Even those who die confessing Christ without baptism receive the full remission of sins through their confession. Christ’s absolute statements about confessing Him before men and losing one’s life for His sake create an exception to the ordinary requirement of water baptism. The death of such martyrs is precious to God, for it accomplishes both complete forgiveness and abundant merit. Those who could have avoided death by denying Christ, yet chose death rather than denial, display a grace that surpasses even the forgiveness granted to those who sin after baptism.
Augustine then turns to a philosophical inquiry into the timing and experience of death. When does death actually occur? Is the soul’s departure after death or in death? If after death, then death itself is neither good nor evil—it is past and gone. What remains is the soul’s new condition. Death was evil while being suffered, but once it has passed, how can something that no longer exists be characterized as good or bad?
Closer examination reveals that even the pain of dying is not death itself. So long as sensation remains, the person is still alive—still before death rather than in it. When death truly arrives, it removes all bodily sensation. This creates a logical puzzle: those in their final agony are called dying, yet they are still living. When death comes, they are no longer dying but dead. No one can be dying without being alive, yet the moment of death itself seems to have no duration. The present moment, like the point of transition from future to past, cannot be grasped.
This leads Augustine to a striking observation about human existence: from the moment we begin to live in the body, we begin to move toward death. Every day, every hour, every moment brings us closer to the end. Our entire earthly existence is a race toward death in which no one can pause or slow down—all proceed at the same speed, though some have longer to travel than others. If dying begins when death starts to take away life, then dying begins at birth. What is happening throughout our days and moments except the gradual consumption of life by death? When life is fully consumed, we speak of what happens “after death”—but that consumption itself was death. We are simultaneously living (for something is being consumed) and dying (for that consumption is occurring).
The logical and linguistic difficulties here are real. We cannot say a person is “in death” in the same way we say someone is “in sleep” or “in grief.” Those who sleep are sleeping; those who grieve are grieving; but those who are dead are not dying. The dead are said to be “in death” until the resurrection, yet we do not call them dying. Augustine finds it fitting that the Latin language itself reflects this mystery: the verb moritur (to die) cannot form its perfect tense according to the normal grammatical pattern. While similar verbs yield a perfect participle, moritur produces mortuus, which functions as an adjective rather than a participle. Just as the reality of dying cannot be captured in a definite state, so the word resists normal grammatical declension. Yet this applies only to the first death. In the second death, the wicked will always be in death—never living, never dead, but endlessly dying. Never will anyone be more disastrously in death than when death itself becomes deathless.
When God threatened Adam with death for eating the forbidden fruit, which death did He mean? Augustine answers: all of them. The first death comprises two—the soul forsaken by God and the body forsaken by the soul. The second death is the complete death, comprising all deaths in one eternal punishment. God’s warning encompassed the whole cascade of consequences that would flow from transgression.
The immediate effect of the first sin was God’s abandonment of the human soul. Adam and Eve became aware of their nakedness and experienced shame where none had existed before. A new motion arose in their flesh—disobedient desire that they could not control. This was fitting retribution: the soul that had refused to serve God lost its own authority over the body. Having deserted its superior Lord, it could no longer command its inferior servant. The flesh began to lust against the spirit, and this internal warfare has characterized human existence ever since. We are born inheriting this seed of death, carrying in our members the conflict that originated in the first transgression.
God created humanity upright, but through the abuse of free will, humanity corrupted itself and passed that corruption to all descendants. The whole human race existed in Adam seminally; when he fell, we fell. His voluntary departure from God preceded God’s abandonment of him—spiritual death came before the sentence of bodily death. When God asked “Where art thou?” He was not seeking information but calling Adam to recognize his condition: God was no longer with him. The sentence “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” pronounced the bodily death that would follow from spiritual death. Christians agree that bodily death is not natural but penal—the righteous judgment of God on sin.
Augustine now confronts the philosophers, particularly the Platonists, who ridicule the Christian teaching that death is punishment. These thinkers hold that the soul’s blessedness is complete only when it escapes the body entirely. Augustine responds that the burden is not the body itself but the body’s corruptibility. Scripture states that “the corruptible body presses down the soul”—the adjective is essential. The soul is weighed down not by embodiment as such but by the corrupted body that sin has produced.
More devastatingly, Augustine cites Plato himself against the Platonists. In the Timaeus, Plato represents the supreme Deity promising the lesser gods that they will never be separated from their bodies but will abide in them eternally. If embodiment were inherently miserable, why would the supreme God promise eternal union with the body as a gift? The philosophers contradict themselves: they maintain that souls must escape all bodies to be blessed, yet they affirm that the gods—whom they consider most blessed—are eternally united to their bodies. They cannot have it both ways.
The philosophers further object that earthly bodies cannot become incorruptible or inhabit heaven. Augustine replies that their own system undermines this objection. They consider the earth eternal, though it is the central member of their divine world-animal. If the earth can be eternal, why cannot earthly bodies be made eternal by God’s power? Plato himself acknowledges that God can prevent created things from dying and composite things from dissolving. What prevents God from conferring the same immortality on human bodies that Plato’s supreme Deity confers on the gods?
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