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St. Monica
00:29:06
Dr. Tim Gray and Dr. John Sehorn discuss St. Monica, mother of St. Augustine.
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You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustan Institute, an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith.
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I'm Tim Gray, president of the Augustine Institute, and joining me is one of our professors, Dr. John Seehorn. And this is St. Monica, who is the mother of St. Augustine. And she's an amazing, amazing saint in the life of the church. And she's also an inspiration to many of us. You know, if you're a parent, especially all the moms out there, if you're worried about your child, well, you know, Monica is your patroness. She had a worry about. She was a devout Catholic, and she had a troublesome husband and a troublesome son, and she praised them both into heaven. And it's really quite amazing. Her story, her example, her model. And I'm just moved by St. Monica. And we have a special devotion to her here at the Augusta Institute, not only because she's the mother of St. Augustine, but we also have a relic that was given to the institute early on of St. Monica. And that was really, I felt, a sign of Augustine's favor and care for us to send us this relic of his mother and that we can go to her. I was just down at Mass and praying to St. Monica and to the relic. We have a relic of St. Augustine. We have them right next to each other in the chapel. And then we have a beautiful picture of a scene from the Confessions where Augustine, in book nine, relates this conversation right before his mother passes away. She was pretty strong and hearty, and her health declined suddenly. And before that happened, just days before that happened, he had a conversation with his mother about what would heaven be like, and that the good things of this earth, as beautiful and good as they are, are nothing compared to the good things of heaven and to be with God and to enjoy the beatific vision. And so they had this incredibly long conversation as they were looking out a window over these gardens. And so here they are in Ostia, John, you know, as Augustine depicts it, in this beautiful port city. And they're looking out from this window over a beautiful garden. And you could be kind of charmed by the beauty, the natural beauty of this garden. But for them, that earthly beauty brought their minds and hearts up, up, up, as Augustine describes it, to the heavenly beauty. And, you know, Augustine reflects on this an important part of the Confessions. And I just want to, you know, I know many of you who have wayward children that you're worried about, they might be straying from the faith and Wandering and maybe even lost. Well, Augustine was one of those people who was wandering and lost. He rejected the faith of his mother and went astray. And, you know, Monica prayed and prayed and prayed, and her prayers won the grace to bring Augustine back. And I just think Monica is there to give us hope as a parent. You know, I've prayed to St. Monica for my son many, many times. And, you know, I think she's a great patronage, patroness for us to pray to. But let's just talk about St. Monica because she's an extraordinary woman. And yet I love Augusta and his honesty, too. He's very real in how he portrays his mother.
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C
He is, yeah. You know, Monica didn't come from an educated background. She was married to a man, Patricius, Augustine's father, who was not a believer and who actually often mistreated her, unfortunately. And through all this, you know, Monica really persevered, as you said in prayer for Augustine. We could talk more about some of those prayers later on, the effect they had. But it is something that strikes me almost every time I read the Confessions, that for all the praise that Augustine heaps on his mother and all the credit he gives to her openness to be a vessel of God's grace, again, we can kind of come back to that. But he doesn't think she's above criticism. So, for example, Augustine's father was very, very invested in the idea of Augustine getting the best possible education, setting him on the best possible career path, and he spent a lot of money and curried a lot of favorite in order to make that happen. And Augustine's actually a little bit critical of his mother for going along with it, because as grateful as well as he was, and certainly we are for the eloquence he gained in his education and the way that God eventually used that to make him a great preacher. He also talks early in the first few books of the Confessions about the kind of. The ways in which his education warped him and actually taught him to look at things from a worldly point of view, to use words, to use language, to seek his own pleasures, to seek his own projects instead of seeking eternal truth.
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You know, I think, John, that this puts. I know, for any parent where even good parents, Monica's a good woman, virtuous. But, you know, Augustine points out this weakness, this kind of blind spot she had. And we all want our kids to succeed and. And have the best.
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Right?
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We want our kids to have the best education, the best things we can give them, right? And here's where a Parent can easily be tempted into a blind spot because we're trying to do this for our child, but we actually can deform our child by what we give them if we spoil them. And so the idea of emphasizing overemphasizing worldly success and worldly education. Monica, you could see her being susceptible here to wanting her son to have the best education because she recognized his intellectual gifts. And yet, for Augustine, he looks back at that and he's like, yeah, that wasn't probably the best path for me at a key formative period.
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Yeah. And I have to say there's a certain consolation that we can take in that as parents as well.
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Right.
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Monica is this model of a Christian parent who prayed for her son, who wept for her son, who exhorted him, trying to call him to her faith in Christ, and still made some mistakes along the way, and nonetheless. Right. Was able to win those graces for her.
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And that's very hopeful, I mean, for parents. You know, I know so many great Catholics who sent their kids to expensive Catholic colleges where they lost their faith.
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Right.
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And so they kind of feel guilty. Well, they went to this great, great school that was intellectually and academically rigorous and had this great brand, but the kids lost their faith there. But like Monica, they can pray their kids back.
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Right.
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And so that's. Prayer is always available to us. And that's. Monica is just such a great patroness of, we can always pray for our kids, that no matter how bad we raise them or how neglectful we might have been, we can always pray them back. That's just.
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C
Yeah, that's right. And, you know, one of the things that I appreciate about Augustine's description of his mother's prayers for him is the way that he connects them, especially to the Mass. In book nine of the Confessions, where we read about the end of Monica's life and her death, he mentions at one point that she never let a day go by without approaching the altar, without attending at Mass and praying for her son, which is so striking.
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Her devotion to daily Mass, oh, absolutely. Is really moving. And then he takes that devotion, he says, well, and he addresses his readers to pray for his mother at the altar. Of course, we don't have to pray for her now because she's canonized and we know she's in heaven. She prays for us.
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C
Yeah. There's a kind of beautiful series of inversions here. Right. Because Augustine talks about how she prayed for him. There's actually a passage where he talks about her tears and he compares her Tears to her heart's blood. And when you remember that daily she was approaching the sacrament of Christ's body and blood, you see how her tears were united to Christ's sacrifice. And in fact, in book nine, he talks about. When he's talking about her devotion to the Mass, he says she bound herself by faith to the price of our redemption.
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Right.
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And that this is the only thing that she pled with for herself and for her son. And so that's a beautiful reminder, by.
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The way, one of the witnesses that he gives to that. As she's on her deathbed, her one request is that her sons would remember her at the altar.
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Right, Right. So then we get these great inversions. So she prays for Augustine all these years at the altar, and then she's overjoyed. She had told him, she said, the only thing I want before I die is to see you become a Catholic Christian. And so we can kind of get later into the path that Augustine takes before he gets there. But that happens. And, Tim, you mentioned the beautiful contemplative experience they had together in conversation using the words of Scripture at Ostia before she died. And so, yes, she asked to be remembered at the altar. So now we've got Augustine praying for Monica and asking us to pray for her as well. But Augustine did too good of a job. And actually, based almost exclusively on the witness of St. Augustine and the Confessions, the Church has recognized Monica as a saint. And so now on this feast day, when we go to the altar, we don't pray for Monica. We ask for her to pray for us as her sons and daughters, just as she prayed for Augustine.
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It's such a beautiful reversal or you know, inversion here. It's really, really joyous. Well, you know, I want to go back to Monica as a wife, because I think a lot of people know of Monica, and, you know, here's a mother who prays for her wayward child. And. And so many people identify and just love Monica because of that, because they can so easily identify with her. But she also had, as you mentioned earlier, a difficult husband, Patricius. And he was a pagan. And I love how Augustine talks about how her parents arrange for this marriage. So she's a Christian, but her parents arrange for her to marry this man who's of a certain social standing, not very wealthy, but not poor, established. And her parents arranged for him to marry this man. So imagine this young Christian woman who is then married to a man who's not a Christian, who's a pagan, with all the values or lack thereof, of pagan society.
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Right.
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And one of the things that Augustine recognizes that his father didn't value chastity because pagans didn't.
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Right.
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And so he mentions that his father was not sexually faithful to the marriage. And yet Monica has a mercy on where her husband's at or where he's not at and still loves him and seeks to convert him and how she ends up converting him. You know, Augustine, I just. I love this passage about how Augustine describes it. And this is in book nine of the Confessions and paragraph nine. And I just want to read a couple lines of Augustine describing how Monica seeks to convert her husband. He says she never ceased to try to gain him for you as a convert, for the virtues with which you had adorned her and for which he respected, loved and admired her were like so many voices constantly speaking to him of you. Now, what's so beautiful about this image is that the way that she would constantly try to convert her husband was through her virtue. It wasn't apologetics, it wasn't her hammering him with the gospel and faith, but her virtue and charity and love is how I love. Augustine says these virtues are like so many voices that eloquently speak about Christ to Patricius.
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Right.
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And of course, we know at the end of the story he converts. But I just want to highlight that element because there's so many. Whether a husband you have a wife who's not a Christian, or a wife who has a husband who's not a Christian, or maybe not an active Christian who needs deeper conversion. Monica becomes a model for how to do that. And of course, Augustine's also going to be honest about his father's temper and his vices and, and what she has to overcome there, which is really remarkable, that speaks to her heroic virtue.
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It really is. Yeah. And the depth at which that witness can take root is really astonishing.
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Right.
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In the case of Augustine's father, it's only at the end of his life that he requests baptism on his deathbed. And, you know, there's part of me that looks at that and thinks, you know, poor Monica, what she missed out on in a strong Christian marriage.
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Right.
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But this is part of the beauty of our Lord's providence, that he can take these situations that we find ourselves in and still bring good out of it and make it a witness to Christ and his church, the love of the bridegroom for his spouse, and that can take all these different forms. This is something that I think really left a mark on Augustine as a pastor later in his Life after he'd become a priest and then a bishop and had to deal with all kinds of really difficult familial relationships. He always stuck with the teaching of Scripture, the teaching of the Church on marriage. But he also knew that God has mercy on us in whatever situation we find ourselves in. And even when it can seem hopeless in a marriage, right there is that space for grace to operate if we're faithful, to bear witness, just as Monica did.
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That's so true. Because, you know, obviously we see this at the end of the story where Patricius converts on his deathbed. And I'm.
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So.
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As you talk about that, John, what struck me is the words that Monica had, that Augustine relates of St. Monica later on said, you know, she always therefore desired, you know, he converts on his deathbed, but she always wanted to be buried with Patricius so that they would be in Christian burial together, and she knew that they would be together in heaven, Right? And so even though they didn't share a marriage that was Christian together, they would share eternity together as disciples of Christ and that Christian unity would have them together in eternity. And. And of course, later on, Monica even becomes detached from that, and she's willing to be buried away from her homeland in Africa and to be buried in Ostia. And Augustine notes her level of detachment and what spiritual maturity that shows for her.
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Yeah, no, that's true. Although I have to say, one of the things I love about that scene, when Augustine's brother Navigius says, don't you want to be buried back in North Africa instead of here in Italy? And she kind of turns to Augustine and says, like, listen to this guy, right? What's he talking about? And it's not because she doesn't care about her body. It's because she knows of the fidelity of her true bridegroom. And she says, the Lord's not going to wonder where to find me when he comes to raise us up in the resurrection of the dead, right? And so it is this incredible ordering, right, where she goes to spend eternity in adoration of the Lord with Patricius, whose conversion she had been such a huge divine instrument in bringing about. But also she sees everything in the light of the divine bridegroom.
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You know, it's so striking to me, her patience with her husband. To go back to the difficulty. Augustine talks about how difficult his father was. And his father had this hot temper, as he describes it. He says, though he was remarkably kind, he had a hot temper, but my mother knew better than to say or do anything to resist him when he was angry, if his anger was unreasonable, she used to wait until he was calm and composed and then took the opportunity of explaining what she had done. And so here you see a bit of the wisdom of Monica as well as the fortitude and patience she had. She would explain why she did something, but she'd wait until her husband cooled off. And, you know, I just. Again, you know, the way marriage sanctifies and makes saints. Here's Patricius, who's got this hot temper. And Monica grows in holiness. This is why she's a canonized saint. In a sense, her husband's temper is something she had to endure and had the fortitude to endure. And then Augustine notes that one of the remarkable virtues of Monica was that, you know, the women in town would oftentimes gossip about the faults of their husbands. But even though she had to endure this man's great temper, Right. She would not complain about it to the other women. In fact, when the other women would complain about their husband's vices, she would correct them and say that they would, out of fidelity to their marriage, they shouldn't gossip about their husband's weaknesses. So. So it's just really remarkable example of, for all of us in marriage, the kind of charity and patience we're called to that leads to sanctity and holiness.
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C
Yeah, no, that's very true. And you can see how probably from an early age, even in ways he couldn't understand, this would have affected Augustine as well. A lot of the Confessions really is about learning to look back at your life and to slowly, with the help of grace, begin to see how God's mercy has been active even when you didn't. Especially when you didn't recognize it. Right. So, Tim, you mentioned earlier the wonderful passage in book nine where it talks about Monica's virtues as voices that called her husband to the Lord, to her Catholic faith. And we see the same thing in Augustine. There's. I think it's. In book two, there's an early passage where Augustine actually is praying over his past. And he. He says to the Lord, where were you? Where was your voice? And then he says, wait, what. What am I saying? I know where your voice was. Your voice was coming through my mother's words to me. And he. And he talks about at a number of places how Monica's faith in Christ made this deep impression on him, even when he was showing no interest in the church, even when I'm sure Monica thought, I'm not getting through to him, even when he would have said to you, like, I don't want to be. I'm not going to be a Christian. I'm not going to be a Catholic Christian. That's crazy, right? And one of my favorite moments where we see this is in book three of the Confessions. Augustine is kind of at the last level of his own education. He's preparing for a career teaching rhetoric. He's been. Well, he's found actually someone who'll turn out to be a partner for a very long time. We would probably call her a common law wife. Sometimes people refer to her as his mistress or concubine. That's a little bit misleading because in terms of Roman law, she would have essentially been like a common law wife. He's actually had a child with her, a Deodatus. Augustine's one of the few canonized saints who ends up being celibate, but who had a child. And anyway, Augustine reads a text that really gets his attention. And it's interesting because it's not a Christian text. It's a text by. It's actually. Most of it's lost, but from the great Roman statesman and orator and philosopher Cicero, it's a text of his called the Hortensius. And the whole text is about really the futility of wasting our lives, chasing after things that we're going to have to leave behind us when we die, and exhorting the reader to pursue wisdom and recognizing wisdom as the one thing that's really worth having. And this Augustine says it lit a fire in him. But he said there was one thing that displeased me about the text, and it was that the name of Christ did not appear in it because that name had been planted in his heart from his childhood by his mother. So, again, I mean, he's not living a Christian life, doesn't seem to have much interest in it, but he wants. He knows that when it's really time to find truth, you need to look for it in Jesus. And you know, Tim, I can think of so many times in people I've known where that really is true. There's no clear indication that they're even seeking spiritual truth. And yet when whatever it is happens, that kind of triggers a search for something deeper they know to look forward in Christ.
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Monica's a great example of mothers are great gardeners of the human heart, and they can cultivate and nurture us in our youth in such profound, deep ways. And she planted these deep seeds of faith in Augustine that he came back to, you know, that he did abandon Christ and leave it behind. In fact, not only did he abandon his faith in Christ and the Church, but he abandoned his mother, which is in some ways analogous. I think the lowest point in Augustine's story is where he forsakes, he kind of escapes from Monica. You want to tell that story? So it was a really. He looks back at that and he has deep regret for how he treated his mother.
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C
Yeah, I mean, you're talking about when he went to Rome and left her behind in North Africa and kind of deceived her so that all of a sudden the ship takes off and he's gone and there's Monica looking for her son and he's taken off on her. And you're right, it is kind of a metaphor, you know, for much of Augustine's life. You know, even when we mentioned, I mentioned his reading of the Hortensius and he wanted to look for Christ. So he actually did try reading Scripture at that time and it didn't go well because Augustine had received this fantastic education and eloquence and great linguistic style and things like that. And he opened the Bible and especially in the old Latin translation that he would have been reading at the time, it looked very, very crude. It looked very unsophisticated. It looked very low brow. It looked like something that really was not worthy of someone who'd been educated in Cicero and Horace and Terence and Virgil and all these Latin.
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Divine revelation.
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Exactly. How could it be divine revelation? And unfortunately, things kind of go sideways here and Augustine ends up joining a non Catholic sect called the Manichees, who were kind of a funny mixture of Christianity and a number of other religious influences. And he ends up being a Maniche for the next nine years, much to his mother's chagrin. But part of it was that he thought that sounded a lot more respectable. And if you think about it, there's a terrible irony here, right? Why was Augustine so addicted to respectability, to prestige, to sophistication? It was precisely because of the education that Monica had helped his father get for him.
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Yeah, no, it's a paradox. And again, as parents you have to be so careful because we always have to make our first goal the spiritual good and the spiritual riches that we want our children to have. That material riches, even in terms of education for worldly success, are relative to the souls of our children. We want our children's souls to be saved. And what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul? And so parents have to parent with that end in mind. And Monica corrects. Though she recognizes Augustine's wayward ways, she becomes a witness to him that he has to live a different life, a better life than he's living. But she still loves him. Even after he's got his mistress or his common law wife, she still visits him. She still has that relationship. And that love, as you said, just like those virtues became voices to her husband, her virtues and charity become voices to her son. The way God speaks through that.
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Yeah. And I do want to be clear, of course, that Augustine is in no way against education.
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Right.
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And he's really clear about this, even when he's criticizing his own education. He says, lord, the words that I was learning, right? These skills, these are good things, but they should have been put to use in service of your Word.
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Right.
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Which is of course, exactly what God's going to call him to do as a bishop who preached thousands of sermons over, I guess, 35 years that he was a bishop. He was consecrated to the episcopate in 395 and he died in 430. So think about 35 years as a bishop preaching God's Word, bringing that very text that seemed so crude to him, bringing that to the people and feeding them, nourishing them with God's Word. And you know, that kind of initial contempt that Augustine had for Scripture makes it all the more beautiful when we think about the way his story with Monica ends up.
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Right.
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I mean, Augustine, eventually, he realizes that the Manichean sect really doesn't have good answers. He Encounters Bishop Ambrose, St. Ambrose, who is the Bishop of Milan, where Augustine eventually gets a really prestigious position where he's a kind of rhetor. Orator, a speaker for the imperial court, which at that time was not in Rome, it was actually in Milan. So this is a very, very high ranking position, lots of space for kind of climbing the social ladder. But he starts listening to Ambrose preach because he knows Ambrose is a good speaker and he kind of thinks he'll maybe learn a thing or two from this famous orator. And he's not disappointed. But what he finds is that as he listens to Ambrose speak and he's trying to get kind of a sense of this guy's style and he's appreciating it. He finds that he can't help but let the truth that Ambrose is speaking seep in. So Ambrose is interpreting Scripture and Augustine's starting to see it in a new way.
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I love speaking of Milan. You know, he mentions his mother's manly courage because there's a bit of a persecution from the emperor's mother. And people are worried about St. Ambrose being captured or persecuted. And so a lot of the people are doing vigil outside the cathedral and Monica is one of them. Again, it shows you her strength and her devotion. Well, you know, St. Monica is just such a wonderful, wonderful model of virtue and of faith. And you know, it's her faith that she's going to pass on to her son and her prayers. And so let's pray to St. Monica. She has the ear of God. Pray to her. Pray to her. If you have children, pray for them and for your grandchildren. And ask St. Monica to intercede and pray with ardor as Monica did and with consistency. And you know, those prayers, perseveringly made, will win the heart and mercy of God and will win that grace. And so that's what we want to pray for. Pray for all those who are in need. Thank you and may the Lord bless and keep you.
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