Augustin Sokolovski
On May 17, or May 4 according to the Julian calendar, the Church honors the memory of Saint Monica. Like Emily of Caesarea (+375), Nonna Nazianzus (+374), and Antusa of Antioch (324-?) – mothers of Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, and John Chrysostom – Monica was one of those illustrious wives who raised great doctors of universal Christianity. Without them, the history of the Church and the world would have been different. The holy mothers of the Church Fathers are truly worthy of commemoration.
The mother of the greatest of the Western Church Fathers was born in Thagaste, present-day Souq-Ahras in Algeria, in 331. At the age of 22, she gave birth to Augustine. In 371, at the age of 40, she became a widow. Monica's husband, Patrice, or, according to the modern transcription, Patrick, was baptized before her death. This tradition, transforming sacramental baptism for the remission of sins into a washing before death, was indeed widespread in antiquity. Paradoxically, it was the later teaching of his son Augustine that contributed to the abolition of this practice.
His father's death did not change the future Church Father's attitude toward Christianity. He was immersed in religious delusions and, like the Apostle Paul before his conversion, intellectually persecuted the Church (1 Cor 15:9). He denied the meaning of Christianity and mocked the biblical foundations of faith in Jesus Christ in the Old Testament.
Saint Monica prayed for her son. Her prayer was based on the conviction of the Christians of the Carthaginian Church that God, by the power of His grace, can change a person's will, "breaking" it by transforming it into a thirst for goodness (cf. Luke 14:23). Saint Monica's faith, prayer, and patience were not without fruit.
In 387, on Easter night, April 24, Augustine was baptized in Milan by Saint Ambrose. A few months later, on November 13, Monica reposed in the Lord in Ostia, where the Roman seaport was located. In modern times, archaeologists have even found the supposed place of her death.
In addition to her first child, Augustine, Monica gave birth to a son, Navigius, and a daughter, Perpetua (+423). The latter is also canonized and venerated as a saint.
Augustine's conversion to Christianity was the result of a complex personal search and spiritual growth. However, he himself believed and claimed to have become a Christian exclusively through God's predestination through his mother's prayers. In his later writings, Augustine insisted that he had received this knowledge from above by divine revelation at his episcopal ordination.
This May celebration in honor of Saint Augustine's mother is associated with the transfer of part of Monica's relics from Rome to the Augustinian Abbey of Arrouaise, in northern France, in 1162.
Founded in 1090, the monastery dedicated to Saint Nicholas needed the special heavenly intercession of Augustine, whose monastic charter guided it. Clearly, veneration for the Father of the Church himself was very great in the West at the time. Augustine was called the "Matrix of All Conclusions" and the "Father of Fathers." His relics rested in Pavia, in northern Italy. It was therefore simply impossible to transfer a relic of the saint to France.
On the contrary, the veneration of Monica, Augustine's mother, only began to spread within the Church seven centuries after her death. But at the turn of the first and second millennia of the Christian era, it experienced considerable growth and has continued to spread in untold ways to the present day. It turns out that the transfer of the relics to France and the beginning of the flowering of her veneration at that time are closely linked.
Like many shrines, churches, and monasteries, the once glorious Abbey of the Canons of Saint Augustine ceased to exist after the French Revolution (1789). However, linked to the circumstances of the rise of this Augustinian monastery, the transfer of the saint's relics, by mysterious divine predestination, became one of the dates of celebration of the memory of Monica of Thagaste in the Orthodox Church.