St. Augustine’s Grief Journey: Shifting Coping Mechanisms
St. Augustine, one of the most influential philosophers and theologians in Catholic history, writes in his autobiographical book The Confessions about three losses that were transformational in his life: the death of an unnamed friend; the death of his mother Monica; and the death of his son Adeodatus. In reading his account of these deaths, we see a change in his understandings of what death is and how he should respond to it. This impacts the embodied way he lives out his grief and the coping mechanisms he uses throughout his grief journey.
Augustine argues that some causes of sadness, a frequent response to grief, may be inappropriate for a griever who believes in the hope of the resurrection. This evolves away from his early beliefs, which were informed by Manichaeism (a heresy that promoted the view that the spiritual world was good and locked in a battle with the physical world, which was evil). Augustine left Manichaeism and wrote extensively on the relationship between the soul (spiritual) and the body (physical) as parts of one human person, which will be reunited at the resurrection of the dead.
His hope for this reunification leads him to conclude that some sadnesses may be an inappropriate response. Augustine’s grief journey through the losses of his friend, mother, and son leads us to consider how that belief ought to shape experiences of sadness.
Augustine’s Grief Journey: Death of His Friend
Before Augustine’s conversion, a dear friend of his falls ill and is baptized, for which Augustine mocks him. The friend responds harshly, “[he] warned me that if I wished to be his friend I had better stop saying such things to him” (IV.8). Augustine plans to try to talk to him again a few days later about this reaction, but the friend worsens and dies while Augustine is gone. Some of the characteristics of Augustine’s grief for his friend include:
- Restlessness: “Within me I was carrying a tattered, bleeding soul that did not want me to carry it, yet I could find no place to lay it down” (IV.12).
- Overwhelming: “Black grief closed over my heart and wherever I looked I saw only death. My native land was a torment to me and my father’s house unbelievable misery. Everything I had shared with my friend turned into hideous anguish without him” (IV.9).
- A loss of interest in hobbies or passions: “My eyes sought him everywhere, but he was missing; I hated all things because they held him not, and could no more say to me, ‘Look, here he comes!’ as they had been wont to do in his lifetime when he had been away” (ibid.).
- Identity Confusion: “I had become a great enigma to myself, and I questioned my soul, demanding why it was sorrowful and why it so disquieted me, but it had no answer” (ibid.).
- Personal Belief Confusion: “If I bade [my soul], ‘Trust in God,’ it rightly disobeyed me, for the man it had held so dear and lost was more real and more lovable than the fantasy in which it was bidden to trust” (ibid.).
- Disbelief over the world continuing: “I was amazed that other mortals went on living when he was dead whom I had loved as though he would never die” (IV.11).
Overall, Augustine’s response to his friend’s death is a grief of intense hopelessness and fear marked by instability.
In grief, what Augustine had come to expect is no longer sure to him. What he knows about himself (such as what he is passionate about, or why he feels the way he feels) has become unclear; what he knows about his community (where his friend is, and how he feels about reminders of his friend) has shifted; what he wonders about God (whether God is real or not) is emphasized; and what he fears about eternity (that it will not involve the reunification of body and soul) feels evidenced by the intensity of his emotional reaction.
What Augustine knows with certainty is that this death has impacted him severely. He speaks of how “as the dying lose their life, life becomes no better than death for those who live on” (IV.4). He not only loses his zeal for life; he also grows in fear of his own death (IV.11). Augustine retrospectively frames this reaction as due to his lack of hope in resurrection: “I was miserable, and miserable too is everyone whose mind is chained by friendship with mortal things, and is torn apart by their loss” (IV.11). In reminiscing later, he refers to the “uncleanness of such affections” (ibid.). In other words, he attributes the severity of his emotional reaction to his belief at the time that death truly was the end, either for his friend’s body or for his friend entirely. His first sadness is for the death of his friend; his second sadness is for his belief that this death is a permanent end.
Given that Augustine had no hope of resurrection and experienced grief so intensely, one might well wonder how he coped with the potentially permanent loss of so dear a friend. He outlines three coping mechanisms that played an important role in this grief.
Coping Mechanism #1: Crying. Like many people, Augustine found that crying helped him process his grief: “Weeping alone brought me solace, and took my friend’s place as the only comfort of my soul” (IV.9). He writes extensively about why he wept, wondering if his tears were comforting because of his hope God would hear him, but he names that more as prayer than as grief (IV.10). He also notes that the tears were not a plea for his friend’s immediate resurrection in this world (ibid.). Instead, he asks whether humans enjoy or feel a need to weep to “match the weariness we feel over what we once enjoyed” (IV.10). In contemporary grief terms, Augustine views his tears for his friend not as bargaining or as spiritual communication but as emotional release, and he finds solace in them.
Coping Mechanism #2: Social Support. Augustine also benefits from social support after the death of his friend: “But what revived and refreshed me especially was the consolations of other friends” (IV.13). These consolations included doing the typical activities he and his friends had done before, even those activities that were not particularly godly—such as joking around and “trifling together” (ibid.). He explains that doing these activities with these friends, “emanating from the hearts of those who loved and were beloved in return . . . were so much fuel to melt our souls together, and out of many to make but one” (ibid.). We see mirrored here a similar intensity in his desire for intimacy with his surviving friends as he had experienced with his friend who died. However, at this point he believes such intimacy can only exist in this life.
Coping Mechanism #3: Time. Augustine writes that, “my hurt has been assuaged with time” (IV.10), which he says “disseminated in my mind other ideas and other remembrances, and little by little patched me up again with the former kind of delights, unto which that sorrow of mine yielded” (IV.13). In contemporary grief terms, time gave Augustine opportunities to reintegrate his own identity and practice restoration-oriented coping.
Overall, through the death of his friend, Augustine realizes his despair of resurrection and experiences great uncertainty and intensity in his grief. He copes with crying, social support, and time, but he does not have hope for his friend and has developed a greater fear of death himself.
Augustine’s Grief Journey: Death of His Mother
The second major death that shapes Augustine’s grief story is that of his mother, St. Monica, who dies of illness in old age. Augustine had converted shortly before she died, which was something she had long hoped and prayed for. Augustine’s grief response to her death demonstrates a shift in his thinking on the reunification of body and soul and in how he practices his grief in an embodied way as a result.
Some of the characteristics of Augustine’s grief for his mother include:
- Silence: “I was silent, holding back my tears” (IX.27).
- Hiddenness: “With this salve of truth I soothed the agony that was known only to you; [my friends] were unaware of it, and though they listened attentively to my words, they believed that I felt no pain” (IX. 31).
- Sharp and painful: “What was it, then, that gave me such sharp inward pain?” (IX.30).
- A physically close loss: “She and I had grown accustomed to living together; an exceedingly gentle and dear custom it was, and its sudden disruption was like a newly-inflicted wound” (ibid.).
- Heaviness: “All day long I was secretly weighed down by sorrow” (IX.32).
- Desperation: “In my mental turmoil I begged you as best I could to heal my hurt” (IX.32).
Compared to Augustine’s grief response when his friend died, these characteristics of grief are more embodied and rely on more physical metaphors. Perhaps this is because Augustine is present at Monica’s physical death while absent for the death of his friend. Monica’s death may have been a more embodied experience for him, which could thus have been reflected in his grief. And, perhaps this is because Augustine had recently converted. His shift toward honoring the bodily and incarnate rather than villainizing them may have borne out in his telling of this story.
As with the loss of his friend, the loss of Augustine’s mother provides us with more insight into how intimately he experienced his relationships. He describes her loss in vivid terms: “Being now bereft of her comfort, so great a comfort, my soul was wounded; it was as though my life was rent apart, for there had been but one life, woven out of mine and hers” (IX.30). Once again, Augustine stresses his intimacy and the importance of relationship in his life, seeing separation in these intimate relationships as the result of death.
But, Augustine grapples strongly with other concepts in his thinking which have changed since the death of his friend. While we still see a sense of the Manichean emphasis on the soul as the good counterpart to the less-than-good body (“that religious and godly soul was set free from her body” (IX.28), we also see Augustine enter into deep questioning regarding how he lives out his beliefs about eternity in his grieving practices, and how his grieving practices reflect or do not reflect his beliefs about eternity.
Contrary to his thinking during the death of his friend, Augustine holds hope of the resurrection after the death of his mother. He and those around him even change their typical grieving practices in order to better align with this hope: “We judged it unfitting to mark this death by plaintive protests and laments, since these are customarily employed to mourn the misery of the dying, or death as complete extinction. But she neither died in misery nor died altogether. The evidence of her virtues and her sincere faith gave us good reason to hold this as certain” (IX.29). However, despite this decision about grieving practices, Augustine still struggles with whether his emotional reaction to his mother’s death belies a hypocrisy in his own thinking about eternity. He explains just a few paragraphs later,
I chided myself with weakness for feeling as I did, and dammed up the flood of grief, so that for a little space it receded from me; but then a fresh wave swept over me, and though it was not enough to bring on an outburst of tears or even a change of expression, I knew myself what I was suppressing in my heart. And since I was gravely displeased to find how powerfully I could be affected by these human experiences, which in the due order of things and as a consequence of our natural condition are bound to occur, the woe I felt over my woe was yet another woe, and I was distressed by this double sadness (IX.31).
In other words, Augustine’s sadness over his mother’s death prompts a second sadness over how sad he is, because he worries that his first sadness means he does not truly believe in the hope of the resurrection.
Augustine’s recognition and theorization of his double sadness complicates some of his coping mechanisms while simultaneously providing a new opportunity.
Coping Mechanism #1: Crying. Augustine identifies crying as closely connected to his double sadness, but he also again finds comfort in his tears—just as he had with his friend’s death. He does, however, carefully caveat what causes for tears he thinks are acceptable.
Upon Monica’s death, Augustine says, “the tears welled up, but in response to a ferocious command from my mind my eyes held the fount in check until it dried up, though the struggle was intensely painful for me” (IX.29). He suppresses his immediate response of sadness, presumably because he does not know if it comes from a justifiable cause, he believes it is unjustifiable, or he does not wish to give the impression to others that he does not believe in the resurrection of the dead.
Augustine’s prohibition of public crying extends beyond himself. When Monica dies, Augustine’s son Adeodatus bursts out in tears. Augustine recounts, “he was restrained by all of us and grew quiet. By this means something boyish in myself, which was sliding toward tears, was also restrained by the man’s voice of my heart, and it too grew quiet” (IX.29). This phrase may strike modern readers, especially those accustomed to a Western Anglo-Saxton Protestant view of grief, as harsh. It is key to remember that whichever reason holds for Augustine’s concern of public tears (whether he is unsure if they are justified, he believes they are not justified, or he does not wish to lead others to doubt his belief in the resurrection), the same holds true for his son. In this grief-stricken moment, Augustine is trying to parent Adeodatus well by guiding toward what he believes to be the true belief through adjusting his bodily actions and grief practices. At the same time, he relates to the response Adeodatus has and has to parent himself toward hope, too.
Public and private weeping differ, though. Soon after withholding his tears publicly and reprimanding his son for failing to do so, Augustine weeps privately. He attributes this to his mother’s piety:
Little by little I recovered my earlier thoughts about your handmaid, remembering how devout had been her attitude toward you, and how full of holy kindness, how willing to make allowances, she had been in our regard; and now that I was suddenly bereft of this I found comfort in weeping before you about her and for her, about myself and for myself (IX.33).
This weeping brings him solace, much as his weeping did after the loss of his friend.
Augustine recognizes that his weeping, though effective as comfort, is considered socially unacceptable, noting that he cried freely because only the Lord’s ears heard him and no one else could “judge my weeping by the norms of his own pride” (IX.33). But, in the next breath, he becomes almost defensive in his analysis of his tears over his mother’s goodness: “Let anyone read it who will, and judge it as he will, and if he finds it sinful that I wept over my mother for a brief part of a single hour—the mother who for a little space was to my sight dead, and who had wept long years for me that in your sight I might live—then let such a reader not mock, but rather, if his charity is wide enough, himself weep for my sins to you” (ibid.). The key differentiation here is between Augustine’s potential pride (that is, not wanting to be seen acting in a socially unacceptable way) and potential sinfulness (that is, indicating through his tears a lack of hope in the resurrection). Augustine is arguing that some tears, though socially unacceptable, can be not sinful; other tears may be sinful, but he does not believe his sobbing over the loss of his mother’s piety qualifies as such.
Augustine later clarifies that he thinks he may have been “guilty of some carnal affection” in weeping for his mother, but that he also weeps because she may have sinned and there is a possibility that her eternity may not be spent in heaven (IX.34). He ends this passage with a reminder of God’s mercy, pointing once again to his growing hope of the resurrection (ibid.).
Overall, crying as a coping mechanism becomes much more fraught for Augustine after his conversion because of its implications as a bodily practice that potentially reflects (or even publicly promotes) certain theological beliefs. His double sadness complicates this grief practice that brought him solace and indeed brings him comfort again, as he navigates which causes for tears he finds acceptable and which reflect a lack of hope.
Coping Mechanism #2: Social Support. Augustine has conversations with friends “who felt I should not be left alone” and listen to him attentively (IX.31), but he hides his tears from them for the reasons we have outlined. He does, however, find some solace in thinking about his mother and the responses she had when he performed acts of service for her (IX.30). In contemporary grief terms, he is receiving continuing social support from reflecting on his relationship with Monica.
Coping Mechanism #3: Time. As after the death of his friend, Augustine finds that time helps him process his grief over the death of his mother. But, now, he ties the passage of time specifically into his ability to remember her piety rather than simply to engage in activities with other friends: “Little by little I recovered my earlier thoughts about your handmaid, remembering how devout had been her attitude toward you” (IX.33). In contemporary grief work terms, he is using time for loss-oriented coping purposes rather than restoration-oriented coping purposes.
Coping Mechanism #4: Sleep. Augustine notes that after his mother died, he tried to take a bath (which did not change his affect; see sidebar) and then slept “and on awakening felt a good deal better” (IX.32).
Coping Mechanism #5: Hope. Augustine returns repeatedly to hope of the resurrection as a way to process his grief from his mother’s death, writing to God, “we trustingly hope for a place in your house” (IX.34). He also prays for his mother in an act of hope and asks all of us, reading his confessions, to do the same (IX.37).
Overall, after Augustine’s conversion, he takes hope in the resurrection of the dead. But, his old beliefs about bodies and souls, along with his former coping mechanisms, give him pause, as he contemplates his double sadness.
Augustine’s Grief Journey: Death of His Son
Augustine’s son, Adeodatus, died around the age of sixteen. Augustine does not speak at length of his death in The Confessions. Indeed, only one full sentence is dedicated to the event of Adeodatus dying (for context, in the previous section, Augustine actually spends more words describing the characteristics of his reaction to a severe toothache than he does here on the death of his son). But, both the fact that the passage is included at all, and the fact that the passage is presented in the story of Augustine’s own baptism, provides powerful insight on his conversion.
This section begins with the news of Augustine’s coming baptism alongside Adeodatus, after which Augustine speaks highly of Adeodatus for his God-given gifts, insisting that the gifts did not come from Augustine. Addressing God, Augustine praises, “It was you, and you alone, who had inspired us to instruct him in your truth as he grew up, and so it is your own gifts that I acknowledge to you. . . . The brilliance he evinced filled me with awe, for who else but you could be the artificer of such prodigies?” (IX.14).
Augustine continues, “Very soon you took him away from this life on earth, but I remember him without anxiety, for I have no fear about anything in his boyhood or adolescence; indeed I fear nothing whatever for that man” (ibid.).
While Augustine had demonstrated varied characteristics of grief in response to other losses, he describes his grief over Adeodatus’s death as more uniform. This grief is:
- Imbued with gratitude: “Very fair had you fashioned him . . . surpassed many educated men of weighty learning” (ibid.).
- Peaceful and confident: “I remember him without anxiety, for I have no fear about anything in his boyhood or adolescence; indeed I fear nothing whatever for that man” (ibid.).
In his writing about his grief over the deaths of his friend and his mother—in both of which his grief has many characteristics he describes in detail—Augustine notes much less variety in his reaction to this grief, identifying only a very tranquil response written about through a lens of gratitude. Further, this instance of grief does not seem to attend separately to mind and body, as his descriptions of grief had in the past. This contrast is particularly stark in comparing his description of his grief over his mother’s death, which is very embodied, to this short passage about Adeodatus’s death.
The framing of this passage sets the stage for Augustine’s main coping mechanism: hope. By including Adeodatus’s death in the midst of the story of their baptism, Augustine contextualizes his grief, and his primary coping mechanism of hope, around his surety of Adeodatus’s salvation.
Coping Mechanism #1: Crying. Augustine addresses crying in the sentences after he notes the death of Adeodatus, but the tears are not related to his son’s death. Rather, he describes his crying as caused by the beauty of God’s salvation:
And so we were baptized, and all our dread about our earlier lives dropped away from us. During the days that followed I could not get enough of the wonderful sweetness that filled me as I meditated upon your deep design for the salvation of the human race. How copiously I wept at your hymns and canticles, how intensely was I moved by the lovely harmonies of your singing Church! Those voices flooded my ears, and the truth was distilled into my heart until it overflowed in loving devotion; my tears ran down, and I was the better for them (IX.14).
Rather than naming crying as a source of relief in grief, as he had done previously, Augustine names tears as a piece of his hope of salvation even outside the context of grief. However, his description of this reaction here, immediately after addressing his son’s death, highlights how his hope allows his grief over Adeodatus to take the form it does. Crying here is also not simply a communication of his weariness or some lack of trust in salvation. Rather, the act itself, situated within hope, betters him.
Coping Mechanism #2: Social Support. Augustine emphasizes in his praise of God’s design for salvation the importance of the voices of the singing Church in orienting him toward the source of hope. It is not on his own, as an isolated island, that his meditations bear fruit. Rather, his Church community provides him the opportunity and orientation to reflect further on hope.
Coping Mechanisms #3 and 4: Time and Sleep. Although the passage of time and getting sleep are both compulsory (and indeed often foster greater senses of hope), Augustine does not indicate that they may have contributed to his coping after his son’s death. They seem less impactful in this case of grief than they had been in former instances.
Coping Mechanism #5: Hope Itself. Through his emphasis on lack of fear because of his son’s baptism, Augustine demonstrates hope as his primary coping mechanism after his son’s death. At this point in his life, Augustine has internalized Christian teaching on salvation. Because Adeodatus dies soon after he and Augustine are both baptized, which opens a known path for their salvation, Augustine has no fear for Adeodatus’s salvation. This is both his main coping mechanism and the defining characteristic of his grief. In contemporary grief terminology, Augustine demonstrates here a sense of reorganization or reconciliation to the reality of his son’s death and eternal life.
By the time Adeodatus dies, Augustine has found surety. While his grief journey after the death of his friend started with a trademark of uncertainty, now he has confidence. His fear has been replaced by peace. We see in his grief response to the death of his mother how the hope of the resurrection began to change him; by the time Adeodatus dies, this change is complete. His primary coping mechanism is a sure hope. Body and soul will be reunited one day for all eternity.
Augustine’s son, Adeodatus, died quickly around the age of sixteen. Augustine does not speak at length of his death in The Confessions, but what he does say provides powerful insight on Augustine’s hope.
Adeodatus dies soon after he and Augustine are both baptized (which opens a known path for their salvation). Augustine writes, “I remember him without anxiety, for I have no fear about anything in his boyhood or adolescence; indeed I fear nothing whatever for that man” (IX.14). There are few other details about Adeodatus’s death or Augustine’s grief response. The primary characteristics of this grief response are that it is peaceful and confident.
By the death of Adeodatus, Augustine has found surety. While his grief journey after the death of his friend started with a trademark of uncertainty, now he has confidence. His fear has been replaced with simple cherished memories. We see in his grief response to the death of his mother how the hope of the resurrection began to change him; by the time Adeodatus dies, this change is complete. His primary and sole-mentioned coping mechanism is a sure hope. Body and soul will be reunited one day for all eternity.
Overall, in his response to Adeodatus’s death, Augustine believes the realities he had grappled with during the death of his mother, as we see in his confidence in Adeodatus’s salvation. He does not experience double sadness but rather only comfort from the Lord in the form of hope for the resurrection.
Conclusion
Augustine describes to us how his relationship with the idea of death changes over time and what that means for his grief responses. After experiencing a very intense sadness over his friend with little hope, he converts and then experiences a similarly intense sadness over his mother. But his growing hope makes him reflect on the role of sadness in his grief response, to the effect that he determines only some kinds of sadness are appropriate or justified. When Adeodatus dies, Augustine shares with us only his new and most important coping mechanism: his sure hope of the resurrection.
What do the changing characteristics and coping mechanisms of Augustine’s grief teach us, centuries later?
Augustine grappled with the physical and embodied nature of humanity and of grief. For those of us who live in our minds and tend to ignore our bodies, we may find in Augustine an example of what grappling with being incarnate means, for our own deaths and for how we mourn the deaths of others. And for those of us who have been taught that tears are inappropriate—whether as a response to grief or to devotion—we may find in Augustine a companion in discerning the worthiness of tears.
Augustine was deeply concerned with how others perceived him early on in his conversion. For those of us who work to be perceived by those around us as holy or well-theologized, Augustine demonstrates that increasing our sure hope can go hand in hand with paying less attention to what others think of the sincerity of our hope.
And finally, Augustine found that losses prompted reflection. When his friend died, he wondered if life was worth living. When his mother died, he questioned whether his mourning for her was congruous with his belief in God. Although some might say that including so short a note about his son’s death indicates a lack of reflection on this loss, the fact that he includes his son’s death in the story of his own baptism demonstrates for us the importance of this moment in his own conversion and the importance of baptism to his assurance of his son’s salvation. Grief demands contemplation, even when we approach deaths with sure hope.
