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Updated: June 7, 2025
In this rigid atmosphere of his home, the student from Carthage, with his free, fashionable airs, must have caused a painful astonishment. Monnica felt at once that she and her son understood each other no longer. She began by remonstrating with him. Augustin rebelled.
He kept on repeating this verse over and over again, as people do with a tune they have just picked up. But the pious Monnica, who heard him, could not tolerate the singing of such holy words in such a place. She spoke sharply to the offender.
Things got worse when, with his presumption of the young professor new-enamelled by the schools, the harsh and aggressive assurance of the heresiarch, he boasted as loud as he could of being a Manichee. Monnica, deeply wounded in her piety and motherly tenderness, ordered him to give up his errors. He refused, and only replied by sarcasms to the poor woman's complaints.
All this aided to bring about the tie, the understanding, which grew more and more close between Augustin and Monnica. And so from this time they both appear to us as they were to appear to all posterity the pattern of the Christian Mother and Son. Thanks to them, the hard law of the ancients has been abrogated. There shall be no more barriers between the mother and her child.
He said to her: "Since, according to your dream, we are to be both standing on the same rule, that means that you are going to be a Manichean." "No," answered Monnica. "He did not say, where he is you will be, but where you are he will be." Augustin confesses that this strong good sense made a certain impression on him. Nevertheless he did not change. For still nine years he remained a Manichee.
They were obliged to a conduct which would shew them worthy of all the outer marks of respect which surrounded them. The austerity of Monnica had increased with the zeal of her faith. She set an example to the Church people at Thagaste.
He never pardoned save as a Christian his schoolmasters for having brutalized him. Nevertheless, despite his hatred for ill-ordered lessons, his precocious intelligence was remarked by everybody. It was clear that such lucky gifts should not be neglected. Monnica, no doubt, was the first to get this into her head, and she advised Patricius to make Augustin read for a learned profession.
But he stole like a man of quality, to make presents and to win over his playfellows: he ruled the other boys by his presents a noteworthy characteristic in this future ruler of souls. Morals like these, a little rough, shape free and bold natures. Those African children were much less coddled, much less scolded, than to-day. Monnica had something else to do than to look after the boys.
Monnica looked after the household, no easy work in a house where nine sat down to table every day. But the Saint fulfilled her humble duties with touching kindness and forgetfulness of self: "She took care of us," says Augustin, "as if we had all been her children, and she served us as if each of us had been her father." Let us look a little at these "children" of Monnica.
Patricius married to be like everybody else and also because he was well over forty, and his mother an old woman who would soon be no longer able to run his house. Monnica also had her mother. The two old women had a meeting, with many politenesses and ceremonious bowings, and because the thing appeared to them reasonable and most suitable, they settled the marriage.
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