Monnica, The Patron Saint of Mothers of Disappointing Children (i.e. Philosophers)

by Patricia Grosse

The first mention of St. Monnica in Stephen Greenblatt’s The New Yorker article “How St. Augustine Invented Sex” occurs in the second paragraph – the first paragraph is devoted to Augustine’s teenage erections in public and his father’s pride at the son’s pubic hair: “His mother, Monica, was a pious Christian and responded very differently. Since God had already started to build his temple in her breast, she ‘endured a violent spasm of reverent, tremulous trepidation.’ The unbaptized adolescent’s sexual maturity had become the occasion—not the first and certainly not the last—for a serious rift between his parents.” Although Augustine himself barely mentions his father, Patricius is often discussed before Augustine’s mother in writings about Augustine’s life; indeed, such a primacy of Patricius can even be found in Possidius’s 439 biography of Augustine in 439CE.

Greenblatt’s opinion about Monnica is very clear: she was a shrewish woman who sought to place herself between Augustine and his father, Augustine and the world. Reading Greenblatt one would think that Augustine’s greatest triumph was outliving the old broad.

Although Greenblatt is not alone in interpreting Monnica’s domineering presence in Augustine’s life in this way, Augustine himself speaks of his mother in a much different context. The first mention of St. Monnica in her son’s autobiographical text Confessions occurs in a discussion of his lack of memory of his infancy and the divine swelling of her breasts with milk (conf. I.vi.7). Augustine’s last direct reference to his mother in the Confessions comes at the very end of Book IX, when, at the close of his “traditional” autobiography, Augustine confirms that his confessions seek to elicit prayers for his mother from his readers (conf. IX.xiii.37). This call to prayer is immediately followed by his astoundingly confusing account of memory in Book X.

Monnica has been interpreted in many ways: overbearing mother, terrible mother-in-law, wonderful mother, saint, and, according to the Augustine an exemplum for Christians to follow. Given the myriad ways in which Monnica is represented in both scholarship and in lay materials, one might think her a fantastical creature, one with many faces.

Monnica, the patron saint of alcoholics and mothers of disappointing children, is traditionally associated with a kind of feverous obsession with her son. She is nearly the patron saint of overbearing mothers. And yet, our picture of her comes primarily from Augustine’s own autobiographical text, the Confessions, and, as with much of Augustine’s writings, his accounting of her life and her influence on his has been misinterpreted. Much scholarship and lay interpretations of the mother of Augustine is so embroiled in pseudo-psychoanalysis of a perceived “Oedipal” relationship that it fails to see her true impact not just on his life but also on his thought.

According to Augustine, Monnica cried every night for her son’s coming to the Christian faith. She was a terror to priests and bishops wherever she went—visiting them to pray for her son, to ask advice on his deliverance. One angrily told her that the mother of these tears would have her wish granted, which she took as prophetic speech. The first person Augustine went to tell upon his conversion to Christianity in a Milanese garden was his mother.

An important question that guides this post is, what did Augustine seek to convey in his portrayal of his mother in his Confessions? Was Augustine trying to give a real biography of her life? Is this version of Monnica a real person or an exemplum of Christian virtue? There are other representations of Monnica to be found in some of his earlier dialogues and, of course, references to her in his later letters. The place and personhood of Monnica in the Confessions can say much to greater understanding of her place in his thought in general.

Let us begin at the end. In Book IX of the Confessions, Monnica is described as, at the end of her life, giving up on her desire to be buried in Africa alongside her husband Patricius. Waking briefly from the fever that would take her life, she asks, “where was I?” After this question, she tells her sons, “Bury my body anywhere you like. Let no anxiety about that disturb you. I have only one request to make of you, that you remember me at the altar of the Lord, wherever you may be” (Conf. IX.xi.27, 173). This simple question is one that perhaps references an earlier experience she shared with her son: not too long before this exchange, before she fell ill, she leaned out of a window with Augustine and, together, they approached something like ecstasis—an ecstasy more lasting and gentle than that platonic vision Augustine experienced alone. Are we to believe that place she was before deciding to be buried anywhere was this afterlife?

“Where was I?” Does Monnica’s question have a religious significance? Or is Augustine simply relaying the confusion that surrounds death from such a fever (one such fever would take him, too, in another land, with the Vandals at the gates)? Where was I? A few paragraphs in the text later we learn that his mother, approaching death, “did not think of having her body sumptuously wrapped or embalmed with perfumes or given a choice of monument. Nor did she care if she had a tomb in her homeland. On that she gave us no instruction; she desired only that she might be remembered at your altar which she had attended every day without fail” (Conf. IX. xiii.36.177-178).

From this passage we learn a few things: embalming and perfuming the dead, monuments and epitaphs, being buried beside her husband, and finally, returning to Africa were all previously important to Monnica. Monnica’s sacrifice of all of these customs, of all of these intimate ways of life, might mean several things: she may have wished to avoid the trouble of her sons seeing her as a corpse; she could have recognized that her end was near and that their furlough in Ostia (which was to last for an undetermined amount of time) would not only leave her son with a corpse but a putrefying one at that: her own corpse wouldn’t be able to be properly cared for and interred according to the customs of her homeland in any meaningful way; or she could have started the beatification process and begun to see worldly customs of burial as outside of the necessity of religious sacraments. It is this last view that it seems Augustine seeks to convey with his narrative.

We know that Monnica was buried according to local customs in Ostia (that is, Italian Roman Customs). In accordance with her wishes, Augustine placed no monument to his mother at this time in his life. However, an epitaph was placed over her original tomb around 431 (about a year after Augustine’s death) by the Roman politician Anicius Auchenius Bassus. This epitaph marks a beginning for the cult of St. Monnica. This epitaph was discovered in 1945 by some children looking to play ball, an eerie allusion to the children’s games that led to Augustine’s own conversion. It reads:

Here the most virtuous mother of a young man set her ashes, a second light to your merits, Augustine. As a priest, serving the heavenly laws of peace, you taught [or, you teach] the people entrusted to you with your character. A glory greater than the praise of your accomplishments crowns you both—Mother of the Virtues, more fortunate because of her offspring.

An interesting monument that focuses on the glory of her son, which is a stark contrast to the monument Augustine would ultimately leave her in his Confessions.

Having begun with her bones let us turn to her life: Most of what we know of Monnica’s life comes in the context of her son’s account of it at the end of his autobiographical narrative. As they were on their way back to Africa, Monnica became ill during a stop-over in the port city of Ostia, near Rome: “While we were at Ostia by the mouths of the Tiber, my mother died” (Conf. IX.viii.17, 166). What follows this bit of information is an account of God’s “gifts to her,” beginning with her early struggles with alcohol. A strange beginning for a hagiography! Not least because this hagiography has no conversion scene and not much in the way of struggle. Monnica grew up in a Christian household and was a Christian herself until she died. Her husband was an angry, abusive pagan who never laid a finger on her due to her own cleverness and who converted at the end of his life due to her good example.

St. Monnica is the patron saint of alcoholics because her son gives a positive account of her descent into a kind of drunkenness and her return to moderation. Augustine emphasizes her struggles with alcohol twice: first with the account of her as a child and then as an adult. This account of her “alcoholism” is immediately preceded by an account of her childhood as sober, how she wasn’t even allowed to drink water during meals. However, she began drinking first a little and then a lot of wine as she was sent down as a girl to fill wine from the wine cask. “How did you cure her?” Augustine asks God. He did so through the taunts and jeers of the slave girl who would go down with her to the cellar. Augustine writes, “The taunt hurt. She reflected upon her own foul addiction, at once condemned it, and stopped the habit. Just as flattering friends corrupt, so quarrelsome enemies often bring us correction” (Conf. IX. Ix.19, 168). However, this correction did not lead to complete abstention but rather moderation.

Monnica brought to Italy a habit from Africa that Bishop Ambrose of Milan disapproved of—in both the Catholic and Donatist households, Africans went to saint’s tombs to drink wine, eat meals, and “feast” with the dead. Augustine gives a description of his mother’s custom, its relationship to her devotion, the dilution of the wine, and more assurances that she was definitely not doing it in order to get rowdy and drunk. Augustine claims near the end of the discussion that she likely only took the ban to heart due to her love for Ambrose. Thus we see in Book 6 Monnica’s willingness to give up on cherished customs for the sake of following the advice of those whose opinions she respects.

The account of her childhood Augustine claims to have from his mother himself. What we know from the Confessions of Monnica’s lived experiences come more in the context of Augustine’s filial experience of his mother. In the Confessions, we first hear of Monnica as a nursing mother. His tale begins with his reliance on his mother’s and nurse’s accounts of himself as an infant as well as his own viewing of infants (possibly his son, Adeodatus). The rationality of his infancy is described as one of blind grasping: “For at that time I knew nothing more than how to suck and to be quietened by bodily delights, and to weep when I was physically uncomfortable” (I.vi.10, 7). The importance of Monnica’s milk as a metaphor for Augustine’s imbibing of the Christian faith can be seen throughout the text—and, indeed, in many places in his work. Along with that milk, he claims to have drunk in Christianity.

It is important to keep in mind as well the great lengths Monnica went through to follow and support her son, and in the Confessions Augustine is very clear in describing his own annoyance towards her “clinginess.” As I’ve mentioned, many scholars claim Monnica to be your typical clingy mother who won’t let her son grow. However, Monnica’s devotion is always portrayed in sharp contrast to Augustine’s rudeness—for example, he lies to her and abandons her in Carthage when in fact he went to Rome in secret. This is not portrayed as a clever trick by Augustine but rather as a dirty one. The Confessions is a confession of Augustine’s traveling to God’s grace, and it is an account of the pilgrimage a dedicated Christian must take. That journey, however, was taken alongside a patient, moderate, loving woman who was willing to change long-held beliefs when confronted with a good enough reason. Monnica of the Confessions is an exemplum who sought to bring others with her on the path to salvation, not just her son.

Augustine in his Confessions gives his mother a Saint’s Vita that is not a typical Vita—it is not strange that she is remembered by Bassus in the fifth century as the mother of so great a figure. Augustine, rather, sees himself in the true light of day—pigheaded, full of himself, a son not deserving of such a mother. And yet he turns it around, he comes to appreciate her fully in the end, and his Confessions remains a lasting monument to her memory and her exemplum for other Christians in need of patience.

Fourth-century Italian monuments do not often portray women as more than good mothers and sisters and daughters. Monnica’s portrayal in Augustine’s Confessions, however, is so much more. She is a person and her son is not a good son, she is a mother who makes mistakes but learns from them. This monument, far from being sensually bereft, is rife with sensory, affective descriptions of what it is like to love and be loved. Where was I?

*This post is adapted from my current book project, Moving St. Monnica’s Bones. The Confessions citations are from Henry Chadwick’s translation. )

 Patricia L. Grosse is Assistant Professor and Chair in the Philosophy Department at Finlandia University in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Her current book project is Moving St. Monnica’s Bones. Her research and teaching interests include philosophy of love, feminist philosophy, Augustine of Hippo, and philosophy of pop culture.