Eugene VANCE How do Bury Your Early Christian Mother? The Case of Monica

The death and burial of Monica at Ostia in Confessions IX raise crucial questions in a Roman perspective. Should Monica really be buried apart from her homeland and away from the joint tomb with Patricius awaiting her in Hippo? What is the place of grief in the Christian faith, and how as a Christian should Augustine commemorate his parents in view of the tenaceous mores of Roman religion and society?
Previously, Monica had proposed to her family a theme by which she wanted to be commemorated: that of a heroic maritime voyage of return to her dead husbands side, evoking an epic fidelity to her still-pagan husband during her ìpeacefulî marriage to him since the age of 12. The maritime navigatio was important to Roman funerary iconography as well as to Christian pilgrimage imagery, but Monicas previous concept of an epic navigatio to her spousal tomb was less Christian than Roman.
Augustine and his friends are stunned that at the threshold of death, Monica is now indifferent to repatriation and burial beside Patricius. They see Monicas change of heart as an offense to the Roman obligations either to repatriate the body of a defunct relative or to consign it to a permanent burial in situ. Their view is tenacious. In De obitu Theodosii (394 C.E.), Ambrose lauds the struggle of the emperors son and successor Honorarius to repatriate and bury his father in distant Constantinople an ìundertakingî over land and sea that took almost two years to complete. By contrast, Monica tells her sons that she wishes her body to be buried ìjust anywhereî(ponite hoc corpus ubicumque), and that she also wishes instead to be commemorated anywhere and any time even by us, the readers of ìthese Confessionsî at the Eucharistic table. Such indeed is Augustines plea at the end of Bk. IX, which marks the end of the narrative portion of the Confessions, itself a ìcommemorativeî act indeed, a sarcophagus of words which commemorates, by the way, both of his parents, putting both them and himself to rest.
As he highlights Monicas burial as a Christian challenge to Roman customs, he provides the spiritual basis for her change of heart. Monica expresses her entire confidence in bodily resurrection an article of faith that the Romans had yearned to discredit by defiling the bodies of the martyrs of Lyon. He also implies that Monicas wish to be commemorated at the Eucharistic table vindicates Ambroses forbidding even her Christianized practice of the refrigerium on holy feast days after she came to Milan. The Eucharistic feast has now superceded the refrigerium.
Writing about 20 years later in De Cura Gerenda Pro Mortuis, an older bishop shields Christian burial and commemoration from Roman habits of mind, allowing for the fulness of grief, yet underplaying the appeal of burial ad sanctos that still vexed Paulinus of Nola. He evokes one last time his desolation at having been abandoned by Monica in dying, yet rejoices that Christ himself has now taken up his wardship.