What do you think when you read the word “saint”? Do you imagine an icon of a placid martyr, like Ignatius of Antioch crawling with lions? Perhaps you think of a saint from your own living memory, like Pope St. John Paul II or St. Teresa of Calcutta. Or maybe you think of a living person you know who embodies sanctity and who might even one day have a place in the Roman canon. Words like “sin,” “failure,” and “redemption,” however, are probably not the first to come to mind when most of us think of the saints.

This is understandable, and it has been affected by historical circumstances that have shaped our writing about the saints through the centuries. We need and want good examples, and the stories of saints we have grown accustomed to are mostly positive tales of their virtue and accomplishments.

Let’s say your child has aspirations of becoming a great soccer player. What do you do? You go on YouTube and find highlight videos of Lionel Messi dribbling and shooting and say, “Look, if you practice, you could do that.” I know because I have done this. We generally don’t watch highlight reels of mistakes (lowlights?) or long, slow videos of improvement.

For a long time, this is what we have done with the majority of our presentations of the saints, as well. We love to talk about their incredible sanctity (“St. John Vianney only slept two hours a night because he heard so many confessions!”) or we focus on the saints who don’t have very visible stories of sin or conversion.[1] I have a deep love for saints such as Thérèse of Lisieux and John Paul the Great, but I sometimes find treatments of their lives difficult to relate to, as these stories give the impression that they never struggled with sin in the way that I do.

St. Monica, the mother of St. Augustine of Hippo, is a good example of this treatment. As a scholar of the early Church who has read St. Augustine’s Confessions numerous times, I have slowly become aware of the flat and incomplete treatment we often give to St. Monica by focusing only on the one great aspect of sanctity for which she is most famous: intercession for her wayward son. It is understandable that we focus on this, particularly when there are people in our families who are far from God. Intercession for Augustine is St. Monica’s most prominent activity in the Confessions itself, as Augustine wanted to clearly depict the means that God used to bring him to conversion.

However, Monica is a more complex figure than simply the “Mother of Tears” who prayed her son into the Church. Long before the blessed death of his mother related by Augustine in book 9 of the Confessions, he gives us several glimpses into parts of Monica’s life that needed redemption. By examining three of these and seeing how God’s grace was operative in each situation, my hope is to demonstrate how saints like Monica can be examples to us of the redemptive power of God in normal circumstances and not just examples of truly exceptional sanctity.[2] I will examine them in the order in which Augustine describes them in the Confessions, which is not chronological.

Augustine’s Childhood and Education

Let us begin by discussing Augustine’s childhood, especially the fact that he was not baptized as an infant or child. This, I think, would make any Catholic parent wonder. Augustine does not explain why this was the case, even though infant baptism was a very common practice in North Africa at this time.[3] Rather, he begins the story when he is a boy of unstated age, but old enough to be devoted to Christ and to ask for baptism when he became ill.[4] He recovered from the illness and consequently was not baptized, but he makes sure to emphasize Monica’s piety and her willingness to have him baptized if the illness was going to be fatal. He states that he was not, in the end, baptized “on the pretext that if I lived I would inevitably soil myself again, for it was held that the guilt of sinful defilement incurred after the laver of baptism was graver and more perilous.”[5] Speaking of Monica in all this, Augustine emphasizes how she was teaching him to be a Christian despite the fact that his father, Patricius, was not one.

In the following paragraph, however, we see the closest thing to a negative judgment of Monica that we can find in the Confessions. Augustine asks God whether it was good that his baptism was deferred and likens it to deferring the cure of a sick man. He concludes: “How much better it would have been if I had been healed at once, and if everything had been done by my own efforts and those of my family to ensure that the good health my soul had received should be kept safe in the care of you who had given it. Yes, how much better it would have been!”[6] When we add to this the fact that Augustine was sent for vain, pagan schooling that was designed to help him advance in a profitable and worldly career, it would not be unreasonable to question the decisions of his mother.[7]

Does this mean that we should harshly judge St. Monica through these sparse texts? No, it certainly does not. We have nothing more than a thumbnail sketch of what was happening in Augustine’s life and family, and it is not our place to judge. However, it does raise questions about a spotless portrayal of Monica, especially as intercessor for her son. Augustine himself seems to have acknowledged that she could have done better for his soul by having him baptized as a child. To this one might raise the objection that Monica was being subservient to her pagan husband, as would have been expected and required of her. There is some truth to that; but if being subservient to her husband caused damage to her son’s soul, then one could also argue that she could (and should) have tried to break with societal norms and go against Augustine’s father’s wishes. The point is that, whether out of good intentions, a desire to fulfill cultural expectations, or some combination of these and other factors, Monica seems to have failed in her duties to her son.

Sin and failure, however, are not the point of stories about saints; redemption is. So where is the redemption in this story? Where isn’t it? Redemption, in fact, is the whole story of the Confessions. Nobody can say how Augustine’s life would have been different, exactly, if he had been baptized young. But it was through a life of sin and emptiness that Augustine came to discover his need for God, and it was exactly by seeking happiness in earthly things that Augustine discovered how to find happiness in the Creator of those things. Is it possible that Augustine would not have ascended to the heights he did without first descending to the depths? In addition, though he had to be purified of the ill effects of his secular education, Augustine eventually put that education to good use as a preacher, teacher, and writer. If he had not studied the pagan gods, would he have been capable of writing the Confessions? God truly brought great good out of the darkness of Augustine’s youth. His long dissolution also acted as a purifier for Monica herself, who cried and entreated her way to sanctity as a patient intercessor.

Monica, Ambrose, and the Martyrs

The next example of redemption in Monica’s story is found in book 6 of the Confessions, and would be the last one if the story was being told chronologically. Augustine describes living in Milan as a teacher of rhetoric, and how in the year 385 his mother came to live there as well. At the time, he had given up Manichaeism but was not yet convinced by Christianity, and Monica was ramping up her intercessory prayer for him in the confidence that God was drawing him in.

Augustine describes how one of Monica’s pious practices did not translate well to Italy: “In Africa she had been accustomed to make offerings of bread, pottage, and wine at the tombs of the martyrs.”[8] It seems that she would take these offerings around to the martyrs’ tombs, and share them with others present there. She discovered, however, that Ambrose, the bishop of Milan (yes, that Ambrose) had forbidden this practice for two reasons: first, to avoid giving excuses to alcoholics to go around to the shrines and get drunk; second, because it “resembled the cult of ancestors and so was close kin to the superstitious practices of the pagans.”[9]

Was Monica doing something wrong? I think that could be debated, and Augustine focuses on her ready submission to the authority of the bishop. However, it is worth noticing that she apparently saw the incident as a correction of her devotions. Augustine states that she “criticiz[ed] her own custom rather than sitting in judgment on [Ambrose’s] prohibition.”[10] She also came to truly see that Ambrose’s way was better than her own, as she could now give that food to the poor and bring only her prayers to the martyrs’ shrines. Finally, she saw that Ambrose’s way allowed for the celebration of the Eucharist at the martyrs’ shrines on their feast days instead.[11]

Monica the Wine-Swiller

Lastly, we come to the only clear description in the Confessions of a vice on Monica’s part. In book 9, while telling the most complete story of her life, Augustine writes that Monica told him about how she had gradually gained an attachment to secretly drinking too much wine. It is not stated how old she was, only that she still lived under her parents’ roof, as she would drink the wine when fetching it to bring it to their table. She was finally brought to give up this habit not by any of the normal checks put on a child’s behavior (a parent or supervising adult) but by the cruelty of a maidservant. This particular maid had seen her drinking on many occasions, and while they were quarreling, “in the most bitterly insulting language,” she called Monica a “wine-swiller.”[12] This struck Monica to the heart and she gave up the habit from that day.

Augustine has a reason for every anecdote in the Confessions, and his reason for telling this story beautifully sums up why we should talk about the failings and redemptions of the saints. He remarks that the story of Monica’s life is not about her, per se, but about the action of God: “I will speak not of her gifts, but of the gifts with which you [God] endowed her, for she did not fashion herself or bring herself up: you created her.”[13] Regarding specifically the story of her drinking and recovery, he focuses on the unexpected means that God uses to fashion his saints: “But you, Lord, are the ruler of all things in heaven and on earth, and as worldly events flow on their tumultuous way you dispose them in due order, diverting the course of that deep torrent to serve your purposes.”[14] Augustine’s whole point is that saints don’t make themselves; they are made by God through mysterious redemptive processes.

Conclusion

There are two reasons why I think an older style of presentation of the saints is ineffective today and, in fact, inappropriate. The first reason is that our culture has little time—and does not believe it—when people are presented as flat and perfect. Our own faults and those of others, including religious leaders, are too on display. Our culture also does not have the same respect for authorities that it used to have, and putting someone on a pedestal is more likely to make them a target for stones than an example for imitation. Modern people, including the children and adults we are trying to catechize, want examples who have been in the dirt and mud and yet have come through washed clean.

The second reason is that these presentations of the saints tended to background grace and foreground heroic effort. When I think of many of the saint stories I heard and read in my youth, I think of all of the amazing things the saints accomplished, and not so much of their limitations or redemptions. I have a very strong memory of a homily I heard as an adult given on the Feast of St. John Neumann where the priest said that St. John had died thinking that he had been a failure as a priest and bishop. That homily brought tears to my eyes (and, in fact, the memory of it still does) because I could not imagine a saint feeling that way, as I often have. The saints are heroes, aren’t they? They ride through life on tall, white stallions of virtue, cutting down the villains of ignorance and sin wherever they go. Don’t they?

St. Monica (and, in fact, Augustine’s actual presentation of her) can help us see how to refocus our teaching on saints from sanitary hagiographies to holistic stories of redemption. I think that what my children need to hear—and what I need to hear—is that God has worked in someone else’s life and so he can and will work in ours. Monica grew up as a relatively normal young lady. She was economically privileged and had good Catholic parents, but they were ambitious enough to marry her to a young pagan man with terrible morals and a horrific temper. This meant that she lived squarely within a set of limitations imposed by her culture and her circumstances. She had faults like everyone else, but God intervened in the often inexplicable circumstances of life. Her own failure to bring up her son more firmly in Christianity led her to the school of tears, where she had to learn about patience, hope, and grace through long years of intercession. That is a saint I can relate to—someone who prays and hopes and cries for help without knowing all along what the results will be. She was, in other words, just like you and me: someone in desperate need of grace.

Dr. Ben Safranski is a writer, speaker, and catechist. He is Director of Adult Faith Formation at Holy Family Parish in Steubenville, OH. He can be found on YouTube @DrBenS.

Art Credit: Saints Augustine and Monica by Ary Scheffer, Wikimedia Commons.

This article originally appeared on pages 66 - 73 of the print edition.