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Updated: June 7, 2025
She was like the negress in the Arab houses to-day, who is often a better Muslem, more hostile to the Christian, than her employers. The old woman in Monnica's family had witnessed the last persecutions; she had perhaps visited the confessors in prison; perhaps she had seen flow the blood of the martyrs. These exciting and terrible scenes would have been graven on her memory.
Moreover, in Monnica's time men and women took part in these funeral love-feasts and mingled together disturbingly. Patricius got cross about it, and about a good many other things too. His old mother chafed his suspicions by carrying to him the ugly gossip and even the lies of the servants about his wife.
The expressions tears and moans and weeping occur so often in her son's writings, that we are at first tempted to take them for pious metaphors figures of a sacred rhetoric. We suspect that Monnica's tears must come from the Bible, an imitation of King David's penitential tears. But it would be quite an error to believe that. Monnica wept real tears.
In any case, Romanianus, taken up with his pleasures and business, could not have been much of a guide for Monnica's son. Augustin was therefore without control, or very nearly. No doubt he came to Carthage with a strong desire to increase his knowledge and get renown, but still more athirst for love and the emotions of sentiment. The love-prelude was deliriously prolonged for him.
In this drama Monnica was certainly the leader, though it is likely that Augustin's friends also played their parts. No doubt, they objected to the professor of rhetoric, that he was injuring his reputation as well as his future by living thus publicly with a concubine. But Monnica's reasons were more forcible and of quite another value.
Little Augustin knew nothing of all these calculations of motherly prudence and fatherly diplomacy: he begged for baptism, so he tells us. This seems very remarkable in so young a child. But he lived in a house where all the service was done by Christians. He heard the talk of Monnica's friends; perhaps, too, of his grandparents, who were Catholics faithful and austere.
"I thought that I should be miserable," says he, "without the embraces of a woman." Now his promised bride was too young: two years must pass before he could marry her. How could he control himself till then? Augustin did not hesitate: he found another mistress. There was Monnica's punishment, cruelly deceived in her pious intentions.
I say not that this other pleasure is less, for that which is called less hath only to increase to become equal. No, I shall not say that all other pleasure is less. No comparison can be made. It is another kind, it is another reality." In the city of Apuleius, the Christian Monnica's son became simply a pagan.
Generally, disputes as to who shall direct the domestic arrangements divide mother-in-law and daughter-in-law who live under one roof. What could be Monnica's feelings towards a woman who was not even a daughter-in-law and was regarded by her as an intruder?
My eyes sought for him everywhere, and found him not. I hated the familiar scenes because he was not there, and they could no more cry to me, 'Lo! he will come. as they used when he was absent but alive...." Then Augustin began to weep louder, he prolonged his weeping, finding consolation only in tears. Monnica's tenderness was restrained; in him it was given full vent and exaggerated.
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