
Augustine and his mother Monica (1846) by Ary Scheffer.
BOOK II: Spends a year at home before going to Carthage
I want to remember now my past uglinesses and the carnal dullness of my soul… In my adolescence I burned with desire to be filled with the baser things… Your anger against me was increasing… burning in the flames of my concupiscence… At least, I should have paid more attention to the voice of your clouds warning those who marry that you will suffer the tribulations of the flesh, but I forgive you [1 Cor 7:28].
This poor devil, elevated to the greatest Father of the Church for all Christendom (Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant), already believed that sex was sinful even within marriage! On the next page Augustine continues:
Made a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven, I would have sighed happily for your embraces [Mt 19:12]… I was lost at sixteen.
And here it is clear what it means to be a slave to the parental introject (in his case, a mental slave to his mother’s engulfing mind), and why I say that the idea of the deity is but a sublimation of the maternal (or paternal) image:
She wanted me—and I remember how insistently she asked me in secret—not to fornicate… The words, however, were yours, though I didn’t know it. I thought you were silent and that it was she who spoke. Therefore, I despised you, her son, the son of your servant [his mother] and your servant [Augustine], who didn’t cease to talk to me through her.
With such an ogre of a super-ego it is no wonder that further down on the same page he added about his nascent libidinous impulse:
I wallowed in my slime as if it were balm and precious ointment, and to mire me…
BOOK III: Going to Carthage
To love and be loved was the sweetest thing for me, especially if I got to enjoy the beloved’s body…
He was already nineteen years old and his pagan father, the only one who could have saved him from his wife’s abrasive behaviour, had died.
But you know very well, O light of my heart, that I had no knowledge of the counsel of your Apostle at that time.
In a sense he did, as we saw in the previous section. Augustine was unaware that the self is a structure, and that it can be programmed at the whim of one’s parents, either for good or for evil.
What only delighted, excited and kindled me was to love, seek and embrace strongly not this or that sect, but wisdom itself, whatever it might be. These were the words that excited and burned me, and the only thing that dampened my ardour was not to find the name of Christ there. For this name, Lord, the name of my Saviour and your Son, I drank it piously with my mother’s milk, and by your mercy I kept it engraved in the depths of my heart.
By the way, I will never forget my father’s words: ‘Faith is suckled!’ in a tone of assertive gravity. And here is how the unconscious of Augustine’s mother had already perceived that her son, although he would flirt for a short time with Manichaeism and other pagan sects, was at heart a good Christian:
My mother, your faithful servant, wept for me, shedding tears… She dreamt, in fact, that she was standing on a wooden ruler all sad and afflicted and that there was coming towards her a young man with a bright, cheerful and smiling face. He asked her the reason for her sadness and her daily tears, not because he didn’t know it, but because he had something to tell her, as in such visions. When she had answered that her tears were for the loss of my soul, he told her to take courage and to look carefully and be attentive, for where she was, there I was also [my emphasis]. She looked and saw me standing beside her on the same ruler.
Monica’s unconscious captured her son perfectly, as he was: a good Christian.
When she told me the dream and I tried to interpret it as a message that she shouldn’t despair of one day being as I was at present, she promptly and without hesitation replied: ‘No, he didn’t say “where he is, there you are”, but “where you are, there he is”.
This sharp reply of my mother’s impressed me very much… I was more impressed by this reply than by the dream itself.
But as Augustine had not yet devoted himself body and soul to being a champion of Constantine’s still young faith, his mother ‘returned to the charge with greater entreaties and more abundant tears’ as he confesses in his Confessions.
Monica was a clinical case of what some YouTubers call a narcissistic mother: a phallic, possessive mother without ego boundaries between her and her son, whom she treats as a mere egoic object (cf. my Letter to mom Medusa).