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."