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105 3 Mother and Son A Shared Mystical Experience (Book IX) This chapter begins with the birth of Augustine into a new way of living; and it ends with the death of his mother in Ostia, which brings her work in the world to completion. This implies that Augustine is just beginning to live when his mother dies, and it suggests that the death of the person who has smothered him for so long might be necessary if he is ever to embrace a life of his own. Yet at a deeper level, this part of the text focuses on a spiritual transition from death to life, not only for Augustine, but for his mother as well. At the beginning, we trace Augustine’s development from redemption in the garden to baptism in the church; and at the end, we describe the transition of his mother from death in the world to life in God.1 These two parts of Augustine’s narrative are images of one another, where the birth of Augustine and the death of Monica point to corresponding developments from death to life within their souls. Augustine’s birth leads from bondage to the flesh to life in the spirit, while the death of his mother points beyond the loss of life on earth to life in heaven. The spiritual import of both transitions is reflected in the fact that they occur when Augustine is thirty-three (9.11.28). In the Roman world, this means that he has made a successful transition from adolescence to youthful maturity; but in Christian terms, it suggests that he has begun to participate in the life, the death, and the resurrection of Christ. Though Augustine lives and his mother dies, they are bound together by the fact that 106 ENCOUNTERS WITH GOD IN AUGUSTINE’S CONFESSIONS they celebrate their citizenship in the City of God a few days before her death in Ostia. From a spatial perspective, this chapter comes to focus on the interplay between Augustine and his mother as members of the body of Christ; and by implication, it returns us to the problem of the individual and the community with which we have been occupied from the outset. Though one begins to flourish while the other prepares to die, what binds Augustine and his mother together is that both of them pass from death to life within the sustaining context of the Christian community. The analogies between Augustine and Monica bind them together and hold them apart, pointing not only to similarities that permit them to participate in the same community, but also to differences that require them to play distinctive roles in it. When Augustine dies to his old way of life, he enters a new way of living that he must struggle to understand. By contrast, when Monica dies in a world where she can see only “through a glass darkly,” she anticipates a new life in which she will see God “face to face.” Monica participates in Augustine’s journey from faith to understanding by sharing a mystical experience with him a few days before her death in Ostia, but the task of reflection Augustine undertakes in response to this experience stands in contrast with the relatively unreflective apprehension of the truth his mother embraces. Though they both touch the truth, the philosopher must reflect on what Monica accepts as a disclosure of what life with God will be like; and this crucial difference produces a reflective separation between them. Augustine participates in the death of his mother by undergoing a spiritual death of his own, for her death issues in an existential separation between them that crushes his heart on “a pillow of tears” (9.12.33). In the end, what mediates the chasm between them is neither their temporal development nor their spatial interaction, but a communal orientation toward God that emerges along the vertical axis of experience. God’s ears are near Augustine when he cries; God’s heart is near Augustine’s mother when she dies; and the infinite richness of God sustains them both, where their shared mystical experience gives them access to eternity from which neither life nor death can separate them. What begins as a vision of the Father in Book VII, and as an encounter with the Son in Book VIII, becomes life in the Spirit in Book IX;2 and the spiritual community as it is actualized in the...

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