ONLINE FIRST
published on October 11, 2018
Sean Hannan
https://doi.org/10.5840/augstudies2018101047
Augustine¡¯s Time of Death in City of God 13
¡°Only a living person can be a dying one,¡± writes Augustine in De ciuitate dei 13.9. For Augustine, this strange fact offers us an occasion for reflection. If we are indeed racing toward the end on a cursus ad mortem, when do we pass the finish line? A living person is ¡°in life¡± (in uita), while a dead one is post mortem. But as ciu. 13.11 asks: is anyone ever in morte, ¡°in death?¡± This question must be asked alongside an earlier one, which had motivated Augustine¡¯s struggle in Confessiones 11.14.17 to make sense of time from the very beginning: quid est enim tempus? What is at stake here is whether or not there is such a thing as an instant of death: a moment when someone is no longer alive but not yet dead, a moment when they are ¡°dying¡± (moriens) in the present tense. If we want to understand Augustine¡¯s question about the time of death in ciu. 13, then we have to frame it in terms of the interrogation of time proper in conf. 11.