Commontide
Ecumenical Commemoration
Mother of Augustine & Woman of Prayer
August 27 · d. 387
also known as Saint Monica
Monica (c. 332-387) was the mother of Augustine of Hippo, and she is the reason the church has Augustine at all. For nearly thirty years she prayed and wept for her brilliant, wayward son, following him across the sea when he fled her, until at last she saw him baptized by Ambrose at Milan. She died a few months later at Ostia, her life's prayer answered, and is honored as the patron of mothers who pray for their children.
Monica was a Christian woman of Roman North Africa, born about 332 in the town of Thagaste, in what is now Algeria, and she is remembered for one thing above all: she would not stop praying for her son. The son was Augustine, brilliant and headstrong, and for much of her life he broke her heart with his adult life. He abandoned the faith she had raised him in, took up a fashionable heresy called Manichaeism (a mixture of Christian Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism and a bit of Buddhism). He lived with a woman he would not marry, had a child with her, and chased after worldly glory. For fourteen years, Monica wept and prayed and fasted for him year upon year with no sign that it would ever come to anything.
She begged the bishops to reason with him, and one of them, worn down by her tears, finally told her to leave the young man to God and go home in peace, for it was not possible that the son of such tears should perish. She held onto that word through the whole of the long wait.
When Augustine desired to study in Italy, he slipped away, intentionally deceiving her to be rid of her. She followed him across the sea anyway. She found him at last in Milan, where the great bishop Ambrose was preaching, and there she watched, scarcely daring to hope, as her son was drawn step by step toward Christ. And the faithful prayers, like Jesus’ woman before an unjust judge, were at last answered. In a garden in Milan, Augustine surrendered Himself to God, and came and told his mother that he believed at last. The persistent prayers across his whole adult life were answered in a sentence. At Easter, Ambrose baptized him.
Her work was done. As they waited at the port of Ostia for a ship home to Africa, mother and son stood together at a window looking over a garden and spoke of heaven. Augustine says they were lifted up for one moment, to touch the edge of eternal Wisdom, a mother and her son who had so nearly lost each other both resting now in God. Soon after, Monica fell ill. She had always wanted to be buried beside her husband in Africa, but now she famously said it no longer mattered. Nothing is far to God, she said, and he would not fail to know, at the end of the world, the place from which to raise her up.
To her two sons, as she lay dying, she gave a last instruction that has outlived empires. Lay this body anywhere, let not the care for it trouble you at all, she said. This one thing only she asked: that they would remember her at the altar of the Lord, wherever they might be. She died at Ostia, far from home, about fifty-six years old, a few months after the baptism she had prayed fourteen years to see. Augustine wrote in his Confessions a request that those who read remember Monica as she had asked, and today Monica is remembered around the world, the patron of every mother who has wept and prayed over a child who has wandered off, and the standing proof that such prayers are not wasted.
Almost everything we know of Monica comes from one extraordinary source: the ninth book of the Confessions of her son, Augustine of Hippo, who set down her life, her character, and her death with a tenderness and psychological depth unmatched in ancient literature. Because Augustine is the most documented figure of the ancient church, his mother is better known to us than almost any other woman of her age, though we see her almost wholly through his eyes and at the points where her life touched his. She was born about 332 at Thagaste, married a pagan townsman named Patricius whom she won to the faith near his death, and bore at least three children, of whom Augustine was the eldest and the most troublesome.
The shape of her life as Augustine tells it is the long pursuit of his soul: her grief at his lapse into Manichaeism, her following him to Rome and then to Milan, her joy at his conversion in 386 and baptism at Easter 387, the shared vision at Ostia, and her death there as they waited to sail home, in the late summer of 387. Augustine's portrait is frank as well as loving; he records her early fondness for wine as a girl and the strong will that the gospel had to temper as well as the faith it crowned. She became, through his account, the archetype of the praying mother, and one of the few laywomen of the patristic age whose interior life is known to us at all.
Monica is commemorated on August 27th, the day before the feast of her son Augustine, so that mother and son stand together in the calendar as they stood together at Ostia; her liturgical color is white. Her relics were translated in the Middle Ages to the church of Sant'Agostino in Rome, and the Italian coastal city of Santa Monica, and the California city named after it, carry her name.
She is honored as the patron of mothers, of wives, and especially of those who pray for the conversion of their children or their husbands, for she is the church's great example of persevering, tearful, unanswered-seeming prayer that is answered in the end. Her example has been preached to such mothers for sixteen centuries: that she prayed nearly thirty years before she saw the fruit, and that the son she would not give up on became one of the pillars of the whole church. In art she is shown as a matron in the dress of a widow, often weeping, or with her son, or with a book and a girdle, the mother whose patience outlasted her son's flight.
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The Confessions, Book IX (the life and death of Monica)(Latin, c. 397-400)
Recommended: Henry Chadwick, Confessions (Oxford World's Classics)
Monica lives in the ninth book of her son's Confessions; Chadwick's is the finest modern translation, and the text is freely readable at New Advent.
Public domain: Confessions, Book IX (New Advent)
Further reading. Monica's life is told by Augustine himself in Book IX of the Confessions, listed above; the scene at Ostia and her death are among the most moving passages in all of Christian writing. Peter Brown's biography of Augustine sets her in the full context of the family and the world she shaped.
Online resources. Augustine's account of his mother is freely readable in Book IX of the Confessions in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers at New Advent.
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British (Received Pronunciation): Ostia /ˈɒstiə/; Augustine /ɔːˈɡʌstɪn/
Readings for a Commemoration
Micah 6:6–8Psalm 11 Corinthians 1:18–31John 3:16–21
Almighty God, you have surrounded us with a great cloud of witnesses: Grant that we, encouraged by the good example of your servant Monica, may persevere in running the race that is set before us, until at last, with him, we attain to your eternal joy; through Jesus Christ, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.