 Two women figure prominently in Augustine’s literary output (Power 1995; G. Clark 2015): his mother, Monnica (her name appears only in Confessiones 9.37), and his partner for fourteen years, the mother of Adeodatus. In the dialogues of Cassiciacum, Monnica represents a philosophical way of life based on the natural intuitions of reason and on an unshakable Christian faith together with a life according to the precepts of Christian morality (De beata vita 10; De ordine 1.31–32). She, and the uneducated but faithful in general, may not be able to reach happiness in this life by means of an ascent to the divine with the help of the liberal arts, but they will certainly see God “from face to face” in eternal bliss (De ordine 2.45–46). Behind this idealization may be the male Christian philosopher’s nostalgic desire for a “natural” holiness untainted by secular occupation and learning (Brown 1988: ch. 13, on the Greek theologians and bishops of the fourth century). Monnica’s prominence and idealization in the Confessiones has provoked much, and mostly fruitless, psychological speculation. Augustine represents her influence on his religious life as pervasive from his earliest years onwards and even compares her to the Mother Church (Confessiones 1.17). She embodies ideal Christian love of the neighbor (see  7.3 Love)  in that she furthers Augustine’s Catholic faith with all her means (mostly, tears and prayer) and never indulges his Manicheism despite her motherly affection (e.g., Confessiones 3.19). With this she however combines, especially in the earlier books, more mundane motives, e.g., when she arranges a marriage for Augustine in the hope of both fencing his sexual concupiscence and assisting his worldly career (ib. 6.23). Like the other human influences on Augustine reported in the Confessiones, she is used by God as an instrument of his grace in a way she neither foresees nor wills. Only after Augustine’s conversion does she rise to saintly perfection, especially in the “vision of Ostia” when, shortly before her death, mother and son, after a long philosophico-theological conversation, reach a sudden insight into what contemplation of the transcendent God in eternal bliss must be like (ib. 9.24–25). The chapter on the dismissal of Adeodatus’ mother for the sake of an advantageous marriage (ib. 6.25; Shanzer 2002; Miles 2007) has been unpalatable for many modern readers. Yet what is unusual about it is not Augustine’s behavior but the fact that he mentions it at all and, from hindsight, reflects on the pain it caused him. True to the deliberately counter-intuitive and often provocative procedure of the Confessiones, he singles out an emotion that, then as now, most people would have easily understood but which he nevertheless interprets as a mark of his sinful state because it resulted from the loss of a female body he had, in a kind of mutual sexual exploitation, enjoyed for the sake of pleasure (Confessiones 4.2; for the underlying defective view, common in antiquity, of erotic relationships cf. Rist 1994: 249) instead of “enjoying” his female neighbor “in God” and relating their mutual love to him (cf.  7.1 Happiness;  compare Augustine’s excessive grief about the friend of his youth in Confessiones 4.9–11 and contrast his post-conversion mourning of Monnica, ib. 9.30–33).