Monica at Ostia — ending and aftermath
Augustine is baptized by Ambrose at the Easter Vigil in 387. On the way back to Africa, he and Monica share a vision at a window overlooking a garden at Ostia. Nine days later she dies. Then Adeodatus. Then Nebridius.
Summary
Book 9 opens with Augustine's decision to resign his position as public orator. He has already converted; now he must withdraw from the machinery of worldly success. He does it gently — waiting for the end of the school term, claiming illness (his lungs were in fact giving him trouble), not making a dramatic announcement. He retreats with his friends and Monica to the villa at Cassiciacum to read, discuss philosophy, and prepare for baptism. The conversations there become the early philosophical dialogues Augustine later publishes.
At the Easter Vigil in 387, Augustine, Alypius, and Adeodatus are baptized by Ambrose in Milan. Augustine weeps through the hymns — he cannot stop weeping, and the tears feel right to him. Then the group prepares to return to Africa. At the port of Ostia, waiting for a ship, Augustine and Monica find themselves one day leaning on a window sill overlooking a garden, talking of the eternal life of the saints. The conversation ascends — Augustine's account of this is careful not to claim too much — until they seem to touch for a moment the eternal silence that lies above thought and speech before returning, ordinary again, to the conversation.
Nine days later Monica falls ill with fever and dies, at the age of fifty-six. Augustine holds back his tears by will during the funeral; weeps at last, alone, in the bath. His account of her death and of his grief is the most restrained and most moving passage of the book. Then, in Africa, Adeodatus dies, barely sixteen. Then Nebridius, the long philosophical companion, who had returned to Africa and died there as a Christian. Book 9 ends with three deaths and with Augustine turning to God the question that the next four books will spend their energy answering.
- Book 1The opening prayer, the paradox of calling on God, and the childhood years: infancy, the hated Greek, the loved Latin, the school...
- Book 2Adolescence in Thagaste, the first serious entanglements with desire, Monica's unheeded warnings — and the pear theft, which...
- Book 3Augustine at seventeen in Carthage: the theater's pleasurable grief, the shock of Cicero's Hortensius redirecting his ambition...
- Book 4Augustine teaching rhetoric in Thagaste, the dangerous years with the astrologers, and the death of a close unnamed friend...
- Book 5The long-awaited meeting with Faustus the Manichaean bishop, who is charming and admits he cannot answer Augustine's questions....
- Book 6Milan, Ambrose's sermons unlocking the scriptures, and the departure of the fifteen-year concubine — sent back to Africa by...
- Book 7The philosophical turning point. The Platonic books — probably Plotinus in Latin translation — give Augustine the concept of an...
- Book 8The conversion at Milan: the story of Antony, the garden, the weeping under the fig tree, the child's voice chanting tolle lege...
- Book 9Baptism by Ambrose at Easter 387. Monica and Augustine's shared vision at the window in Ostia. Nine days later, Monica's death....
- Book 10The autobiography ends; the philosophy begins. Augustine examines his memory and finds it vast beyond comprehension — a hall that...
- Book 11What is time? Augustine works through the question forced by Genesis — what was there before the beginning? — and gives the answer...
- Book 12A close reading of Genesis 1:1–2. What is the heaven of heavens? What is the formless earth? Augustine reads the creation...
- Book 13A theological reading of the six days of Genesis: light, waters, land, the luminaries — each read as a figure of the soul's...