Monica of Hippo Biography

Almost everything we know about Monica comes from a book her son wrote about God. Augustine’s Confessions, composed a decade after her death, is a long prayer of self-accusation and praise, and inside it stands the fullest portrait of a mother the ancient church has left us. That is worth saying plainly at the start: we see her through the eyes of the boy she wept over, in a book written to glorify not her but the God who answered her. It is a devotional portrait, drawn by a witness who loved her. But it is a portrait from life, and the woman in it is unmistakable — patient past reason, stubborn in prayer, and finally so satisfied that she no longer wished to live.

A wife in Thagaste

She was born around 331 in Thagaste, a small town in Roman North Africa — today Souk Ahras in Algeria — into a devout Christian household of some means. Her name is Berber, and she belonged to a Christian family in a province where the faith was old and deep-rooted. She was raised, Augustine remembered, less by her mother than by an elderly family servant who had carried the household’s children on her back, and who taught the girls to master their thirst and their tongues.

She was married young to Patricius, a pagan town councillor of Thagaste. He was a man of some standing and a difficult husband — hot-tempered and unfaithful. Monica bore all of it with a patience that became famous among the wives of the town. She did not quarrel with him, and when other women showed the marks of their husbands’ anger and asked how she escaped, she told them the fault was often in their own answering tongues. She waited on his temper the way one waits out weather. And over the long years she won him — not by argument but by the steadiness of her life — so that he was baptised a Christian near the end of his life. She and Patricius had at least three children: Augustine, born in 354; a second son, Navigius; and a daughter, of whom Augustine tells us little and whom he does not name.

The years of tears

It was the eldest who broke her heart. Sent away to Carthage to study rhetoric, Augustine fell into the fashionable religion of the Manichees and into a way of living his mother could only grieve over. He took a concubine and fathered a son. He argued for a faith she believed was ruin. For a time she would not have him at her table or under her roof, so sharp was her horror at what he had become — and then, softened by a dream, she took him back and set his place again.

The dream is one Augustine never forgot. Early in her grief, he tells us, she saw herself standing on a wooden measuring-rule, weeping, when a radiant young man came and asked why she wept. She said she was mourning her son’s perdition. He told her to look — and there on the same rule, at her side, stood Augustine. She held to that vision for years as a pledge that where she stood, he would one day stand.

What she did between the dream and its fulfilment was pray. Not once, not in seasons, but as the settled work of her days. Augustine, looking back, could hardly find the bottom of it:

That chaste, pious, and sober widow desisted not, at all the hours of her supplications, to bewail my case unto You.

— Augustine, Confessions III

Nine years she prayed while he was a Manichee; counting from his first straying to the day he was baptised, her intercession ran something like seventeen years. There is no way to make those years sound bearable. They were not a story yet — they were a mother going to God every day about a son who was getting worse, with nothing to show for it but a schoolboy’s dream and her own refusal to stop.

The son of these tears

At some point in the long grief she went to a certain bishop, himself a former Manichee, and begged him to sit down with Augustine and reason him out of his errors. The bishop refused. Her son, he said, was not yet teachable — he was too pleased with the novelty of the heresy — but he would come round in time; let him alone and pray. Monica would not let it go, and pressed him with tears to intervene. Worn down by her insistence, the bishop gave her the answer she carried for the rest of her life:

Go your way, and God bless you, for it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish.

— a bishop to Monica, Confessions III

Augustine records that she took the words as if they had sounded from heaven. They were only a tired man’s attempt to send a persistent woman home; she received them as a promise from God, and she was right.

Her love was not gentle in the passive sense — it followed. When Augustine determined to leave Africa for Rome and would not take her, he lied to her: he told her he was only seeing a friend to the ship, and while she prayed through the night in a chapel by the shore, he sailed without her. She woke to find him gone. She did not accept the loss. She followed him across the sea, and when his road led on to Milan, she came to Milan too.

There she found a teacher she could give herself to. Ambrose was bishop of Milan, and Monica loved and obeyed him, sitting under his preaching and bending her old African customs to his counsel. Ambrose, for his part, used to tell Augustine how blessed he was in such a mother. Neither of them yet knew how near the end of her waiting was.

The garden and the font

In the summer of 386, in a garden in Milan, the thing she had prayed for happened. Augustine — torn, weeping, unable to give himself wholly to God — heard a child’s voice over a wall chanting take up and read, opened the letters of Paul, and read the sentence that ended his long resistance. He went straight indoors to tell his mother. She had prayed for his soul without ceasing for the better part of his life; now he told her it was done. Augustine writes that she was filled with triumph and blessed God, who is able to do far more than we ask or think.

At Easter of 387, in Milan, Ambrose baptised Augustine. The son Monica had mourned as lost stood in the water a Christian. The dream on the wooden rule had come true to the letter: where she stood, he stood beside her.

The window at Ostia

They set out for Africa together. Resting at Ostia, the port of Rome, mother and son stood one day leaning at a window that looked over a garden, and fell into a conversation that climbed, as they talked, from the things of earth toward the life of God — reaching, for a moment, past everything they could name. When it was over Monica spoke words Augustine set down almost as she said them: that there was one thing only for which she had wished to linger in this life, that she might see him a Catholic Christian before she died.

My God has exceeded this abundantly, so that I see you withal, despising earthly felicity, made His servant. What do I here?

— Monica at Ostia, Confessions IX

Within about five days she fell into a fever. She had once wished to be buried in Africa beside Patricius, and had spoken of it often; now she let it go entirely. When her sons wondered aloud whether it would not grieve her to die so far from her own city, she gave them the answer of a woman who had finished her business with the world:

Lay this body anywhere; let not the care for it any way disquiet you. This only I ask, that you will remember me at the Lord’s altar, wherever you be.

— Monica, Confessions IX

Nothing, she said, is far from God; she did not fear that at the world’s end He would not know the place from which to raise her. On the ninth day of her sickness she died, in the fifty-sixth year of her age and the thirty-third of her son’s.

What she leaves

She wrote nothing. She founded nothing. She held no office the church could name. What she left is a demonstration that has outlived nearly every institution of her century: that the prayer of a faithful mother is not wasted, however long it goes unanswered, and that God can be trusted with the years in between.

The church came to remember her as the patron of mothers and wives, of hard marriages, and above all of everyone praying for a child who has wandered off and will not come home. A Spanish expedition, centuries later and half a world away, is said to have named a set of springs on the California coast Las Lágrimas de Santa Mónica — the Tears of Saint Monica — and the city of Santa Monica keeps her name to this day. It is a fitting accident. She is remembered by her tears because her tears were the truest thing about her, and because she was right to keep shedding them. The son she wept over became the greatest teacher the Western church has known, and he laid the whole of it at her feet — a mother who would not stop asking, for a God who does more than we ask.