Editor’s Note: This essay won second place in The Living Church’s student annual essay contest.
For early and modern readers alike, especially those who have experienced the loss of someone dear, it is hard not to be moved by the outpouring of profound grief that Augustine shows in his Confessions. In describing the deaths of an unnamed friend at Thagaste and later his mother, Monica, Augustine writes with intensity and vulnerability, recounting the swells and recesses of his emotional state, as well as his concurrent psychological and theological processing. Yet, as anyone who has been close to death knows, grief can only be tolerated for so long; we yearn for hope. Augustine is not as forthcoming on the latter subject. In the episodes concerning his friend and his mother in The Confessions, I will argue, Augustine gives us two contrasting visions of a Christian understanding of grief. It is only by considering The Enchiridion that we can begin to see his Christian understanding of hope.
In Book IV of Confessions, when Augustine is 21 years old and a Manichean, he has his first profound encounter with death, when a friend perishes from a fever. This friend, who remains unnamed, is someone whom Augustine has known since childhood, though the two have only become close during the previous year, creating “a friendship sweeter to me than any sweetness I had known in all my life” (IV, iv.7, p. 62).[1]
When his friend dies, Augustine becomes all but inconsolable. Indeed, there is a full section devoted to his weeping (IV, v.10, p. 63). There are two significant ways that Augustine’s excessive sorrow sheds light on his understanding of grief—one that affirms the belief that Christians have a unique experience of grieving since they have faith in an eternal union with God.
First, he admits that he has transformed his unnamed friend into an idol and has been worshiping him instead of God. Rowan William agrees: “[H]e had failed to love his friend humaniter, humanly; he had loved another mortal as though that human other were both immortal and the one necessary object that would complete his own selfhood.”[2] The result is “a classical case of loving the creature more than the Creator.”[3] He loves his friend as if he were immortal, so when his friend dies, it shakes him to his core.
Second, this death occurs before Augustine converts to Christianity. Indeed, his ideology is so firmly anti-Christian that he mocks his friend for having been given an emergency baptism while unconscious; Augustine is shocked to discover that not only does his friend refuse to share in his derision of the sacrament, but even threatens to end their friendship.
Whereas Christianity holds humility and meekness as virtues, Manicheism—at least as reflected in Augustine—clearly values pride, not to mention self-will and self-reliance. Consequently, it makes sense that Augustine is utterly lost and without hope upon his friend’s eventual passing, since Augustine has nothing hopeful in his arsenal as a means of strength and support: everything eventually dies, including oneself. His deep despair directly relates to a crucial tenet of his teaching and understanding about grief—namely, that Christians grieve differently than those who have no hope in the world, since Christianity rests in the immortal, hope-filled One.
Reading of Augustine’s first interaction with death through the lens of the Doctrine of Grief, we can see how his fervent Manichean beliefs prevent him from seeing the possibility of future glory and hope that could come after death through an eternal union with God. Without such hope, he is left to express his wails and weeping within the silence of nothingness that surrounds him; there is no God to hear his cries. It makes sense that this youthful Augustine dissolves into bitterness (IV, vi.11, p. 63).
The Augustine who suffers the death of his mother Monica in Book IX of The Confessions is more mature both in years and in his faith. By this point, he has converted to Christianity and has immersed himself in his beliefs, following the model and encouragement of his mother. Consequently, this later episode of grieving is markedly different from the earlier one. To begin with, Augustine is determined to grieve the loss of his mother in a manner appropriate for a Christian.[4] For Augustine, this approach—and ideal—means withholding his emotions, at least initially. Paul Helm characterizes his grief as more nuanced, moving through two stages: suppression and expression.[5] That is, Augustine initially holds back his tears through sheer will, and only later finds them pouring forth.
When the moment of death does come to Monica soon thereafter, Augustine does, as Helm suggests, suppress his affections: “I closed her eyes, and a huge sadness surged into my heart … but in response to a ferocious command from my mind my eyes held the fount in check until it dried up” (IX, xii.29, p. 176). There is an almost technical parsing of his emotions during this event, as he dissects his feelings with precision. While much of this clarity may come from the fact that he is describing this incident retrospectively, there is a definite aura of emotional detachment as well.
As this episode unfolds, Augustine’s young son Adeodatus bursts into tears, but Augustine silences him. His knee-jerk reaction to keep both his son’s and his own emotions in check comes, he tells us, from a dual motivation: because it is “unfitting to mark this death by plaintive protests and laments,” and because “[Monica’s] sincere faith gave us good reason” to see her death as anything but “complete extinction” (IX, xii.29, p. 176). Thus, in this suppression stage of processing his grief, both decorum and Christian hope work side by side. In considering his levels of grief, it is here that Augustine notices a “double sadness” (IX, 31, p. 177).
Essentially, he is sad because Monica has died, then he is sad as well because of the fact that he is sad. Only after Augustine retreats to his private quarters and takes a bath does he enter into what Helm calls the expressive stage of grief: He unleashes a torrent of tears. The progression here is telling. Having suppressed his tears in public, he suppresses himself by retreating into privacy. He washes away whatever sins he believes he has committed by grieving through the ritual of bathing—an act with clear baptismal overtones; he even makes an explicit connection to his mother’s baptism. Then, once he is dead to sin and alive to a new life in Christ, metaphorically speaking, he finally feels liberated enough to sob.
This second death event conforms more with his Christian understanding of grief. Having embraced Christianity, Augustine knows eternal salvation comes to those who believe, and this knowledge fills him with Christian hope—giving him the confidence to grieve as Christians do. So, when he cries, his tears are those of joy, assured that Monica will rest in peace and rise in glory with God: “I found comfort in weeping before you about her and for her, about myself and for myself” (IX, 33, p. 178). His private grief, presumably like his private prayer life, also brings him closer to God. In these two grief encounters, Augustine shows a notable evolution in his attitude toward death. Regarding the unnamed friend, he calls it “the hideous enemy” (IV, vi.11, p. 64), but just before Monica’s passing, he recalls her speaking of “the blessing of death” (IX, 28, p. 176).[6] As a devout Christian, he is finally able to grieve in a way he considers both suitable and faithful.
While theologically sound, Augustine’s view of grief does not offer much in the way of consolation in this life. What hope he offers is promised in the life to come. Indeed, to find Augustinian writing related to a Christian doctrine of hope, we will look at another work. Augustine’s one real systematic—and beautiful—treatment of hope comes in The Enchiridion, his short, later treatise on faith, hope, and charity. Connecting these Christian virtues with worship, he presents a vision of hope that is illuminated through the specific ways we turn to God corporately.
Matthew Drever asserts: “Augustine correlates faith, hope, and love to Christian liturgical practice: we learn about faith from the creed, and hope and love from the Lord’s Prayer.”[7] It is through Augustine’s detailed examination of the Lord’s Prayer that we can see the author work out his understanding of hope with more depth. He does so by considering the seven petitions in the evangelist Matthew’s version of the prayer, and then presents these pleas as a neat summation of the virtue of Christian hope.
He defines the first three petitions as asking for eternal goods, and the following four as requesting temporal goods. Further, he argues that the first three petitions are also temporal in that they begin now but are perfected in eternity. Augustine explains: “They are begun here; they are increased in us as we make progress; and in their perfection, a state to be hoped for in the other life, they will be an everlasting possession” (Ch. 30, 115, p. 107).[8]
Let us consider the third petition: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.” Augustine argues that we ask for the building up of God’s kingdom to begin in our earthly realm, but it achieves perfection in the eternal.[9] Conversely, in the last four petitions, we ask for temporal things, but they will not be needed in our eternal life with God. For instance, the fourth petition bids: “Give us this day our daily bread.” We need food for bodily sustenance in this life, but we will have no such needs in the day to come.
As Drever notes—and as seen in the author’s conception of these seven petitions—the Augustinian view of hope as demonstrated in the Lord’s Prayer points to the future, while simultaneously straddling the historical and the eschatological, acknowledging our pain and renewal with an “an overarching and anchoring voice of optimism.”[10] In other words, hope for Augustine does not ignore our present suffering with a broad future promise; instead, it is the perfecting and/or eradicating of our earthly needs and concerns. Hope has its roots in the now, and is ever connected to the forward-looking work of God.
In some ways, it is hard to reconcile the Augustine who writes so vulnerably and personally about grief concerning the deaths of his unnamed friend and Monica with the Augustine who dissects hope with such precision, albeit briefly, in The Enchiridion. However, taken together, these accounts present a full engagement with Christian teaching on grief and hope. In his reflection on the death of Monica, Augustine articulates a Christian view of grief that brings him consolation through eschatological hope; and then his vision of hope brings that future hope into the present, promising a cessation of our immediate sorrow, without erasing it. So, for Christians, any tears we shed over the loss of a loved one will undoubtedly be tears of sadness, but they will also be tears of joy.
[1] Saint Augustine, The Confessions, trans. Maria Boulding (Hyde Park: New City, 2001). All quotations from The Confessions are from the Boulding translation and cited within the text by book, section, and page number.
[2] Rowan Williams, On Augustine (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2016), 3-4.
[3] Paul Helm, “Augustine’s Griefs,” Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers 20.4 (2003): 449.
[4] Helm, “Griefs,” 450.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Jordan Daniel Wood, “Death in Augustine’s Confessions, or, On Holy Ambivalence,” Macrina Magazine (30 July 2021): 2.
[7] Matthew Drever, “Augustine on Hope in Times of Suffering,” Vox Patrum 82 (2022):150-51.
[8] St. Augustine, Faith, Hope, and Charity, trans. Louis A. Arand (Westminster: Newman, 1947). All quotations from Faith, Hope, and Charity (The Enchiridion) are from the Arand translation and cited within the text by chapter, section, and page number.
[9] Drever, “Augustine,” 151.
[10] Drever, “Augustine,” 152.
Garth Wingfield is a Guest Writer. This essay won the second place in The Living Church's annual essay contest. Wingfield is a candidate for Holy Orders in the Diocese of New York and a student at Virginia Theological Seminary.
