Monica and the Window at Ostia

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Full script

Imagine a window on the upper floor of a plain house in a port town, with the shutters pushed back and the evening coming in. Below the window there is a small garden, with a wall around it, and some herbs, and one fig tree that has seen better years. Beyond the wall there are the sounds of a harbour getting ready for the night: ropes, and a dog, and somebody laughing, and a long way off the slap of water on a hull.

At the window, two people are leaning on the sill, side by side, the way people lean when they have been talking for a long time and are not in a hurry to stop. One is a woman of fifty-five or so, in a plain dark dress, with a face that has done a great deal of worrying and has finally been allowed to rest. The other is a man of thirty-two, her son, a teacher of speech and writing, clever, tired, and newly baptised.

They are not talking about the weather. They are talking about heaven.

And the strange thing, the thing that makes this one of the best-loved scenes in all of ancient Christian writing, is that the man at the window wrote it down afterwards, and we still have what he wrote. So tonight we are going to sit in that room, and listen, as well as we can. But first, as always, we must begin where the story begins, which is a good deal earlier, and a good deal further away.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is about Saint Monica, the mother of Saint Augustine, and almost everything we know of her comes from one source, the book her son wrote called the Confessions. A few things, the room, the garden, the sounds, and the exact words the two of them spoke to one another, are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original, and we will say at the end which parts those were. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Monica was born in the town of Thagaste, in North Africa, in what is now Algeria, in the year three hundred and thirty-one or thereabouts. Rome still ruled all that coast, and the people spoke Latin, and many of them also spoke the old language of the country. We do not know her parents' names. We know that the family were Christians, and that she was brought up by a very old servant, a woman who had carried Monica's father on her back when he was a baby, and who was therefore trusted with everything.

This old nurse, Augustine tells us, was strict. The girls were not to drink between meals, not even water, even in the heat. The nurse said that if they grew used to drinking whenever they pleased, they would grow into women who could not stop.

Now here is a small story that Augustine tells about his mother, and it is one of my favourites, because it is not a story about a saint at all, it is a story about a girl. Monica, when she was old enough, was sent each day to the cellar to fetch wine from the cask for the family's table. She would fill the little jug, and before she poured it out, she would take a tiny sip with the tip of her lips. Only a sip. Not because she wanted the wine, her son says, but because of the overflowing high spirits of a child, the sort of thing that bubbles out of young people in small mischiefs. And then, as these things do, a sip became two sips, and two became a little more, and before long she had grown quite fond of drinking cups of wine nearly full.

And then one day she was quarrelling with a maid who went down to the cellar with her, and the maid, in the heat of the quarrel, called her a drunkard. A little wine-bibber. Just like that, to her face.

Augustine says it stung her like a wasp. She saw at once the ugliness of what she had been doing, and she stopped, and she never did it again. He draws a moral from it, which I will give you in my own words: that it was not the scolding of her elders that cured her, but the sharp, unkind word of a quarrelling servant. God, he says, makes use of all sorts of people to mend us, even the ones who mean us harm.

I like that she was a girl who sipped the wine. I like that she was stung and corrected herself. It tells us that her goodness was not born finished. It was grown, like a vine, and pruned.

She was given in marriage, as girls were then, to a man named Patricius, a townsman of Thagaste, a person of some small standing, who sat on the town council. He was not a Christian. Augustine does not make him a villain, and he is careful to say that his father was kind, generous in a way, and hot-tempered in a way that was very hard to live with. He was also, Augustine admits, unfaithful to her.

Now in Thagaste there were women who came to the market with bruises, because their husbands were quick with their hands, and they would sit and compare the marks and complain. Monica, her son says, never had a bruise. Her friends were amazed, and asked her how it was that she, married to a man known for his temper, had never been struck. And she told them her secret, which was not a secret at all but a plain bit of wisdom. When he is angry, she said, I keep quiet. And when he has cooled down, then I speak.

That is all. It does not sound like much, does it? It is the oldest advice in the world, and the hardest. But Augustine says that those women who tried it found that it worked, and those who did not went on being bruised.

And she had a mother-in-law, who at first did not like her, because of gossip from the servants, and Monica won her over by patience and by doing her duty with a good heart until the old woman went and reported the gossiping servants to her own son, and had them punished. After that, Augustine says, the two lived in a remarkable peace.

Patricius, in the end, came to faith. Monica prayed for him for years, and it was only in the last year of his life, when he was baptised, that her prayers for him were answered. He died soon afterwards, and Augustine was then about seventeen.

Monica had children, several, though we only know the names of two besides Augustine. There was his brother, Navigius, and there was a sister, whose name we do not know, who later became the head of a community of women. But the one that the book is about, the one who fills the book, is the oldest, Augustine, born in the year three hundred and fifty-four.

He was brilliant. Everyone said so. He was sent to school in Thagaste, and then to a bigger town, and then to Carthage, the great city, to study the art of speaking. And in Carthage he fell in with the wrong sort of crowd and the wrong sort of ideas. He took a woman, not his wife, and had a son with her whom he named Adeodatus, which means given by God. And he joined a sect called the Manichees, who taught that the world was a battlefield between a good god of light and an evil god of darkness, and that the Christian Scriptures were crude and full of errors.

Monica was heartbroken. Augustine says that she wept for him more than mothers weep over dead children, because she saw his death in her faith. She saw that he was dead to the thing she loved most.

And once, in that time, she did something very human. She forbade him to eat at her table. She could not bear to hear the things he said. She turned him away from the house, for a short while, out of love and out of grief.

And then she had a dream.

In the dream, as Augustine tells it, she was standing on a kind of wooden rule, a long plank, like the ruler a carpenter uses. She was weeping. And a young man came towards her, radiant, cheerful, smiling at her, and asked her why she was sad, and why she wept every day. And she answered that she was grieving for her son's ruin.

And the young man told her, in the dream, to take heart, and look carefully, and see that where she was, there he was too.

She looked, and there beside her, on the same rule, stood Augustine.

Now this puzzled her, and she hurried to tell him, and Augustine, who was then a very clever young man, said at once that it only meant what he had said all along. That she might as well come round to his way of thinking, and be where he was.

And Monica, who had not studied rhetoric in Carthage, answered him instantly. No, she said. It was not said to me, where he is, there you are. It was said, where you are, there he is.

Augustine says that this answer struck him, even then, even in his stubbornness, and that he remembered it afterwards for years. It was quick, and it was exactly right, and it came from a woman who had no training in argument at all.

He did not turn round at once. Not by any means. The dream gave her comfort, but it did not give her a quick answer. It was nine more years before he came to faith.

During those nine years, there is another scene in the book, which I want to tell you, because it is so tender. Monica went to a bishop. Augustine does not name him. He was a man who had himself once been among the Manichees, and had left them, and knew their books. And she begged him, with tears, to talk to her son, and argue with him, and show him his errors.

The bishop refused. He said, the young man is not ready. He is too full of the pleasure of having found something new, and he would only laugh at me. Leave him alone, only pray to God for him. He will find out for himself, by reading, how wrong they are and how great their error is.

But Monica would not give way. She kept begging, and weeping, and pressing. And at last the bishop, a little out of patience, said to her the words that her son remembered all his life. Go now, he said. As you live, it cannot be that the son of these tears should perish.

And she took it, Augustine says, as though it were a voice from heaven.

I should say that this is the bishop's remark, as Augustine remembers it, and not a prophecy in the formal sense. It is the kind of thing a kind old man says to a mother who is crying in his study. But it was what she needed to hear, and she kept it.

Now we come to a part of the story that is not at all peaceful.

Augustine, still not a Christian, and ambitious, decided to leave Africa and go to Rome, where he thought he could earn more money teaching and find more respectful students. He did not tell his mother. Or rather, he told her something that was not true.

She had followed him to the port, to the harbour at Carthage, and she clung to him, and she begged either to bring him home, or to go with him. He tricked her. He told her he was only waiting at the harbour for a favourable wind, and that he was going to see a friend off. He persuaded her to spend the night in a little chapel by the sea, a memorial of Saint Cyprian, the bishop and martyr of Carthage. And while she was there praying, he slipped away, and sailed.

I want to say something plainly. He did this to his mother. He knew what he was doing. And years later, writing the book, he said so, in a few lines that are among the most honest in any autobiography: that he lied to his mother, and such a mother, and got away. And that she wept, and prayed, and went back to her house alone.

But here is the end of that part of the story, which Augustine also tells. She did not go home to grieve. She followed him. She set out across the sea, in the winter, in a ship, in a storm, and she was the one who comforted the sailors. She told them, with confidence, that they would arrive safely, because God had shown her in a vision that they would. The sailors, who had been afraid, took courage from a woman of about fifty-three. They reached Italy.

She found Augustine at Milan.

At Milan, Augustine was by now teaching speech at the court. And at Milan there was a bishop named Ambrose, whom we have met before on this show, the one with the story of the bees. Augustine had been going to hear Ambrose preach, at first only to admire his style, and then, little by little, to listen to what he said.

And Monica came to Milan, and she fell in love with Ambrose at once, Augustine says, in the way that you love a person who is an instrument of God's help. She went to church every day to hear him. She loved him, her son writes, because of his care for her son's soul.

There is one small thing that I like very much. In Africa it had been the custom for the faithful to bring baskets of bread, and wine, and porridge to the tombs of the martyrs on their feast days, and eat there, and give some away to the poor. Monica had done this all her life, and she took her basket to Milan. But when she got to the church door, a doorkeeper told her that the bishop had forbidden it. There had been drunkenness, in some places, at such meals, and Ambrose thought it too much like the old pagan feasts for the dead.

And what did she do? She did not argue. She did not say, but this is what we have always done. She at once put down her basket. She took it back home. She learned, instead, to bring to the martyrs' graves a heart full of prayers, and to give what she had to the poor, and to receive the Lord's body and blood at Mass on the martyrs' feasts, as the Church there did.

Augustine says he was amazed at how easily she gave up a custom of a lifetime, simply because it was asked of her by a bishop she respected. It was the same woman who had been stung by the maid's insult in the cellar. She could be corrected. It was one of her great strengths.

Well, you know what happens next. It is the best-known conversion story in the Church's history, and I will tell it very briefly, because tonight is Monica's night and not his. In the summer of three hundred and eighty-six, in a garden in Milan, Augustine heard, as he says, the voice of a child in a neighbouring house, singing over and over, take up and read, take up and read. He took up the book of Saint Paul's letters, which was lying open on a bench, and read the first line he saw, and it changed him. And he went in and told his mother. And she was filled with joy, Augustine says, and she praised God, who is able to do more than we ask or understand.

For years she had asked for something, and God had given her far more.

At Easter of the next year, three hundred and eighty-seven, Augustine was baptised by Ambrose at Milan, together with his friend Alypius and his son Adeodatus. And Monica was there to see it.

And then, her work done, she turned to the thing that she had always wanted, which was to go home.

So now they are in Ostia. It was the port of Rome, at the mouth of the Tiber, a few hours from the city, and it was where they waited for a ship. They had left Milan, and they had come down to the coast, to be together, a little company: Augustine and Monica, his brother Navigius, his son Adeodatus, who was about fifteen, and a few friends. Everyone was waiting for the voyage back to Africa. They were resting after the long journey, as Augustine says, away from the crowds.

And there, in a house, with a window that looked out on a garden, Augustine and his mother found themselves alone, one evening, with nobody else in the room.

I have asked myself what it would have been like for them. For so many years they had been on opposite sides of a gulf. She had wept, and he had wandered. And now there was nothing between them. Nothing at all. Neither of them had to convince the other of anything. Neither of them had to hide, or explain, or be afraid. They were both baptised. They were both home, in the only way that counted.

And they talked, Augustine says, very gently, in the quiet, forgetting the past and reaching out to what lay ahead. They asked each other, in the presence of the Truth, which is God, what the eternal life of the saints would be like. That life that no eye has seen and no ear has heard, as Saint Paul says, and which has not entered the human heart.

I am going to tell you now what they said, but I must be honest first. Augustine does not give us their words. He gives us the outline of their thought, in his own summary, in a few sentences of the greatest beauty. What I am going to say is a retelling, in plain language, of what he reports, and the dialogue between them is invented to carry it. If you want the real thing, read the ninth book of the Confessions, chapter ten. It is not long.

They said, let us suppose a person for whom all the noise has gone quiet.

Let us suppose, said Augustine, that the tumult of the body is hushed. That the pictures of earth and water and air and sky are hushed. That even the sky itself is hushed, and the soul is hushed, and cannot think of itself any more. That dreams and imagined visions are hushed. That every tongue, and every sign, and everything that comes and goes is hushed. For if anyone could hear them, all these things would say, we did not make ourselves. He made us who abides forever.

And suppose, said Monica, that having said this, they too fell silent. Having turned our ears to the One who made them. And suppose that he alone spoke, not through them, but by himself, so that we heard his word, not through any tongue of flesh, nor the voice of an angel, nor the sound of thunder, nor a riddle, but himself, whom we love in these things. So that we could hear him himself, without them, just as, a moment ago, we reached out and, in a flash of thought, touched the eternal Wisdom that abides above all things.

And suppose that this went on, said Augustine, and every other kind of vision, far lower than that one, were taken away, and this one alone ravished and absorbed the one who saw it, and hid him in its inward joys, so that his life was always such as that one moment of understanding, for which we sighed. Would not this be what is meant by, enter into the joy of your Lord?

That, as far as I can tell, is what they said. Or at any rate that is the shape of it. Augustine's own words are even more astonishing than mine, and I would not like you to think that mine are better. But there is one more thing, which is the most important thing, and which I have kept for now.

He says, in that passage, that for one moment they touched it. That in the rush of one heartbeat, as the old Latin has it, they reached the place of the eternal Wisdom, and touched it, and it was a taste, only a taste, of what they had been talking about.

And then, he says, we sighed, and left the first fruits of our spirit bound there, and returned to the noise of our mouths, where a word has a beginning and an end.

I want you to hold on to that. A mother and a son, at an open window, in a plain house, with a fig tree and a wall and a harbour behind them, for the length of one heartbeat touched the thing they had been looking for. And then it was gone, and they were two people at a window again, and it was getting dark.

I think a great many people have felt something like it. A moment in a church. A moment on a hill, or at a bedside, or over a table. A moment when the veil was thin, and then thick again. The Church does not say that every such moment is a vision. It says only that God is nearer than we think, and that when we are quiet he can be heard. And Monica and Augustine, a mother and a son, stood in the evening light and heard him, and it was enough.

And Monica said, when they had been quiet for a little: Son, as for me, nothing in this life gives me any pleasure now. I do not know what I am still doing here, or why I am here. My hopes in this world are finished. There was one thing for which I wanted to remain a little longer in this life, which was that I might see you a Catholic Christian before I died. God has given me that, and more, for I see that you have despised earthly happiness and become his servant. What am I doing here?

That is her speech, or very close to it, as Augustine remembers it. And it is the only time in the whole book that she says, in so many words, I am ready.

He says he does not remember exactly what he answered. He thinks he may have said something, he was not sure, and then he does not say. He was, I suppose, a man at a window who has just been told that his mother is ready to go, and who is not ready to hear it.

Within five days, or not much more, Monica fell ill with a fever.

She was in bed, and one day, in the course of her illness, she lost consciousness and was for a while quite gone from the room. Her sons ran to her. When she came to herself, she looked at Augustine and his brother standing over her, and she asked them, in a puzzled voice, where was I?

And then, looking at their faces, which were full of grief, she said, you will bury your mother here.

Augustine said nothing, and held back his tears. But his brother Navigius said something which was kind and clumsy, the kind of thing a person says when they cannot bear it. He said he hoped that she would not die in a foreign land, but at home, and that it would be a happier thing for her. And when she heard this she looked at him with anxious eyes, as if he had said something low, and said to Augustine, look what he says.

And then she said to both of them: lay this body anywhere. Do not let the care of it trouble you. This only I ask of you, that you remember me at the altar of the Lord, wherever you may be.

Now think about that for a moment. Her husband had a family tomb at Thagaste. She had always intended to be buried beside him. She had even, Augustine says, taken pains for years to make ready the place. And now she let it go, with a sentence. She had come to see that nothing is far from God. As she herself put it, nothing is far from God, and there is no danger that he will not know at the end of the world where to raise me up.

She had only one request, and it was not about her body. It was that they remember her at the altar. That whenever the Eucharist was offered, wherever they were, she should be named in the prayer.

And in the ninth day of her sickness, in the fifty-sixth year of her life, and the thirty-third of her son's, that devout and good soul was set free from the body.

Augustine closed her eyes. And a great sadness flowed into his heart, and was about to overflow in tears. But his eyes, under the strong command of his mind, held back the flood, and dried it up. It was a hard struggle. He says that he thought it was not proper to mourn with a lot of weeping and groaning, as people did when someone died unhappily, as though she were wholly dead. For she had not died unhappily, nor was she altogether dead.

And while he held back, the boy Adeodatus burst out wailing, and then, checked by all of us, fell quiet. In the same way, Augustine says, something childish in myself, which was slipping towards tears, was held in check by the young voice of my heart. We thought it unfitting to celebrate that death with tearful complaints, because it was not a miserable death, nor altogether a death.

I find that the kindest of all the details. They were not ashamed of grief. They only did not want to behave as if they had no hope.

And then a friend of theirs, a man named Evodius, who was in the house, took up a psalm. He sang, and the whole house answered him. The psalm was the one hundred and first in the old numbering, I will sing of mercy and judgment, to you, O Lord, I will sing. And so the grieving house of friends and brothers and sons, instead of weeping, sang. The body was carried out. They went and came back without tears. When the Sacrifice of our redemption was offered at her tomb, as the custom was, before the body was buried, Augustine says, I did not weep even during those prayers.

All that day, he says, I was heavy with a secret sorrow. And I asked God, as well as I could, to heal my grief, and he did not, I think to fix in my memory, by this one lesson, the bond of habit that holds even a mind that no longer feeds on a lie.

Here is the end of the story, and I think it is the part that really breaks my heart.

Augustine went to the baths, because he had heard that the Greek word for bath meant that it drives anxiety from the mind. But it did not drive the sorrow from his heart. He slept, and woke, and found his grief, a little eased. And lying alone in his bed he remembered the lines of a hymn by Ambrose, which he knew and loved. God, maker of all things, ruler of the heavens, who clothes the day in lovely light and the night in sleep. So that rest may ease our weary limbs, and bring us back to work, and relieve our troubled minds, and loose the knots of sorrow.

And, he says, little by little I came back to my former feelings about your handmaid, her holy way of life with you, her tender care and gentleness with us, which we had been suddenly deprived of. And I was glad to weep in your sight about her and for her, about myself and for myself. And I let go the tears that I had held back, and let them flow as much as they wished, making of them a pillow for my heart. For you were there, and no man, only you, to hear my weeping.

That is how the day ends. In the dark, alone, a thirty-three-year-old man weeps for his mother, and God hears.

I think it is worth saying that nothing in the Church's teaching tells us not to cry. The Lord himself wept at the tomb of his friend Lazarus. What Augustine learned that night is that grief and faith can live in the same room.

And he ends his account of her death with a request, written down more than a dozen years later, in a book that was meant for the whole world. He asks his readers to remember her. Inspire, he writes, my God, my heart, that I may remember before your altar your servants, my parents, Patricius and Monica, by whose flesh you brought me into this life, though I do not know how. May they, with a devout affection, remember my parents in this passing light, and my brothers and sisters under you, our Father, in the Catholic Church, and my fellow citizens in the eternal Jerusalem, for which your pilgrim people sigh from their departure until their return.

That is the last thing he says about her. It is a prayer, and not a very long one. And it has been prayed again, by those who read it, for sixteen hundred years.

Now a few words about what came afterwards.

Augustine did go home to Africa, in the end. He became a priest, and then a bishop, at Hippo, and wrote the books that made him one of the great teachers of the Church, in both the East and the West. The Catholic Church honours him as a Doctor of the Church; the Orthodox Church honours him as a blessed teacher, though there are questions about some of his later teaching that this story does not touch, and I will leave those to the scholars and the bishops.

And Monica? Her body, according to the tradition of the Church in Rome, was carried from Ostia to Rome many centuries later, in the time of the Middle Ages, and is kept in a church there which is also dedicated to her son. I give you that as a tradition and not as a record. What is certain is that the Church has remembered her, from the very beginning, as the model of the praying mother, the woman whose patient tears were turned in the end into the most famous conversion in history.

She is the saint, now, of mothers, and of anyone who is waiting. Of anyone who has prayed for a child, or a husband, or a friend, for years, and has seen no change. And the Church holds her up not to say that all prayers will be answered the way hers was, but to say that no prayer is thrown away. That the son of these tears may not perish, and that even if the answer is long in coming, it is not because nobody is listening.

Some notes for the curious. Almost everything in this story comes from Augustine's own account, the Confessions, which he wrote about the year four hundred, a dozen or so years after Monica died. The cup of wine and the maid are in the ninth book, chapter eight, together with her patience with Patricius and her mother-in-law. The dream of the wooden rule, and her answer, are in the third book, chapter eleven. The bishop's words are in chapter twelve of the same book. The leaving of Carthage and the chapel of Saint Cyprian are in the fifth book, chapter eight, and her crossing and her words of comfort to the sailors are in the sixth book, chapter one. The story of her basket and Ambrose is in the sixth book, chapter two. The conversation at the window and her death are in the ninth book, chapters ten to thirteen. The ages, fifty-six and thirty-three, are given by Augustine, and the year, three hundred and eighty-seven, is the usual dating by scholars, from the Confessions and what we know of his baptism. That last is the accepted reconstruction, and not something the book states in so many words.

What is ours: the room, the shutters, the fig tree, the harbour sounds, and every exact sentence that Monica and Augustine speak to one another at the window. The long speech that begins let us suppose a person for whom all the noise has gone quiet is a retelling in plain words of the argument Augustine reports, and the way we have divided it between the two of them is our own device. Augustine says only that they said these things together. The speech beginning son, as for me, and the request about the altar follow his report closely, and the lament about burial in a foreign land is his brother's, as he gives it. The hymn of Ambrose is quoted from the Latin in our own translation.

Three things are worth being careful about. First, how much we know. Almost all of it comes from her son, who loved her and was writing a prayer, not a biography, and who tells it with the eyes of a man who had come late to faith. Other people knew her, and we do not have their words. Second, the vision. Augustine does not call the moment at the window a vision or an ecstasy in any formal sense, and neither do we. He calls it a touching, in the rush of one heartbeat, and he is plain that it did not last. The Church has always been careful with such moments, and so are we. Third, the later tradition of her relics and her patronage. These are old and sincere, but they come long after her death, and we have said so.

Monica is honoured above all in the Catholic Church. Augustine is honoured in both traditions as one of the great teachers of the early Church. We have tried to stay on the ground the two traditions share.

That's the story of Monica and the window at Ostia for tonight. The Catholic Church remembers Saint Monica on the twenty-seventh of August, the day before her son's feast. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who is waiting for something, and could use a gentle story at the end of a long day.

And here is a blessing. May you have, tonight, somebody to lean on a windowsill beside, and nothing that needs to be said. May the noise of the day grow quiet, and the noise of your thoughts, and the noise of your worries. May you hear, under all of it, a voice that does not need a tongue. May whoever you are praying for be held in a mercy larger than your praying. May your tears, if you have any, be a pillow for your heart. And may you know that you are remembered at the altar of the Lord, wherever you are. May the God of Monica be with you, tonight and always.

Goodnight, and God bless.

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