Saints and Seasons
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Two Christian mothers

by Mike Oettle

TWO notable Christian mothers appear on the calendar for May: Monica (4 May), mother of St Augus­tine, and Helena (21 May), mother of the Emperor Constan­tine I. These two very different mothers are remem­bered chiefly because of the high profiles of their sons, and it is interesting to compare the two.

Monica, or Monnica (died AD 387), a Romanised Berber woman of Tagaste in Numidia (now the village of Souk-Ahras in Algeria), was married at an early age to a pagan named Patricius. Her life with him was not easy, as he was a hot-tempered man and his mother (who lived with them) a difficult woman, but Monica was a dutiful, patient and loving Christian and, although she only succeeded in con­verting her husband late in life, she lived in complete peace with them until their deaths. Of her two sons, she especially loved Augustine (born in AD 354) and made it her heart’s desire to see him baptised.

Augustine went to study at the University of Carthage (now in Tunis) where, at the age of 19, he became a devoted follower of phil­o­s­ophy or “divine wisdom”. Repelled by the “barbarity” of the Old Testament, he turned to Manichæism, a religion which, although it encouraged ascetism and in­tense devotion to Christ, also taught that the physical world was evil and did not discourage his wild way of life, nor the fact that he was “living in sin” with a girl he stayed with for over 10 years – longer than his nine-year fling with Mani­chæ­ism. (He had a son by her, too.) At 28 Augustine, a teacher of rhetoric, headed for Rome to find better pupils, but then obtained a professorship (with the title of Imperial Rhetorician) in Mediolanum.[1]

During all this time Monica kept praying for her son and even­t­ual­ly joined him in Mediolanum (he had tricked her and left her behind in Carthage). There she met Bishop Ambrose, who had already begun to have an influence on her son. Guided by Ambrose and Monica, Augustine was bound to find his way to complete commitment to Jesus, and this finally happened while he was reading the Letter to the Romans in a garden and came across the words: “Let us live decently as people do in the daytime: no drunken orgies, no promiscuity or licentiousness, and no wrangling or jealousy. Let your armour be the Lord Jesus Christ; forget about satisfying your bodies with all their cravings.”[2] After a time of prep­ar­ation he was baptised by Ambrose in 387.

Monica’s life work was done. Within just five days she took ill and died, aged 56, satisfied that her son was at last a Christian.

He returned to Africa[3] to live a monastic life at Tagaste, but in 391 was press-ganged into be­coming a priest in the nearby city of Hippo[4] (now Annaba) and became its bishop in 396. His writings make him the great philosopher of the early Catholic Church, and his in­fluence is still felt today, not least because he had a profound influ­ence on the great reformer Calvin.

(Augustine of Hippo is not to be confused with Augustine of Canter­bury, also known as Austin, who carried the gospel to south-eastern England. He died on 26 May 605.)

By contrast Helena (AD 248-328) was no such exemplary mother until later in life. It is not even certain that she was married to Constantine’s father, the Emperor Constantius, but it was hardly her fault that he put her aside in order to marry the daughter of an imperial partner, and thus advance his politic­al career. After Con­stan­tine had become emperor in 306 he had her proclaimed empress dow­a­ger, and persuaded her to become a Christian. (He him­self, al­though he established Christianity as the official religion, resis­t­ed being baptised until shortly before his death.) Helena did little of note until after a family tragedy involving her favourite grandson Crispus and his stepmother, Fausta, who were executed for an inces­t­u­ous affair. Grief-strick­en, she went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where she had churches built on the reputed sites of the Nativ­ity and the Ascension.

At this point, unfortunately, Helena disappears into legend, for she is credited with the dis­cov­ery (called the “invention”) of the cross on which Jesus died (the so-called true cross), and after this a host of miracles began to be attributed to her, chiefly (it would seem) because of confusion with other women named Helena. She was an especially popular saint to pray to during the Middle Ages, but it seems that she owes her popularity to legend and her imperial status more than to any profoundly Chris­t­ian quality.

In in her own time, however, and in the mediæval era, Helena was very highly regard­ed. (She was especially popular in religious art, appearing with the “true cross”.) It called to mind the words of the Magnificat (which one could apply respectively to Monica and Helena): “For he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden” and “He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek.”

She also was important to England in the time of King John (*1167 †1216, king from 1199), be­cause Rome tried to depose him on the grounds that England was a papal fief. John counter-argued that England was not under Rome’s authority because it was “an empire of itself”, a rather contorted argument based on the fact that Constantius was proclaimed emperor at Eboracum (York) and Con­stan­tine lived in Britain during his childhood.

Both Helena and Monica have found their way into geography, thanks to St Helena Island (dis­covered on St Helena’s Day, 1502, by the Portuguese navigator João da Nova Castella), St Helena Bay on the Cape West Coast (discovered by Vasco da Gama on 7 November 1497), and the City of Santa Monica, in Los Angeles County, California.

 

ASIDE from Monica, the only saint from Africa on the calendar for May is Simon of Cirene (12 May), a Jew from the eastern part of modern-day Libya.



[1] Milan.

[2] Romans 13:13,14.

[3] The Romans used the word “Africa” solely for the countries we know today as Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia; at its widest the term also covered the western part of modern-day Libya.

The name is derived from the tribal name Aferi; this tribe’s home was in the vicinity of the cities of Carthage and Tynes (now Tunis), a district occupied between 310 and 307 BC for three years by Greek forces from Syracuse.

Following this war the Phoenicians of Carthage and western Sicily and the Greeks of eastern Sicily left each other in peace, but the Greeks now had a name for the land around Carthage: AFRIKA, or Afrika.

In later years the Romans fought three wars against the Phoenicians. The third war, the so-called Third Punic War (149-146 BC) resulted in the sacking of Carthage and Tynes het uitgeloop op die vernietiging van Carthago en Tynes, the rebuilding of Tynes, and the permanent Roman occupation of a territory largely the same as modern Tunisia, which the Romans called Africa.

Following their later seizure of land further west, the Romans called that territory Africa Nova. The futher extension of the territory covered by the name Africa came in the time of Prince Henry the Navigator (15th century).

[4] Hippo means “horse” – it’s not short for hippopotamus, which means “river horse”.


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  • This article was originally published in Western Light, monthly magazine of All Saints’ Parish, Kabega Park, Port Elizabeth, in May 1989.

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