Baring-Gould’s sources: All Monastic Kalendars, and modern Roman Martyrology. Authority* — The Confessions of her son, S. Augustine.] S. Monica was bom in the year 332, in Africa, of a Christian family, and was educated by a relative, perhaps an aunt, with a strictness in a degree advantageous, in a degree dangerous to a young girl. This lady forbade the young Monica to take a drop of water except at meal times, and the reason given by this prim old maid was, “If you get into the habit of drinking water now, when you are married and have the keys of the cellar, you will tipple wine/' What her governess dreaded actually took place before Monica was married, for she was sent by her father with the pitcher to the cellar, every day, to draw the wine for table, and she got into the habit of sipping from the pitcher before she brought it up to the dining hall, and as the habit grew upon her, so did she enlarge the amount she drank. She was fortunately brought to see the danger of the course she was entering upon before the habit had become inveterate, by the retort of a slave whom she was reprimanding, and who cast her tippling in her teeth. Monica was so ashamed of her failing being known, and commented on by the servants, that she corrected it from that day. Soon after she was baptized, and from her baptism lived an edifying life. She was married young to Patricius, a gentleman of Tagaste, a pagan, but honourable and upright. His great failing was a hot and hasty temper, from which Monica endured much suffering, though he never struck her. By him she had two sons, Augustine and Navigius, and though she laboured to instil Christian truth into their hearts, yet she was unable to obtain their baptism, and Augustine leaned rather to his father’s example than to that of his mother. As Patricius grew older his conduct softened towards the patient wife, who never answered his sharp words nor resented his unkind actions; and won by her sweetness, he allowed himself to be instructed in the truths of the faith, and to be baptized. A year after he died. It is said that when Monica heard other wives complaining of their husbands’ ill-humour or neglect, she said, “Who are to blame? Is it not we and our sharp tongues ?” Some matrons, moved by her success in securing the affection and taming the irritability of her husband, adopted her method, and, we need hardly add, found that it led to the happiest results.
Monica was wont daily to assist at mass, and her reverence was so great, that she never turned her back on the holy altar.
Patricius died in 371, when Augustine was aged seventeen. This, her best loved son, was then at Carthage studying. Monica learned to her grief that he had been seduced by the doctrine of the Manichees, a sect heathen rather than Christian, which acknowledged two principles in mutual war, the good the source of spirit, the bad the origin of matter. This heresy subsisted through the Middle Ages, and its adherents received the names of Albigenses, and Paulicians, and Lollards. It still survives in some of the coarser sects of Protestantism.
This was great grief to Monica. There was nothing she could do for her dear son but pray for him, and this she did incessantly. Her tears and entreaties did not move him, and for a while he lived in a separate house. It was too painful for her to hear his arguments, and see the gradual deterioration of his noble character under the influence of this pernicious heresy, and he, on his side, showed impatience of his mother’s advice. ■S'. Monica.
And so years passed, Augustine involved in false doctrine, and sinking into a life of dissolute morals. Monica prayed on. She urged some bishops to discuss his errors with Augustine, but the son, with the hot-headed impetuosity of youth, refused to listen to them. “ Wait,” said one old bishop to Monica; “your son's heart is not now disposed to receive the truth. Wait the Lord's good time." And when the poor woman seemed sinking with despair, he spoke to her those blessed words which have been repeated again and again as ages have passed, and mothers have wept, and sons have been prodigal, “ Go on praying; the child of so many tears cannot perish.” She was comforted, and prayed on.
Arrived at the age of twenty-nine, Augustine resolved to go to Rome and teach rhetoric there. His mother, dreading to lose sight of him, endeavoured to dissuade him from his journey. He pretended to yield to her entreaties, only that he might escape her importunities, and whilst she was spending the night in prayer in a chapel dedicated to S. Cyprian, he embarked and set sail for Italy. “I deceived my mother," says Augustine in his Confessions, “ by a lie, whilst she was weeping and praying for me. O, my God ! what did she ask of Thee, but that Thou wouldst stay me from sailing? But Thy purposes were not as were hers. Thou didst refuse her that which she then demanded so earnestly, to give her in the end that which she had all along prayed for." On the morrow, Monica found her son gone; she rushed to the shore, and the white sail on the dark blue horizon of sea was the only trace left of him. She returned to prayer weeping.
Shortly after his arrival at Rome, Augustine fell dangerously ill, and he attributed his recovery to the prayers of his mother.
In 384 he left Rome to teach rhetoric at Milan. There he fell in with S. Ambrose [bishop of Milan (d. 397)], who quickly dispersed the errors of Manicheism into which he had fallen; but Augustine, though dissatisfied with the dualism which had captivated his opening understanding, and had seemed to him to solve the mystery of the world's creation and man’s existence, was not convinced of the truth of Christianity. He had formed an union with a woman of bad character, who bore him a son, and this union restrained him from giving his heart to the truth.
Monica's aching heart could bear absence no more. She took ship and came to Italy, and to Milan, seeking he] dear erring son; and now, in S. Ambrose, she found a teacher who refreshed her weary soul, and encouraged her to perseverance.
She was growing old, the silver was in her hair, lines were traced by sorrow on her brow. Years of tears and prayer and hope deferred had sweetened that face, once fair as an opening rose, into a spiritual beauty, not of this earth.
Daily was she now seen in the basilica at Milan kneeling at mass, or bringing her offerings to the poor. At first, following the African custom, she brought an oblation of bread and wine to the tombs of the saints, thence to be distributed among the poor, but finding that this had been forbidden by S. Ambrose, she relinquished the custom. At Tagaste and at Rome it was usual to fast on the Sabbath (Saturday), but not at Milan. She consulted S. Ambrose, who gave her the wise advice, “When I am here in Milan I fast not on the Sabbath, but when I am in Rome I fast on that day. Do the same. Always follow the custom of the Church where you are/' At length what the holy mother had so long wished for was accomplished, and God was about to answer all her Monica.
prayers in good measure, pressed down, and running over. All their fulfilment she was not to see, but she was suffered to behold the baptism of her son Augustine and his boy Alypius, on the same day, at Easter, 38 7. Then she felt that her work was accomplished, and she yearned for home, — first for the home where she had been as a little girl, playing under the date palm, under the eye of the good yet severe governess, who would not let her taste a drop of water, though she was thirsty, because it was not meal time; the home where she had spent happy years with her husband Patricius, who, if he had been rough and passionate, yet had held her heart fast for many years ■ the little church where she had wept and prayed day after day and year after year; she must return and give thanks there. Who can describe the many memories bound up with a longing to re-visit these scenes, which drew Monica back towards Africa, now that the object of her life was won? But next there was a longing for another and better home, one eternal in the heavens, where she would meet again her father and her mother, her husband, and perhaps the little daughter who we hear was born to her, and of whom we hear no more, and whom we may therefore conclude died early. But all these longings sprang from one source, a desire for rest after her long besieging of heaven’s doors. The gate had been unclosed, and mercy had shot down, and she yearned to enter in and rest in the presence of the Lord of all grace.
So she persuaded Augustine and Navigius his brother to return with her to Ostia. They bade farewell to stately Milan with the fire-fly haunted marshes surrounding it, and made for Ostia, the seaport at the mouth of the Tiber. It was at Ostia that occurred the memorable evening conversation which Augustine has described for us, and which a modern painter has sought to portray on canvas; but which only the heart of a mother and a son can fully realise.
“She and I were standing at a window,” says Augustine, “and it overlooked the garden of the house in which we were lodging. We were at Ostia Tiberina, far away from the crowd, after a long and tedious journey, preparing for our voyage. And there we began sweetly to talk together alone, and forgetting the past, to search into present truth. What Thou art, O God ! and what is in store in eternal life for the saints, which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath entered into the heart of man to conceive. Thus we drank with our hearts from Thy fountain above, the fount of life which is with Thee.”
Augustine in his Confessions tells us at full all they talked about, at the window, that last memorable evening. He did not know then that it was the last he was thus to spend with her. But in after years the whole scene rose up before him, the evening light playing on the inspired face and silvery hair of his mother, the vine leaves fluttering around the window in the cool sea breeze, the green glow on the horizon, where the sun had gone down, looking like the plains of Paradise, and the mother speaking of heaven and God, and her desire to be at rest. She fell ill and died at Ostia, lovingly nursed by Augustine, Navigius, and the boy Alypius. She was asked if she wished to be buried in her own country; but no, she said, she was content to lie at Ostia. “Only,” she added, “do not, I pray you, forget to remember me at the altar of God !” She died in the fifty-sixth year of her age, in the year 387. “If anyone thinks it wrong that I wept so bitterly for my mother part of one hour, for a mother who wept through many years for me that I might live to Thee, O Lord, let him not despise me for it; but rather let him weep for my sins committed against Thee 1” S. Gothard, There is uncertainty about her relics [the bodily remains of a saint, or objects they used, kept with honor], which are claimed by two places, Rome and Arouaise. Martin V. translated the body from Ostia to Rome in 1430, and it was placed in the church of S. Augustine; but Walter, a canon of Arouaise, relates that he translated the relics of S. Monica, “whom the Latins call Prima,” to Arouaise in 1x62. Prima is a very bad translation [the solemn moving of a saint’s relics to a new shrine] of the name Monica, and in all probability Walter of Auouaise was mistaken, though tire Bollandists [Jesuit scholars who since the 1600s have critically studied the lives of the saints] give credence to his account
