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Some authors suggest that this could mean that she was as young as twelve or thirteen years of age at the time of the agreement.
Other writers have surmised that, because Monica was a great influence in this plan, the young lady in question must have been a Christian.
This is possibly a safe presumption to make, but Augustine never wrote on this matter.
Monica argued with such force and persistence that Augustine finally agreed to send back to Carthage the woman who was his de facto partner (concubine) and the mother of Adeodatus.
Many writers have pointed out the harshness of this decision, but it reflected the social realities of the time.
A person in the social circles of Augustine would never have married his de facto partner, and certainly could by Roman law have done if his former concubine had ever been a slave.
Even so, their parting was very painful for Augustine. He wrote in his Confessions, "When they took from my side her with whom I had slept for so long, my heart was torn at the place where it stuck to her, and the wound was bleeding.....My heart, which clung to her, was broken and wounded and dropping blood."
The love of his life returned to Carthage in North Africa "after having made a vow to you [God] that she would never go to bed with another man... " (Confessions 16, 132-133)
Some writers have suggested that back in Carthage this woman became a Christian, but Augustine certainly made no such statement.
He praises her for vowing to take no other man, while he himself showed no such control of his passions.
He promptly took another woman while he waited for two years for his betrothed to reach the legal age for marriage.
His never including the name of his concubine in his voluminous writings is also sometimes held against Augustine.
But this reticence, surely, is to his credit. He was writing his own Confessions, not hers.
It would have been a gross breach of her privacy to publish her name to his readers in Carthage when he was then the Bishop of Hippo, which was only a few days' journey away.
The classical culture in the time of Augustine suggested that only men could be friends to men.
Because friendship presupposed the full equality of those involved, it was thought that only other males could be the friends of a man.
It was thus significant that Augustine applied the term friend to this woman who had been his lover and who was the mother of Adeodatus, his son.
Although Augustine sensitively wrote about his concubine in his Confessions, little mention was made of her from the time of the writing of Augustine's friend and biographer, Possidius, until the era of Jordan of Saxony O.S.A. (or Jordan of Quedlinburg), who lived in c. 1299 - c. 1380.
This writtten silence about her and Adeodatus was possibly because they both were startling reminders of the relatively-unbridled lust of Augustine in his early years - something that also was passed over in embarrassment by centuries of Christian writers.
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