Monica
Christian mother of Augustine, known only from his Confessions. She followed him from Africa to Milan, saw him converted and baptised, and died at Ostia on the way home.
Everything known of Monica comes from the Confessions of her son Augustine of Hippo. She was given in marriage to a man who was not a Christian, and near the end of his life she won him to the faith (Augustine, Confessions 9.9.19–22). During Augustine’s years as a Manichaean she begged a bishop to argue with him; he refused, and sent her away with the words that “it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish” (Augustine, Confessions 3.12.21).
She followed her son by sea to Milan (Augustine, Confessions 6.1.1) and was told at once of his conversion (Augustine, Confessions 8.12.30). At Ostia, waiting for a ship home, the two talked at a window about the life of the saints, a conversation Augustine describes as an ascent of the mind beyond all created things (Augustine, Confessions 9.10.23–24). A few days later she fell ill with a fever and died there, in the fifty-sixth year of her age and the thirty-third of his (Augustine, Confessions 9.11.27–28). See the Conversion of Augustine. Her dates are reckoned from his: he was born in 354.
In the timeline
- AD 386, firm dateThe Conversion of Augustine
In a garden at Milan the African teacher of rhetoric Augustine, after years of hesitation, reads a sentence of Paul and resolves to seek baptism. He tells the story himself in the Confessions. Ambrose baptises him the following Easter.