St. Monica of Hippo: Mother of Tears
Early in the Confessions, Augustine regretfully recalls how he dismissed his mother’s pleas for chastity as mere woman’s talk, instead opting for a promiscuous path of torturous suffering. Watching this, Monica stood by helpless and unheeded. And yet, as the Confessions unfolds, we are presented with a conversion narrative that portrays Monica, mother of tears, as Augustine’s very lifeline to God. By weeping and praying for the soul of her son, Monica exhibits a form of maternal fidelity which cannot but move the heart of God. From Augustine’s mature perspective, it is ultimately her love, conformed to the love of the Father, which accounts for his radical conversion: she participates in her son’s salvation because of her maternal love. Monica is a tiger-mama, and not a perfect saint from the beginning, but her willingness to submit her love for Augustine to God purifies her maternal instincts, and ultimately brings her and her son, together, to the heavenly kingdom.
So, what can mothers learn from Monica’s story today? Much, I think, especially those who share her anxious tendencies. Indeed, the first time I read Confessions as a mother, her character sprung off the pages in a radically new way: here, I thought, was a woman I could identify with. She was not in any sense a chill or sanguine mother. Instead, she was fiercely protective and flooded with worries for her son. Overcome with maternal instinct, there were things she had to learn the hard way. At the start of my own maternal journey, I desired to take her wisdom into my heart. I knew I would need it. Carrying it with me, what I would like to offer today is the good news I have taken from Monica’s story. In short, I have found, it illumines a path to sanctity that both enfolds and purifies our love for our children. More than this, it reminds us that we are but co-operators with a Heavenly Father who loves them far more and far better than we do. This is the best news any mother can hear, and to dwell with it is a gift.
To read the Confessions as a mother, I have found, is to strain to hear Monica’s voice within it. So, while my students often come away from book one with complaints about Augustine’s cynical view of babies, I always come away in gratitude that I have heard his mother’s voice. Indeed, when Augustine says he knows he was welcomed into life with tender mercy, it is her word which serves as proof. Other hints of Monica hover in the background. Here is where I hear them most clearly. Listen:
My mother and my nurses did not fill their own breasts; rather you gave me an infant’s nourishment through them in accordance with your plan, from the riches deeply hidden in creation. You . . . inspired in those who nurtured me the will to give me what you were giving them, for their love for me was patterned on your law, and so they wanted to pass on to me the overflowing gift they received from you. It was a bounty for them, and a bounty for me from them; or, rather, not from them but only through them, for in truth all good things are from you, O God (1.6.7).
This whole passage is full of Monica’s words, received by Augustine in trust and love. Put differently, her confessions shape his. When Augustine tells us of God’s plan, hidden deep within creation, it is Monica who taught him to notice it. It is she who discovered within herself the overwhelming desire to give to her child. And, it is she who found God within in that desire. Disclosing these discoveries to her son in loving conversation, Monica revealed that dawn of the love which defines their whole story. Coming upon her as an in-breaking, this love revealed the fatherly heart of God to her in a way that deepens her bond him and with her son. The overflowing gift of God’s love, poured as it is into Monica’s heart, serves as the anchor that preserves mother and son on their stormy journey to sanctity.
Signs of this storm appear early. At the same time that Augustine highlights Monica’s deep love for him, he also points to a rift between them because of his incapacity to receive this love in trust. Indeed, Augustine the infant is fallen Adam: we all were. Surrounded by bounty and love, he is already deeply distrustful. We see this reflected both in the jealousy of the nursling who “glared with . . . fury” at a fellow babe at the breast, and in the frustrations of the child who cried, fearing his needs would not be met (1.7.11). Monica, like many mothers, probably felt despondent in such moments, exclaiming, “I am trying to help you, trust me!” The trust so often associated with childhood is not, for Augustine, unwounded.
The feelings of maternal helplessness hinted at in these passages of course only come to a head when Augustine enters adolescence. Taking a break from boarding school due to his father’s lack of funds, Augustine loiters around his hometown with nothing to do—this, at precisely the age when inactivity is liable to get him into trouble. Falling in with a group of boys who embody what he wants to be—confident, comfortable with their themselves at a highly uncomfortable age—Augustine becomes unreachable. Monica knows he has great potential. For this reason, she has looked the other way as his teachers imposed harsh punishments on him, reasoning that they might be what it takes for Augustine to learn. She has felt confirmed as his teachers reported his remarkable talent. She has imagined his future. She has hoped in it.
Now, all that seems on the line. She hates watching her son, used to the discipline of the schoolroom, roam wild about town. She hates that he panders to foolish friends. She hates who he is with them. Word has gotten back to her what they do together, what they say together. She sees it in how he is at home with her. Of course, we get all this from Augustine’s perspective. Going through puberty, “the thornbushes of [his] lust shot higher than [his] head,” so that he was drawn to friends who bragged about their sexual antics (2.1.6). He longed to imitate them. Monica, we hear, did everything she could to talk sense into him. Describing “the intense earnestness with which she cautioned [him] against” unchastity, he recalls that “she urged [him] to keep clear of fornication, and especially not to commit adultery with any man’s wife.” Augustine admits that he dismissed these warnings as “mere woman’s talk” which he “would have blushed to heed” (2.1.7). I cannot imagine how intolerable this must have been for Monica. She must have lain awake at night fearing he was on the brink of making choices he had no idea were actually of consequence. His need for guidance and utter unwillingness to accept this guidance must have been infuriating. is
So, Monica had a heart bursting with the desire to help Augustine get things right, and a growing sense that she was out of her depth in trying to make that happen. And so, she watched from the sidelines as he first became sexually promiscuous and then joined a cult. It was then she really panicked. Overhearing Augustine torment less educated Catholics “with finicky . . . questions,” she must have thought all this cultivation of his intellect was for naught. She must have regretted not having had him baptized. We know she prayed for someone to show him the emptiness of his so-called truth. Encountering a bishop with the rhetorical chops to do it, she cornered him: “would [he] be so kind as to talk to [Augustine] . . . to . . . disabuse [him] of [his] harmful persuasions and teach [him] good ones?” (3.12.21). The bishop refused. The youth was still “too puffed up with the novelty of [his] heresy.” He was, as yet, “unteachable.”
It was, then, a dark period. Indeed, Augustine says that during it, Monica regarded him as dead (3.11.19). I think we see where he got his flare for the dramatic. But, in all seriousness, for those of us who look at our children and wonder how the kinks will iron out, this moment of grief—and Monica’s response to it—offer a real lesson. Monica could have succumbed to her sense of powerlessness. She could have kept trying to control the situation. She could have burned the bridge. She did none of these things. She stayed close to Augustine and handed him over to God.
Now, this is not something that happens perfectly all at once. Indeed, one of the reasons that I cherish Monica’s story is that it reveals what it is for an imperfect mother to become a saint. We all know she could be a little bit smothering. We also know she had expectations for Augustine that she needed to let go of. But, what matters—and why it is such a gift for us to have Monica as a role-model—is that God offers her and her son a path to salvation—and she takes it. Because she does that, Monica’s profound maternal instinct and her deep love for Augustine are caught up in the love of God in a way that ultimately gives her back her maternal agency. God provides a home for her love, and offers her a way to channel it so that nothing of it is lost.
So, how does this happen? Well, it starts with Monica’s tears. Augustine assigns remarkable power to these tears. Explaining why God had mercy on him, he exclaims: “You, [Lord], stretched out your hand from on high and pulled my soul out of these murky depths because my mother, who was faithful to you, was weeping for me more bitterly than ever mothers wept for the bodily death of their children” (3.11.19). Like the persistent widow, Monica moves God to mercy. Unlike the judge worn down by the persistent widow, God makes space for her to move him to mercy. He moves her to move him. Celebrating that God has built Monica’s tears into the economy of salvation, Augustine writes: “Thanks to your hidden providence, O my God, your hands did not let go of my soul. Through my mother’s tears, the sacrifice of her heart’s blood was being offered to you day after day, night after night, for my welfare; and you dealt with me in wondrous ways” (5.7.13). God’s paternal love and Monica’s maternal love work together.
One remarkable instance of this dynamic can be seen when Monica’s prayers miraculously save Augustine from death without her knowing. Here is the story on Augustine’s telling: having just abandoned Monica on the shores of Africa, Augustine falls gravely ill in Rome. She, for good reason, is furious at his sneaking off, but soon resumes praying for him. Though she knows nothing of his illness—a mercy I think—God allows these prayers to be the reason he has mercy on Augustine: “you heard her in that land where she was, and took pity on me where I was.” Reflecting that, had he died, he would have died in his sin, Augustine remarks: “If a blow like that had struck my mother’s heart, she would never have recovered.” Going on to describe how diligent she was in making her daily offering at God’s altar, Augustine again portrays Monica’s fidelity as his lifeline:
Would you, O God of all mercy, spurn the broken, humbled heart of a chaste and temperate widow who was untiring in her acts of charity, attentive to the needs of your saints and faithful in serving them? . . . Could you . . . whose grace had made her what she was, disdain those tears and rebuff her plea for your aid, when what she tearfully begged from you . . . was the salvation of her son? (5.9.17).
God cannot but hear Monica’s prayers and enfold them into his loving plan for her son. Her fidelity is caught up into the fidelity of a merciful God.
Here, I think, Monica’s story offers us great hope. Since God is the same yesterday and today, our prayers for our children go into his safekeeping, just as Monica’s did. Through Monica, God is calling us to entrust more, to entreat more. Yet, this is not the only gift Monica’s story offers us. It also liberates us from an ersatz idea of what it means to entrust our children to God. It is tempting to imagine that if we did this properly, we would not experience anxiety. But in Monica’s case, this is simply not true. As Augustine writes, “I can find no words to express how intensely she loved me: with far more anxious solicitude did she give birth to me in the spirit than ever she had in the flesh” (5.9.16). Or, again, “She who had given me life according to the flesh was very anxious, because in her pure heart, through her faith in you and with a love still more tender, she was bringing my eternal salvation to birth” (1.11.17). This idea that as mothers, we are given the privilege of birthing our children, not only in the flesh, but also in the spirit, is remarkable, but we have to admit that birthing is an anxious process. Monica teaches us to make peace with that anxiety. More than this, she shows us that we need not pretend to be different (or indifferent) mothers to become holy. We can be passionately intense, passionately ourselves, so long as we offer all the loves in our heart to God—and let God do the work of purifying them.
For this reason, I am tempted to say that Monica’s story is God’s pledge of fidelity to all anxious mothers. While our maternal instinct, like Monica’s, will need to be purified, the ongoing activity of placing our children—and our anxiety for our children—in God’s hands is that path to purification. Dwelling with Monica’s story reveals this. She too has a set of hopes for her son that prove to be wrongheaded. We have seen how she corners a bishop, expecting him to be the one to help Augustine see the light. She also expects academic success and a good marriage to be a catalyst in his conversion. Each of these hopes is dashed. And yet, they prefigure the better things within God’s plan. Ambrose eventually comes along, Augustine’s success leads to a self-reckoning, and celibacy provides the liberation from lust that Augustine needs. Thinking about this can inspire us to be more openhanded with our wishes for our own children; Monica’s story reminds us that God’s ways are not our own.
And yet, it is not a given that the disappointment of our hopes will purify our maternal loves. It is the fact that Monica never stops taking God’s promise of fidelity seriously that allows hers to be purified. It is also what allows her to receive that first bishop’s advice to leave Augustine alone and simply pray for him—and to take from that her maternal mission: as this bishop famously tells her, “it is inconceivable that a son of tears like yours should perish” (3.12.21). Augustine tells us that Monica “often recalled” how “she had taken these words to be an oracle from heaven.” Monica, in other words, teaches us to look for the ways God is trying to strengthen us as he purifies our desires, and to receive these consolations as gift. Indeed, when we read that Monica received prophetic dreams, we need to realize that Monica has become good at opening herself up to God’s nudges; she looks for them and so is able to draw strength from them. They are what allow her to do the difficult work of accompanying Augustine along the way.
Paradoxically, this habit of looking out for divine consolation is also what allows her to get better at distinguishing her own wishes from God’s will. We see this in her attitude as she goes about arranging a marriage for Augustine. For context, Monica had long desired to see Augustine married; as a catechumen, he began to desire it himself. And so, the mature Augustine writes:
In the light of my request and her own desire she besought you daily, with powerful, heartfelt cry, to show her in a vision something of my future marriage; but you never consented. She did have some illusory, fantastic dreams, brought on by the activity of her own human spirit as she busied herself about this matter, and these she related to me, but without the confidence she usually showed when you revealed something to her: to these dreams she attached little importance. She claimed that by something akin to the sense of taste, a faculty she could not explain in words, she was able to distinguish between your revelations to her and the fantasies of her own dreaming soul (6.13.23).
Monica, then, still has desires for Augustine that she hopes are part of God’s plan. This is human. And yet, her habit of attending to the ways God speaks to her loosens her grip on them. She still passionately offers them to God, but now with a confidence in the superiority of God’s plan.
How is such a confidence forged? In Monica’s story, one moment seems especially illuminative. This is when Augustine the Manichee has been offered a job in Rome, and Monica really does not want him to go, or if he goes, she wants to come with him. Augustine does not want this. With difficulty, he writes, “I persuaded her to spend the night in a place very near our ship, a memorial chapel to Blessed Cyprian. That same night I left by stealth; she did not, but remained behind praying and weeping. And what was she begging of you, my God, with such abundant tears? Surely, that you would not allow me to sail away. But in your deep wisdom you acted in her truest interests: you listened to the real nub of her longing and took no heed of what she was asking at this particular moment, for you meant to make me into what she was asking for all the time” (5.8.14). Writing that God was both using his lusts “to put an end to them” and chastising Monica for holding onto him too tight, Augustine reads the story as the act of divine mercy she soon discovered it to be—for, by the time she braved the stormy sea to follow him, Augustine had become a Catholic catechumen. Because Monica chooses to entrust Augustine to God every time that all seems lost, she gains personal knowledge of God’s fidelity that transforms her anxiety from the root. She discovers a deeper kind of confidence: one that is not feigned but graced.
Indeed, Augustine remarks how striking it was that when she heard the news of his becoming a catechumen, “there was no wild excitement or agitation in her heartfelt joy” (6.1.1). This could not but remind him of her reaction when he, as a Manichee, had attempted to reinterpret her prophetic dream—it was not he who would stand where she was, but she who would stand where he was—even then, Monica was eerily certain of what God had disclosed to her. He describes being disturbed by her confidence. When, now that he had abandoned Manicheism, “she told [him] very tranquilly and with full confidence that in Christ she would see [him] a faithful Catholic before she departed from this life,” he was again struck (6.1.1). She was, he reflects, certain that the God, “who had promised her everything, would grant what was still lacking.” And he did. Monica’s confidence stands as a divine sign for Augustine amidst his wanderings.
All told then, Monica’s trust in God is the golden thread that leads them both to salvation. It deepens, expands, and purifies her maternal love, so that when she does receive the converted Augustine in from the garden, her first reaction is to marvel that God has the power to do more than we ask or understand. Converting her grief “into a joy far more abundant than she had desired,” God had, Monica reflects, granted “much more than she had been wont to beg of [him] in her wretched, tearful groaning” (8.12.30). Dwelling with this good news, we are invited to draw strength from Monica as from one who has gone on ahead. Entrusting our children to God alongside her, we endure the anxiety of motherhood in hope, remembering that our tears and prayers are ways of bringing our children to spiritual birth. Embracing this labor in love, we can travel the path of graced confidence to joy that is open to even the most anxious of mothers.
