The Life of Saint Monica

But Monica's happiness was to be short-lived, for it seemed that Patricius would soon rejoin his mother. He did not deceive himself. He spoke of his approaching death to Monica, and asked her to help him to make a worthy preparation for Baptism, which he desired to receive as soon as possible. With the simplicity and trustfulness of a child, he looked to her for guidance, and did all that she desired.

The ceremony over, he turned to his wife and smiled. A wonderful peace possessed him. The old life, with all its stains, had passed from him in those cleansing waters; the new life was at hand. Once more he asked her to forgive him all the pain he had caused her, all that he had made her suffer. No, she must not grieve, he told her; the parting would be but for a little while, the meeting for all eternity. She had been his angel, he said; he owed all his joy to her. It was her love, her patience, that had done it all. She had shown him the beauty of goodness and made him love it. He thanked her for all that she had been to him, all that she had shown him, all that she had done for him. Her tears fell on his face, her loving arms supported him; her sweet voice, broken with weeping, spoke words of hope and comfort.

On the threshold of that other world Monica bade farewell to her husband, and one more soul that she had won for Christ went out into a glorious eternity.

CHAPTER VI

HOW ST. MONICA LIVED IN THE DAYS OF HER WIDOWHOOD, AND HOW SHE PUT ALL HER TRUST IN GOD

Patricius had not much in the way of worldly goods to leave to his wife. She needed little, it is true, for herself, but there was Augustine. Would it be possible for her, even if she practised the strictest economy, to keep him at Carthage, where he was doing so well?

Romanianus divined her anxiety, and hastened to set it at rest. He had a house in Carthage, he said; it should be Augustine's as long as he required it. This would settle the question of lodging. For the rest, continued Romanianus, as an old friend of Patricius he had the right to befriend his son, and Monica must grant him the privilege of acting a father's part to Augustine until he was fairly launched in life. He had a child of his own, a young son called Licentius. If Monica would befriend his boy, they would be quits. The gratitude of both mother and son towards this generous friend and benefactor lasted throughout their lives. Licentius was to feel its effects more than once.

"You it was, Romanianus," wrote Augustine in his Confessions, "who, when I was a poor young student in Carthage, opened to me your house, your purse, and still more your heart. You it was who, when I had the sorrow to lose my father, comforted me by your friendship, helped me with your advice, and assisted me with your fortune."

Monica mourned her husband's death with true devotion; but hers was not a selfish sorrow. She had love and sympathy for all who needed them, and forgot her own grief in solacing that of others. There were certain good works which the Church gave to Christian widows to perform. The hospitals, for instance, were entirely in their hands. They were small as yet, built according to the needs of the moment from the funds of the faithful, and held but few patients. These devoted women succeeded each other at intervals in their task of washing and attending to the sick, watching by their beds and cleaning their rooms. Their ministrations did not even cease there. With reverent care they prepared the dead for burial, thinking the while of the preparation of Christ's body for the tomb, and of Him who said: "Inasmuch as ye do it to the least of My brethren ye do it unto Me."

It was a happy moment for Monica when her turn came to serve the sick. She would kiss their sores for very pity as she washed and dressed them, and their faces grew bright at her coming. They called her "mother." It seemed such a natural name to give her, for she was a mother to them all, and gave them a mother's love. To some of the poor creatures, friendless slaves as they often were, who had known little sympathy or tenderness in their hard lives, it was a revelation of Christianity which taught them more than hours of preaching could have done.

But there was other work besides that at the hospital. There were the poor to be helped, the hungry to be fed, the naked to be clothed. She would gather the orphan children at her knee to teach them the truths of their Faith. When they were very poor, she would keep them in her own house, feed them at her own table, and clothe them with her own hands. "If I am a mother to these motherless ones," she would say to herself, "He will have mercy and give me back my boy; if I teach them to know and love Him as a Father, He will watch over my son."

It was a custom of the time on the feasts of saints and martyrs to make a pilgrimage to their tombs, with a little basket of food and wine. This was laid on the grave, after which the faithful would partake of what they had brought, while they thought and spoke of the noble lives of God's servants who had gone before. The custom was abolished not long after on account of the abuses which had arisen, but Monica observed it to the end. She scarcely tasted of her offering herself, but gave it all away to the poor. Often, indeed, she went cold and hungry that they might be clothed and fed.

Her love of prayer, too, could now find full scope. Every morning found her in her place in church for the Holy Sacrifice; every evening she was there again, silent, absorbed in God. The place where she knelt was often wet with her tears; the time passed by unheeded. Patricius, her husband, was safe in God's hands; but Augustine, her eldest-born, her darling, in what dark paths was he wandering? And yet in her heart of hearts there was a deep conviction that no sad news of his life at Carthage could shake. His was not the nature to find contentment in the things of earth. He was born to something higher. His noble heart, his strong intelligence, would bring him back to God.

And yet, and yet … her heart sank as she thought of graces wasted, of conscience trampled underfoot, of light rejected. No, there was no hope anywhere but with God. In Him she would trust, and in Him alone. He was infinite in mercy, and strong to save. He had promised that He would never fail those who put their trust in Him. At His feet, and at His feet alone, Monica poured out her tears and her sorrow. With others she was serene and hopeful as of old, even joyous, always ready to help and comfort. It was said of her after her death that no one had such a gift of helping others as she. She never preached at people – most people have an insurmountable dislike to being preached at – but every word she said had a strange power of drawing souls to God, of making them wish to be better.

Augustine, meanwhile, at Carthage, was justifying all the hopes that had been formed of him. He had even greater gifts, it seemed, than eloquence, feeling, and wit. He was at the head of his class in rhetoric. His master had spoken to him of a certain treatise of Aristotle which he would soon be called upon to study. It was so profound, he said, that few could understand it, even with the help of the most learned professors. Augustine, eager to make acquaintance with this wonderful work, procured it at once and read it. It seemed to him perfectly simple; it was unnecessary, he found, to ask a single explanation.

It was the same with geometry, music, every science he took up. This young genius of nineteen only discovered there were difficulties in the way when he had to teach others, and realized how hard it was to make them understand what was so exceedingly simple to himself.

There was something strangely sympathetic and attractive about Augustine. He seemed modest and reserved about his own gifts, although he himself tells us in his Confessions that he was full of pride and ambition. He had a gift of making true and faithful friends, a charm in conversation that drew his young companions and even older men to his side.

A more worldly mother than Monica would have been thoroughly proud of her son. Faith and virtue were alone weak and faint in that soul that could so ill do without them; but to her they were the one essential thing; the rest did not matter. Yet Monica, with true insight, believed that with noble minds knowledge must draw men to God; she hoped much, therefore, that Augustine's brilliance of intellect would save him in the end, and her hopes were not deceived.

Already the noble philosophy of Cicero – pagan though he was – had awakened a thirst for wisdom in the young student's soul; already he felt the emptiness of earthly joys. "I longed, my God," he writes, "to fly from the things of earth to Thee, and I knew not that it was Thou that wast working in me.."

"One thing cooled my ardour," he goes on to say; "it was that the Name of Christ was not there, and this Name, by Thy mercy, Lord, of Thy Son, my Saviour, my heart had drawn in with my mother's milk, and kept in its depths, and every doctrine where this Name did not appear, fluent, elegant, and truth-like though it might be, could not master me altogether."

He then turned to the Holy Scriptures, but they appeared to him inferior in style to Cicero. "My pride," he writes, "despised the manner in which the things are said, and my intelligence could not discover the hidden sense. They become great only for the humble, and I disdained to humble myself, and, inflated with vainglory, I believed myself great."

It was at this moment that he came in contact with the Manicheans, whose errors attracted him at once. This extraordinary heresy had begun in the East, and had spread all over the civilized world. Its followers formed a secret society, with signs and passwords, grades and initiations. To impose on Christians they used Christian words for doctrines that were thoroughly unchristian.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about them was their hatred of the Church. Augustine, who remained amongst them for nine years, thus describes them when writing to a friend:

"Thou knowest, Honoratus, that for this reason alone did we fall into the hands of these men – namely, that they professed to free us from all errors, and bring us to God by pure reason alone, without that terrible principle of authority. For what else induced me to abandon the faith of my childhood and follow these men for almost nine years, but their assertion that we were terrified by superstition into a faith blindly imposed upon our reason, while they urged no one to believe until the truth was fully discussed and proved? Who would not be seduced by such promises, especially if he were a proud, contentious young man, thirsting for truth, such as they then found me?"

That was what the Manicheans promised. What Augustine found amongst them he also tells us.

"They incessantly repeated to me, 'Truth, truth,' but there was no truth in them. They taught what was false, not only about Thee, my God, Who art the very Truth, but even about the elements of this world, Thy creatures."

So much for their doctrines; as for the teachers themselves, he found them "carnal and loquacious, full of insane pride."

The great charm of Manicheism to Augustine was that it taught that a man was not responsible for his sins. This doctrine was convenient to one who could not find the strength to break with his bad habits.

"Such was my mind," he sums up later, looking back on this period of his life, "so weighed down, so blinded by the flesh, that I was myself unknown to myself."

CHAPTER VII

HOW ST. MONICA'S HEART WAS WELL NIGH BROKEN BY THE NEWS THAT HER SON HAD ABJURED THE CHRISTIAN FAITH

Ill news travels fast. Augustine had scarcely joined the Manicheans before the tidings reached Monica. At first she could hardly believe it. This was a blow for which she had not been prepared; it crushed her to the earth. She would have grieved less over the news of her son's death.

And yet she bent her broken heart to God's will, and hoped on in Him "Whose Mercy cannot fail." Augustine had renounced the Faith of his childhood publicly, she heard later; he had been entered by the Manicheans as an "auditor," the first degree of initiation in their sect. And with all the zeal and ardour that he carried into everything he did he was advocating this abominable heresy and persuading his companions to follow his example.

Her eyes grew dim with weeping for her son. He was dead indeed to God – that God who was her All in All. The vacation was near, and Augustine would then return to Tagaste. Perhaps she would find that it was not so bad as she had thought. It might be only the whim of a moment; she would wait and see.

Alas! the hope was vain. Augustine had scarcely been a day at home before he began obstinately to air his new opinions, determined that she should listen. Then the Christian in Monica rose above the mother; her horror of heresy was for the moment stronger than her love for her son. Standing before him, outraged and indignant, she told him plainly that if he spoke in such a way she could no longer receive him at her table or in her house.

Augustine was amazed; he had found out at last the limits of his mother's endurance. With bent head he left the house and sought the hospitality of Romanianus. No sooner had he gone than Monica's heart melted, the mother-love surged up again. With bitter tears she cried on God to help her; her grief seemed greater than she could bear. At last the night came, and with it peace. As she slept, exhausted with weeping, she had a dream which brought her a strange sense of hope and comfort.

It seemed to her that she was standing on a narrow rule or plank of wood, her heart weighed down with sorrow as it had been all through the day. Suddenly there came towards her a young man radiant and fair of face. Smiling at her, he asked the cause of her tears. "I am weeping," she answered, "for the loss of my son." "Grieve no more, then," he replied, "for, look, your son is standing there beside you." Monica turned her head. It was true; Augustine stood at her side on the plank of wood. "Be of good cheer," continued the stranger, "for where you are there shall he be also." Then Monica awoke; the words were ringing in her ears; it seemed to her that God had spoken. In the morning she went straight to Augustine and told him of her dream. "Perhaps," suggested her son, anxious to turn it to his own advantage, "it means that you will come to see things as I do." "No," said Monica firmly, "for he did not say, 'Where he is you shall be,' but, 'Where you are there he shall be.'" Augustine was even more struck by the earnestness of his mother's answer than by the dream itself, though he pretended to make light of both.

Not long after Monica went to see a certain holy Bishop, that she might beg him to use his influence with Augustine to bring him back to the truth. The wise old man listened attentively to her story. "Let him alone for the present, but pray much," was his advice, "for as yet he is obstinate and puffed up with these new ideas. If what you tell me of your son is true, he will read for himself, and will find out his error." Then, seeing the anguish of the poor mother, he told her that he himself in his youth had been led away by the Manicheans, and had even been employed in transcribing their works. It was that which had saved him; for, as he wrote, the truth became clear to him; he had seen how much their doctrines were to be avoided. Then, as Monica wept for disappointment – for she had counted greatly on his help – a sudden pity seized him. "Go thy ways, and God bless thee," he cried. "It is impossible that a son of such tears should perish."

Monica's dream and the words of the Bishop were like rays of light in the darkness. She drew fresh hope from them and redoubled her prayers.

The vacation drew to an end, and Augustine returned to Carthage, but not for long. He was now twenty years old. His friend and patron, Romanianus, was very anxious that he should open a school in Tagaste while waiting for something better, and this he resolved to do. A little circle of pupils soon gathered round him, who were later to follow their young master in all his wanderings. Amongst these was Alypius, an old schoolfellow and a devoted friend; the sons of Romanianus; and another friend of Augustine's childhood whose name we do not know, but who was dearer to him than all the rest. They were of the same age, had studied together, had the same tastes, and the same ambitions.

Influenced by Augustine, still warm in the praise of the Manicheans, he, as well as the rest, had abjured the Catholic faith to join their heresy.

Augustine had been about a year at Tagaste when this friend was taken suddenly ill. He lay unconscious in a burning fever; there seemed to be no hope of recovery. He had been a catechumen before he had joined the Manicheans. His parents, who were Christians, having begged that he might be baptized before he died, the life-giving waters were poured on him as he lay between life and death. Augustine made no protest, so sure was he that what he himself had taught him before he was taken ill would have more influence than a rite administered without his knowledge or consent. To everybody's surprise the young man recovered his senses and began to mend.

Augustine then laughingly told him what they had been doing, and went on to make fun of the whole proceeding, never doubting but that the sick man would enjoy the joke as much as he did. To his great surprise his friend turned from him in horror.

"Never speak to me in such a way again if you wish to keep my affection," he said.

"We will talk this matter out when you are stronger," thought Augustine. But a few days later the invalid had a relapse, and died with the white robe of his Baptism still unstained.

Augustine was inconsolable. Everything in Tagaste reminded him of the dear companion of his boyhood. "My own country became a punishment to me," he writes, "and my father's house a misery, and all places or things in which I had communicated with him were turned into a bitter torment to me, being now without him. My eyes sought him everywhere, and I hated all things because they had him not." The thought of death was full of horror to him, and he gave way to a deep depression. His health, never very robust, began to suffer.

Romanianus, much as he wished to keep him at Tagaste, realized that a change of scene would be the best thing for him, and agreed to his proposal to return to Carthage and open a school of rhetoric. Alypius and his other disciples followed him, and in the rush of the great city Augustine regained, to some extent, his peace of mind. While teaching, he continued his own studies, and competed for the public prizes. Many men of note joined his school, and his name began to be famous.

He greatly desired honour, he tells us, but only if honourably won. One day a certain magician paid him a visit. He had heard, he said, that Augustine was about to compete for one of the State prizes in rhetoric. What would he be ready to give if he could insure him the victory? It was only necessary to offer some living creatures in sacrifice to the demons whom he worshipped and success would be certain. Augustine turned from him in horror and disgust. He had not yet fallen so low as this.

"I would not sacrifice a fly," he retorted hotly, "to win a crown of gold!"

The magician retired in haste, and Augustine, who succeeded in carrying off the prize without the help of the demons, was publicly crowned by the Pro-Consul Vindicius, who from thenceforth joined the circle of his friends.

The news of his success reached Monica. Her mother's heart rejoiced in his triumph, but her joy was tempered with sorrow. Carthage had taken more from her son than it could ever give him, and her thoughts were of other victories and other crowns. During his stay in Tagaste, although Augustine had not lived under the same roof with his mother, he had been continually with her. Her tender affection had been his greatest comfort in the deep sorrow after his friend's death. He spoke no more to her of religion, and she, mindful of the old Bishop's words, was also silent.

"While I was struggling in the mire and in the darkness of error," writes Augustine, "that holy, chaste, devout, and sober widow (such as Thou lovest) ceased not in all the hours of her prayers to bewail me in Thy sight. And her prayers were admitted into Thy Presence, and yet Thou sufferedst me to go on still, and to be involved in that darkness."

The darkness was indeed great, but the fires were still smouldering beneath the ashes. Love, honour, and success were all his, and yet he was not content. There was something in his soul that none of these things could satisfy. "After Thee, O Truth," he cries, "I hungered and thirsted!" His heart still ached for the loss of his friend, he turned everywhere for comfort and found none. He sought forgetfulness in study. He wrote two books on the "Beautiful" and the "Apt," and dedicated them to Hierus, a famous Roman orator. "It seemed to me a great thing," he tells us, "that my style and my studies should be known to such a man."

Monica drew fresh hope from her son's writings. They were full of noble thoughts and high aspirations. Such a mind could not remain in error. Some day, surely, in God's good time, he would come to know the truth.

CHAPTER VIII

HOW AUGUSTINE PLANNED TO GO TO ROME, AND HOW HE CRUELLY DECEIVED HIS MOTHER

It was about this time that Augustine's enthusiasm for the Manicheans began to cool. He had been studying their doctrines, and had found that they were not quite what he thought. He was disappointed with their professors too.

The first unpleasant truth that dawned upon him was that they were much better at denying the doctrines of the Catholic Church than at explaining their own. It was almost impossible to find out what they believed, so vague did they become when closely questioned. And Augustine questioned very closely indeed. He was on the track of truth, and it was not easy to put him off with hazy general statements. He was still only an "auditor," and before he took any further step he wanted to be certain of his ground. The men whom he consulted did not seem very certain of their own, he remarked, but they bade him have patience. One of their bishops, Faustus by name, was soon coming to Carthage. He was one of their most brilliant preachers, and would be able to answer all Augustine's questions.

This sounded promising, and Augustine awaited his coming impatiently. He certainly was an eloquent speaker; his sermons were charming. But when Augustine went to him privately and explained his doubts to him, the result was not what he had hoped for. He gave the same vague answers that Augustine had so often heard already. Pressed closer, he frankly replied that he was not learned enough to be able to satisfy him. Augustine was pleased with his honesty, and they became good friends. But the seeker was no nearer the truth than before.

Yet if Faustus could not answer him, which of the Manicheans could?

He began to lose faith in them.

What did the Catholic Church teach on these points? he asked. This was a question which they could all answer, and did – with great eagerness and little truth.

It might have occurred to a less intelligent man than Augustine that the enemies of the Church were not the people to answer such a question fairly or truthfully: but he accepted their facts, and decided that truth was not to be found there either. Was there such a thing at all? was the final question he asked himself. The old philosophers, heathens as they were, seemed to get nearer to the heart of things than this.

Yet now and again, out of the very sickness of his soul, a prayer would break out to that Christ Whom he had known and loved in his boyhood, but Who had grown so dim to him since the Manicheans had taught him that His Sacred Humanity was nothing but a shadow. He was weary of life, weary even of pleasure, weary of everything, weary most of all of Carthage.

Owing to the wild ways of the students it was impossible to keep anything like order in the schools. Classes were constantly interrupted by gangs of "smashers," who might break in at any moment, setting the whole place in an uproar.

Augustine's friends pressed him to go to Rome. There, they urged, he would meet with the honour that he deserved. There the students were quieter and better-mannered; no rioting was allowed; scholars might enter no school but that of their own master. This sounded hopeful; Augustine was rather pleased with the idea. He wrote to Monica and to his patron Romanianus to tell them of the step he proposed to take.