelieving husbands, and for the conversion of loved ones^[54]. Associations of prayer — the Confraternities of Saint Monica — gather today parents who, after her example, carry their children in persevering prayer. The city of Santa Monica, California, bears her name.

Sixteen centuries later, Saint Monica speaks directly to every wounded family. How many parents today see their children abandon the faith, live far from God, lose themselves in intellectual or moral errors? Monica tells them never to despair of the salvation of a beloved soul: her son, who seemed definitively lost to the Church — a Manichaean, proud, enslaved to his passions — became the greatest doctor of the West. No situation is hopeless before grace.

She also teaches the patience of the long term. Monica did not obtain Augustine's conversion in a day, nor in a year: it took her seventeen years. She teaches us that prayer for others is not a vending machine, but a fidelity measured in years, sometimes in a whole lifetime. Perseverance is itself a form of love.

She shows finally that holiness is domestic. Monica did not flee the world: she was sanctified within marriage, motherhood, household quarrels, anguished nights. Her pulpit was a kitchen, her desert a home, her martyrdom tears. That is why she remains, for Christian mothers and wives, the most approachable and most beloved of intercessors.

"It cannot be that the son of so many tears should perish." — This word, received by Monica as a gift from heaven, remains the testament she leaves to all who pray for a loved one: God keeps count of tears, and none is shed in vain.

• Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430) — the son of so many tears, Father and Doctor of the Church, whose Confessions are our principal source on Monica.
• Saint Ambrose of Milan (339–397) — the bishop whom Monica venerated and who baptized Augustine at Easter 387.