Grief (Confessions Bk9)
In Book 9 of the Confessions, Augustine refused to cry at Monica’s death (“[he] commanded his eyes”) because he thought to do so would betray a lack of faith, and because Monica instructed him not to. When staging this scene, Augustine cast himself opposite the child Adeodatus who “wailed with grief.” Adeodatus did eventually stop crying—out of exhaustion, perhaps?—then everyone in the house began praying. How do we make sense of this scene? The fact that praying had to be postponed because a child was crying made tears seem immature and disruptive. But the crying child is also a sign that the liturgical act was deficient. If praying is supposed to be a form of surrender, then the suppression of tears, even for pious reasons, marks a failure in orientation.
The story afterwards is a continuation in suppression. The external effort was very successful. Augustine didn’t let a single tear fall. The internal effort—not at all. He “railed against the softness of [his] affection and dammed the flood of grief” but grief came back with renewed strength, “[adding] sorrow to sorrow.” He prayed and begged and his sorrow did not end. He tried a physical remedy by going to the baths because he heard that “the baths [balneum] derived their name from the Greek balaneion [βαλανειον], because it washes [ballein] anxiety [ania] from the mind.” And nothing changed either.
When I first read this passage, I had interpreted the bath scene through the lens of Achilles. In The Iliad, bathing marks the return to life’s rhythms after immobilizing grief. I wanted Augustine’s bath to mean something similar. But rereading the scene, I realized that Augustine’s grief is not the kind that paralyzes—it’s the kind that hides. He succeeded at suppressing tears, at following funeral rites, at conversing with guests with such normalcy that they all thought he had no hard feeling. Augustine never broke away from the routine. He had the mental fortitude to force his body through the motions—here the theme of command comes back to mind.
If I am to relocate the turning point, I might put it in the sleep. Augustine woke up and found that his sorrow had been greatly relieved. Why? How? We don’t know. The moment of transformation wasn’t accompanied by rational insight; it occurred when he wasn’t trying to fortify himself. I am not sure I have anything else to say about this. It is very mysterious.
In 9.12.33 Augustine finally cries, just like Adeodatus did. The posture of a child reappears. But the tears have been transfigured. Unlike Adeodatus’s tears, they are not merely a release, a letting-out; they are themselves a source of comfort—“a flood that bore up [his] heart so that it rested upon them.” Notice how the flood metaphor reappears, transformed: once destructive, it now offers his heart rest.Also worth noting is the unity between body and heart: tears pour out and the interior heart rests upon them.
And one last thing to notice: The final moment upends the earlier logic of exhaustion. Tears no longer drain; they support. Prayer no longer fails; it is no longer effortful. Rest, in the end, is not a stopping point but a transformation of what once seemed depleting into something that carries.
Grief, then, isn’t to be purged through catharsis, but is something transformable—redeemable—through a rightly ordered relationship to God. In this view, grief does not merely pass; it is not “worked through” in the modern therapeutic sense. Instead, it becomes the material through which healing is mysteriously given. And more than that: grief, when reoriented, becomes the very vessel for rest.
