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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.
And as he was not content with losing himself, but also drew others into peril disputing, speech-making before his friends, abusing his power of language to throw trouble into consciences Monnica finally made up her mind. She forbade her son to eat at her table, or to sleep under her roof. She drove him from the house. This must have been a big scandal in Thagaste.
It fell to her husband to open her eyes. With the freedom of manners among the ancients, Augustin relates the fact quite plainly.... That took place in the bath-buildings at Thagaste. He was bathing with his father, probably in the piscina of cold baths. Patricius, as a good pagan, welcomed with jubilation this promise of grand-children, and rushed off joyously to brag of his discovery to Monnica.
Monnica was laid. In this place of graves they came upon also a beautiful statue injured a funeral Genius, or a Victory, with large folded wings like those of the Christian angels. Further on, the forum with its shops, the guard-house of the night-cohort, baths, a theatre, many large temples, arcaded streets paved with large flags, warehouses for merchandise.
Nevertheless, the remembrance of the old severity always remained, and the habit was taken to put off baptism so as not to discourage sinners overmuch. Monnica, always sedulous to conform with the customs of her country and the traditions of her Church, fell in with this practice.
For, in fact, to whom had he been entrusted? Doubtless to some host of Patricius, a pagan like himself. Or did he lodge with his master, a grammarian, who kept a boarding-house for the boys? Almost all these schoolmasters were pagan too. Is it wonderful that the Christian lessons of Monnica and the nurses at Thagaste became more and more blurred in Augustin's mind?
The mystery in which Augustin intended that the woman he had loved the most should remain enveloped for all time, is nearly impenetrable to us. No doubt she was of a very humble, not to say low class, since Monnica judged it impossible to bring about a marriage between the ill-assorted pair. There must have been an extreme inequality between the birth and education of the lovers.
"Blame your own tongue," retorted Monnica. According to her, women should close their eyes to the infidelities of their husbands and avoid arguing with them when they were angry. Silence, submissiveness, were the all-powerful arms. And since, as a young woman, she had a certain natural merriment, she added, laughing: "Remember what was read to you on your wedding-day.
He believed, therefore, that he made a good choice in appointing Augustin. So a chain of events, with which his will had hardly anything to do, was going to draw the young rhetorician to Milan yes, and how much farther! to where he did not want to go, to where the prayers of Monnica summoned him unceasingly: "Where I am, there shall you be also."
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