God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living.

Wisdom 1.13

I

Must the joy of resurrection require the kiss of death? It seems so. How could you return from death without first having died? We can hardly deny the myriad ways that “greater sorrow issues in greater joy”: a costlier war sweetens the emperor’s victory, graver peril brightens the glory of a sailor’s deft escape, sharper hunger deepens bread’s satiation, and the prodigality of the son’s dissipation renders more comely his bitter remorse.¹ Yet joy is ontologically prior to all sorrow, for God enjoys Godself eternally.² And insisting upon death as the precondition for life is as obscene as desiring another’s misery as precondition for mercy.³ Death is revolting. But it seems necessary or natural, even.

Death’s ambiguity surfaces variously across the Confessions. Recall the two explicit death narratives, that of Augustine’s unnamed friend and that of his mother Monica. In the former we read of death “the hideous enemy”;⁴ in the latter Monica speaks fondly of “the good of death.”⁵ Early on Augustine calls this earthly existence both “a deathly life” (vitam mortalem) and “a life-giving death” (mortem vitalem), in the same sentence.⁶ Can we affirm them both at once? The Confessions contains profound reflection on just that question. Though two have been commented often enough, Augustine really describes four separate deaths within these pages: the death of a friend (Book IV), the death of Christ (Book VII), the death of Augustine (Book VIII), and the death of Monica (IX). Together these facets form a prism through which one might glimpse the unseen spectrum of divine providence. These four vignettes present, I mean, a retrospective contemplation of Augustine’s gradual perception that and why death must remain forever ambivalent to Christians.

II

All of which contrasts sharply with Augustine’s Christian predecessors in the Latin Christian tradition. They mostly counseled grim stoicism or a happy embrace of death’s advances. They followed the broadly philosophical disposition toward death and grief that refused what we might call “rational lament.” Consider three representative cases.

In On Patience Tertullian enjoins a “patience” in bereavement that categorically disallows mourning the death of dear ones. For lament is a “species of impatience” and is thus not “excused,” though, like Seneca, a concessive grief may be given a limited “right.”⁷ He brandishes two Pauline passages which become commonplace in later Christian treatments of grieving mortality: “that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope” (1 Thess 4.13); “my desire is to depart and to be with Christ, for that is far better [than this earthly life]” (Php 1.23). The first teaches that there is “certainty as to the resurrection of the dead,” and so “grief for death is needless.” Your loved one is not extinguished because “death is departure.” Why grieve? Dare we prevaricate about our faith?⁸ The second passage teaches that this departure is nothing other than fleeing to Christ’s embrace. To lament such a summons is “to wound Christ.” Worse, if we grieve in reluctance for others to attain Christ “we show unwillingness ourselves to attain” Him.

Cyprian sounds by our standards less—though still—callous. Amid the throes of mass plague and under the specter of imminent persecution (c.252 CE), he delivered a homily intended to encourage his beleaguered parishioners. His conviction: grieve over death only if death is baleful.⁹ But scripture declares that a disciple’s death means being with Christ (Php 1.21-3). This is not to be feared—quite the contrary.¹⁰ Death is “our peace,”¹¹ a liberation¹² a “passage” into eternity rather than an end.¹³ Rejoicing, not mourning, is the proper response to the death of loved ones.¹⁴ Twice Cyprian beckons his audience to “embrace” death’s advent.¹⁵ Outstripping even the Stoics, we find no trace of concessive mourning. The faithful departed “should not be mourned” as if they were forever vanished.¹⁶ Repression of lament heralds victory in these “battles.” These battles—these deaths and the exuberances they solicit from Christians—appear requisite for the conquerors’ delight: “Unless a battle has gone before there cannot be a victory.”¹⁷ One can scarcely imagine a greater tribute to the good of death.

In On the Good of Death, which Augustine certainly read,¹⁸ Ambrose recalls the earlier Socratic agnosticism about death—whether death is good depends on what follows it.¹⁹ So physical death appears initially neutral or indexical. Physical death occupies a middle term between two other kinds of death, one which is always evil (the death of sin), the other always good (the “mystical” death to sin in baptism).²⁰ Hence the evaluation of death comes from the life preceding it. That is, it is not death itself which is evil for the wicked, but their evil life is evil: “Why do we blame death” for remitting the wages of an evil life? So “death either enjoys a good, which is its own repose, or suffers under an evil not its own.”²¹ Death thus exonerated, Ambrose ventures a more radical claim: ontological separation of soul from body, physical death, is an inherent good for the just. Here Ambrose leans into his Platonic inclination: for the virtuous who strive to purify themselves of body, death is good, because “it releases and frees the soul from this union with the flesh. Therefore death is in every way a good…because it separates elements in conflict.”²²

Ambrose rests his case upon the blessings wrought by Christ’s death: “What more can I say about the good which is death, except that it is death which has redeemed the world?”²³ Then he draws out Cyprian’s logic for the final appeal:

For those who consider death an evil, I think it also a suitable reply that through life there is a passage to death, but through death a return to life—only those who have died can rise again.²⁴

Death is good because a necessary requisite for Easter joy. Where’s the delight of victory without a battle? The laurel’s honor without a war? Just so death is “the fullness of service, the total of pay, the thanks of discharge.”²⁵

Death is blameless for the wicked, a blessing for the good, and explicable in redemption. Ambrose’s account reiterates the counsel of his predecessors, both pagan and Latin Christian, and indeed doubles down on death’s goodness. His wisdom comes to this: death makes sense; there is no reason to mourn even the beloved dead.

III

Death of Creation: A Friend (Book IV). Like all else in the Confessions, death is circumscribed within God’s providential activity throughout the whole of creation. In terms of classical metaphysics: since all things have their “unalterable causes” and “eternal ideas” in God, nothing dies in God; yet all dying, insofar as it happens, happens in God, for creatures “would have no means even of passing away if you [God] did not contain them.”²⁶ But this indicates only that God’s transcendence entails his immanence even in ungodly happenings—mutation and extinction—not yet how this presence acts in or through such things. The latter preoccupies Augustine to a far greater degree. What if anything does death do? A hint in the opening lines:

And so we humans, who are a due part of your creation, long to praise you—we who carry our mortality about with us, carry the evidence of our sin and with it the proof that you thwart the proud.

We are already riven with death, which not only testifies to our sin but is somehow God’s own opposition to human pride. Another hint: “You stir us,” he adds, “so that praising you might bring us joy, because you have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is unquiet until it rests in you.”²⁷

Death unquiets the young Augustine when it comes for his close friend. The friend contracted a severe illness and suddenly took to his bed. He, like Augustine himself, had not been particularly devoted; his family had him baptized while he was unconscious. “I attempted to chaff him,” writes Augustine, “expecting him to join me in making fun of the baptism he had undergone.” The friend recoiled from Augustine “with a shudder as though I had been his enemy.” Attributing such rashness to sickness, Augustine expected him to regain sense upon recovery. Recovery never came and the friend died soon after.²⁸

The friend’s death brings death to all things. “Black grief closed over my heart and wherever I looked I saw only death.”²⁹ Death is present by absence: since everything else is not the friend, everything else only intensifies death’s (negative) presence. Death’s very particularity—this friend’s death—dilates its universal import. “I hated all things because they held him not.”³⁰ This hatred of all things, which rebounds in a hatred of death itself,³¹ also begins to teach Augustine about rightly ordered love. Only partially, though, for Augustine’s initial impulse is to tighten his acquisitive grasp on his own life.³² Still, even as he shores up his own life, the friend’s death has permanently convinced Augustine of the futility of sinking one’s love into any creature; they too must pass away. Three times Augustine bemoans that he loved his friend “as though he would never die,” indeed, “as though more than human!”³³ “I had poured out my soul into the sand,” says Augustine, “by loving a man doomed to death as though he were never to die.”³⁴

But just because Augustine’s friendship lived on wrongly ordered love does not mean it was wholly misguided. Finding some solace in new friends at Carthage, Augustine reflects: “From this springs our grief if someone dies…as the dying lose their life, life becomes no better than death for those who live on.” The very intensity of the experience of this love extinguished by death can divert this same love toward the One in whom friendly love perseveres: “He alone loses no one dear to him, to whom all are dear in the One who is never lost.”³⁵

Death of Christ: God (Book VII). So death teaches the transience of all things, the “law of nature” that “all perish,” as well as the consequent vacuity of loving anyone or anything without reference to the immutable God in whom nothing mutable is lost.³⁶ Death proclaims, in a word, “You are seeking a happy life in the realm of death, and it will not be found there. How could life be happy, where there is no life at all?”³⁷ Of course anyone with mildly Platonist proclivities could say the same. But Augustine, glancing forward in reflection to what he will soon realize in time, learns that one particular death—the death of God—teaches more. It reveals not only that we should seek God, but where God is to be found:

He who is our very life came down and took our death upon himself. He slew our death by his abundant life…. There [i.e. in the Virgin’s womb] a human creature, mortal flesh was wedded to him that it might not remain mortal forever; and from there he came forth like a bridegroom from his nuptial chamber…. Impatient of delay he ran, shouting by his words, his deeds, his death and his life, his descent to hell and his ascension to heaven, shout his demand that we return to him.³⁸

Though God “was in” the world metaphysically, “he came” into it physically to save disordered sinners. The ontological wedding of immortal and mortal natures in Christ was an erotic act, binding Life to death on a cross. Death’s pedagogy teaches two lessons: if the friend’s death chastises our love, Christ’s death courts it.

Requiting this love requires humility. Christ’s descent displays God’s humility, and his ascension—an absent presence deeper than death’s—beckons us to find him in the inmost of humanity, in the inmost of ourselves. “He withdrew, yet look, here he is.” The human face of God’s infinite love proves our love a velleity, a sin we must confess. And it proves our idea of God a rarified mist, a delusion we must denounce. Humility enables both actions: “Come down, so that you may ascend.”³⁹

The humility of God, most manifest in Christ’s death, distinguishes the Catholic confession from the Platonic way of ascent. Augustine holds a rather high estimation of what Platonists knew of the truth. Their writings “conveyed in every way possible, albeit indirectly, the truth of God and his Word.”⁴⁰ They spoke of the eternal Word and of the creation of all things through it. But they knew not the Word’s weakness unto death.⁴¹ On two occasions Augustine attempted the Plotinian inward ascent to God but “was not yet capable of clinging” to the eternal and incorporeal heights of divinity.⁴² He knew the destination but not the Way. “Not yet was I humble enough to grasp Jesus as my God,” nor could Augustine “know what his weakness had to teach.” It teaches this: if you want to ascend to and behold God’s divinity you must first descend from yourself and behold God’s humanity. Christ thus “heals their swollen pride and nourishes their love,” that they might “weaken as they see before their feet the Godhead grown weak…and wearily fling themselves down upon him, so that he may arise and lift them up.”⁴³ God’s death discloses the difference “between presumption and confession.” Our “beatific homeland” is “to be not merely descried,” then, “but lived in.”⁴⁴ In Christ humble eyes glimpse the dawn of resurrection through but beyond the mourning.

Death of Self: Augustine (Book VIII). And that is Augustine’s ordeal in the eighth book. Creation’s death unsettles our love and Christ’s death offers it direction and power. It remains to embrace this death for oneself. Hence the famous “conversion” scene in the garden. Here Augustine writhed in turmoil as “two wills,” one carnal and one spiritual, “fought it out” and “tore apart” his soul. Perverted will (or love) led to lust, which led to habit, which led to necessitas, compulsion.⁴⁵ Augustine knew the truth and the life it promised (chaste, humble, etc.). Alas: enslaved by his own will’s self-constructed and habituated inertia, he could do nothing to embrace that truth and life. He heard the story of Victorinus, a seasoned and well-known rhetor who publicly embraced Christ in baptism.⁴⁶ He heard from Ponticianus, “a baptized Christian,” the story of Antony’s rigorously ascetic and devoted life in the desert. But he could not follow: “I had no answer to give as you said to me, Arise, sleeper, rise from the dead: Christ will enlighten you.”⁴⁷

The answer lay open in the quotation. If the call is to resurrect from the dead, then one must first die.⁴⁸ This matter at hand is baptism, embracing one’s own death in Christ.⁴⁹ When Augustine heeds the mysterious voice bidding him to “take up and read,” he reads from Romans 13: “but put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” We put him on by embracing his death in baptism.⁵⁰ Augustine had learned to kill his “self” by finding not himself but Christ in his inmost being. Now he welcomes this death fully: “And so we were baptized, and all our dread about our earlier lives dropped away.”⁵¹

Death of New Creation: Monica (Book IX). Augustine’s mother, Monica, died soon after his baptism. Born anew, his response differs dramatically from that after his friend’s death. But here again the response proves complex. He does not simply embrace the triumphalist response to death, which Monica herself seemed to express.⁵² She speaks of “contempt for this life and the good of death [bono mortis],” a markedly Ambrosian sentiment.⁵³ Augustine initially tries to adopt this attitude, several times restraining tears⁵⁴ and spurning as childish the grief expressed by those tears.⁵⁵ He even begins to wax philosophical on matters pertinent to death, all the while suffering deep inner agony.⁵⁶ He cannot make sense of this agony. Had he not learned from his friend’s death that death is “bound to occur”?⁵⁷

He persists through the burial ceremony. Back home in the solitude of bathing, he utters some consoling lines from one of Ambrose’s hymns and manages to repress his tears. At length they spill forth. He weeps and, as before, finds comfort in weeping. But this time comfort comes from weeping “before you [God] and about her and for her, about myself and for myself.”⁵⁸ These tears are prayers, neither opaque nor indiscriminate. God encompasses them; they are directed toward the God who is present in every absence and whose absence (in Christ’s ascension) enables profounder presence.⁵⁹ As address they imply judgment: they admit death’s basic vanity and its provisional necessity for creation’s restoration.

Augustine senses other Christians will object to his tears:

Let anyone read it who will, and judge it as he will, and if he finds it sinful that I wept over my mother…then let such a reader not mock, but rather, if his charity is wide enough, himself weep for my sins to you, who are Father to all whom your Christ calls his brethren.⁶⁰

Augustine’s interpretation of his own tears is clear enough: their hasty denunciation would likely come from one judging “by the norms of his own pride.”⁶¹ For Augustine these tears carry a holy ambivalence. Adeodatus’s weeping was immature insofar as it presumed death as final. Augustine’s initial restraint was unchristian insofar as it presumed death as necessary (and so trivial). But death is neither finally nor necessarily significant. It is only providentially significant, which is to say essentially ambiguous. After all, the same Christ evoked at the close of the ninth book, “the holy Victim” at whose altar⁶² Monica wished to be remembered—he too once wept over a dead friend.⁶³

IV

Pierre Hadot claimed that the notion of participation in Christ’s death was the peculiar Christian transfiguration of philosophy as practice for death.⁶⁴ That may well be. But that also entails a different conception of “death” altogether, a radically ambivalent one. For Augustine, at least, Christians embrace death only as a means to defeat death, only in the light of Christ’s resurrection.⁶⁵ No Christian embraces death because it is good or necessary. They embrace death because God in His inscrutable providence has rendered even death the way to eternal life. They weep at death; they marvel at Christ. The joy of resurrection does not require death, but providentially comes in no other way. Neither side of that ambivalence can be resolved into some more general, rational account. Indeed, for the Christian reason itself requires the ambivalence. And it may be that the ambivalence itself has something to do with the incomprehensible mystery of the person taken by death. There is no such thing as an abstract death. That this is universally so Augustine sensed profoundly. What its radical implications are he seems never fully to articulate.