Saint Monica

Monica was born in Thagaste, in Numidia, in 331, into a well-off Christian Berber family. She was allowed to study, and she made the most of it. She married Patricius, a pagan small landowner, a man with a difficult temper. She had three children: Augustine, Navigius and a daughter whose name we don’t know. She raised them as Christians, and over the first one she spent thirty years in anguish. Augustine went his own way — a companion, a son born out of wedlock, the Manichaeans, rhetoric, Carthage — and she followed him everywhere, in a way that he himself, in the Confessions, describes as overbearing. The hardest scene is at the port of Carthage: Augustine wants to go to Rome without her, tells her he’s going to see off a friend who is leaving, and sails away at night. She spends the night in tears at the tomb of Saint Cyprian. She joined him in Milan. There she found Ambrose, and there came the conversion she had been waiting for all her life, in the summer of 386. Then they set out together for Africa, and at Ostia, while they waited for the ship, came that conversation at the window overlooking the garden which Augustine put in the Confessions, and which is one of the high points of Latin literature. A few days later Monica fell ill and died. She was fifty-six. If your name is Monica, today is your name day.