After the death of his father, the spectre of his mother hung heavy over him. Legend has it Monica cried every night over his sullied soul. And as he prepared to leave Carthage for Rome, she began “clinging to me with all her strength in the hope that I would either come home or take her with me.” In the end he did neither. He lied to his mother and told her he was simply seeing off a friend, who was about to set sail, and that she should occupy herself for the night at a shrine by the coast. In the cover of dark, he slipped onto a boat and sailed away. Not to be outsmarted, Monica sailed after him but discovered on her arrival in Rome that he had already moved on to Milan to take up a teaching post. So she trekked off to Milan and eventually found him there, living with his mistress. She promptly broke up this romance and arranged his engagement to an underage Catholic heiress. The plan for divine reform worked better than she could have imagined — while waiting for his bride-to-be to come of age, Augustine converted to Catholicism, was baptized, broke off the engagement, resigned from his teaching position, took a vow of chastity, and made plans to return to North Africa to found a monastic community. Once again, never keen to be left behind, Monica followed her son to the port of Ostia, with the intention of sailing back home to North Africa with him. But the plan was not to be. Monica was dying. On one of their final afternoons together, they sat in a garden in Ostia, lost in a conversation about the lives of the saints and how the grace the saints achieved through their divine works surely exceeded any earthly rewards. As mother and son spoke, they were overcome by a shared moment of profound ecstasy:

And when our conversation had brought us to the point where the very highest of physical sense and the most intense illumination of physical light seemed, in comparison with the sweetness of that life to come, not worthy of comparison, nor even of mention, we lifted ourselves with a more ardent love toward the Selfsame [God], and we gradually passed through all the levels of bodily objects, and even through the heaven itself, where the sun and moon and stars shine on the earth. Indeed, we soared higher yet by an inner musing, speaking and marvelling at thy works.

This is where the autobiographical portion of Confessions ends: in a climactic vision shared by mother and son. An ecstatic moment that finally relinquished Augustine from the all-consuming drives of selfhood into a moment of shared transcendence with another. His mother. Santa Monica.