Augustine describes their conversation, saying that together they experienced “the very highest delight of the earthly senses, in the very purest material light…in respect of the sweetness of that light.” But in the intimacy between mother and son, they began talking about God, and they “did by degrees pass through all things bodily, even the very heaven when sun and moon and stars shine upon the earth.” From these material things “we came to our own minds and went beyond them into the realm of pure spirit.”
In describing their talk, Augustine includes a long sentence that is hard to parse, but it includes, in some translations, the word “hushed” over and over—the tumult of the flesh was hushed, the waters and the air were hushed, all dreams and shallow visions were hushed, tongues were hushed, everything that passes away was hushed, the self was hushed in moving beyond the self into a sort of silence. Mother or son makes an exclamation: “We did not make ourselves, he who made us never passes away.” But after saying this, that voice, too, is hushed. And “He who made them, He alone speaks, not through men or women, but by himself.” And Augustine and Monica heard God’s word “not through any tongue of flesh, or Angels’ voices, not sound of thunder, nor in the dark riddle of similitude,” but they heard “his very Self.” And they sighed after a moment of pure understanding.
Augustine is describing here a perfect moment of elevation: hushed…hushed…hushed…hushed. All the clamors of the world slip into silence. Then a desire to praise the creator comes over them, but then even that praise is hushed amid the kenosis, the self-emptying. And then comes the infusing vision of eternal wisdom, what Augustine calls the “glad hidden depths.” One imagines mother and son lost in joy in this climactic encounter. After the years of tears and anger, control and escape, rupture and reconciliation, pursuit and manipulation, friendship and fighting, they finally achieve some sort of outward-facing union. They come together and dissolve together in contemplation of what they both now love.
Monica tells him, “Son, for mine own part I have no further delight in any thing in this life…. One thing there was for which I desired to linger for a while in this life, that I might see thee a Catholic Christian before I died. My God has done this for me more than abundantly.”
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TO BE HEALED IS to be broken open. The proper course is outward. C. S. Lewis observed that if you enter a party consciously trying to make a good impression, you probably won’t end up making one. That happens only when you are thinking about the other people in the room. If you begin an art project by trying to be original, you probably won’t be original.
And so it is with tranquillity. If you set out trying to achieve inner peace and a sense of holiness, you won’t get it. That happens only obliquely, when your attention is a focused on something external. That happens only as a byproduct of a state of self-forgetfulness, when your energies are focused on something large.
For Augustine, that’s the crucial change. Knowledge is not enough for tranquillity and goodness, because it doesn’t contain the motivation to be good. Only love impels action. We don’t become better because we acquire new information. We become better because we acquire better loves. We don’t become what we know. Education is a process of love formation. When you go to a school, it should offer you new things to love.
A few days later, Monica came down with her fatal illness, which took only nine days to carry her off. She told Augustine that it was no longer important for her to be buried back in Africa, because no place was far from God. She told him that in all their tribulations she had never heard him utter a sharp word to her.
At the moment of her death, Augustine bent over and closed her eyes. “An innumerable sorrow flowed up into my heart and would have overflowed in tears.” At that moment, Augustine, not even now fully renouncing classical Stoicism, felt he should exercise self-command and not give in to weeping. “But my eyes, under the mind’s strong constraint, held back their flow and I stood dry-eyed. In that struggle it went very hard with me…. Because I had now lost the great comfort of her, my soul was wounded and my very life torn asunder, for it had been one life—made of hers and mine together.”
Augustine’s friends gathered around him, while he still tried to repress his grief: “For I was very much ashamed that these human emotions could have such power over me…. I felt a new grief at my grief and so was afflicted by a double sorrow.”
Augustine went to take a bath and soothe his self-division, then fell asleep and awoke feeling better. “And then, little by little, I began to recover my former feeling about Your handmaid, remembering how loving and devout was her conversation with me, of which I was thus suddenly deprived. And I found solace in weeping in Your sight both about her and for her, about myself and for myself.”
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MONICA HAD ENTERED A world in which the Roman Empire dominated Europe and a rationalist philosophy dominated thinking. In his writing, Augustine uses her as an example of faith against pure rationalism, of spiritual relentlessness against worldly ambition. He would spend the rest of his life as a bishop fighting and preaching and writing, fighting and arguing. He achieved the immortality he sought in his youth, but he did it in an unexpected way. He started with the belief that he could control his own life. He had to renounce that, to sink down into a posture of openness and surrender. Then, after that retreat, he was open enough to receive grace, to feel gratitude and rise upward. This is life with an advance-retreat-advance shape. Life, death, and resurrection. Moving down to dependence to gain immeasurable height.
CHAPTER 9
SELF-EXAMINATION
Samuel Johnson was born in Lichfield, England, in 1709. His father was an unsuccessful bookseller. His mother was an uneducated woman who nonetheless thought she had married beneath her. “My father and mother had not much happiness from each other,” Johnson would remember. “They seldom conversed; for my father could not bear to talk of his affairs; and my mother, being unacquainted with books, could not talk of anything else…. Of business she had no distinct conception; and therefore her discourse was composed only of complaint, fear, and suspicion.”1
Johnson was a frail infant who surprised everybody by living through the ordeal of birth. He was immediately handed over to a wet nurse whose milk infected him with tuberculosis of the lymph nodes, which made him permanently blind in one eye, with poor vision in the other, and deaf in one ear. He later developed smallpox, which left his face permanently scarred. His doctors, in an attempt to relieve his disease, made an incision, without anesthesia, in his left arm. They kept the wound open with horsehair for six years, periodically discharging the fluids they associated with disease. They also cut into his neck glands. The operation was botched and Johnson went through life with deep scars running down the left side of his face from his ear to his jaw. Physically, he was large, ugly, scarred, and ogrelike.
He fought vehemently against his maladies. One day, as a child, he was walking home from school but could not see the gutter in the street, and feared tripping on it. He got down on all fours and crawled along the street, peering closely at the curb so that he could measure his step. When a teacher offered to give him a hand, he became enraged and furiously beat her away.
All his life, Johnson was suspicious of the self-indulgence that he believed the chronically ill were prone to. “Disease produces much selfishness,” he wrote toward the end of his life. “A man in pain is looking after ease.” He responded to his illness, Walter Jackson Bate notes, with “a powerful sense of self demand, a feeling of complete personal responsibility…. What is of special interest to us now is how quickly as a small child—in discovering the physical differences between himself and others—he began groping his way to the independence and defiant disregard for physical limitations that he was always to maintain.”2