Martín Heredero has a PhD in Philosophy (2024) and a master’s degree in teaching Philosophy. He is associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Valladolid and a professor of Philosophy and Ethical Values at the Saint Augustine High School of the Augustinian Recollects in Valladolid, Spain.
By Martín Heredero.
Saying that “doing philosophy” is “learning to die” is not saying anything new: Socrates already showed it exemplarily, and many others repeated it. However, this already classic characterization of philosophy as ars moriendi has suffered what happens so often to the classic: it has been taken for granted.
It seems, however, that the seriousness of the subject forces us to rethink once again what this learning to die is, and whether it is possible to learn to do that which we will all have to experience without knowing very well what it consists of.
Perhaps we can take a first step towards clarifying this question if we think about what death is. We do not have first-hand experience of it, but we do know what it is to die through others. This deferred examination can clarify for us how to keep our gaze on this mystery, and that is what allows us to make a beautiful passage from the Confessions of Saint Augustine.
I am referring to the words with which the saint narrates a crucial event in his biography, in Book IV: the death of a beloved friend. After having lost his companion, the bishop of Hippo is so disoriented, and the absence of meaning that he experiences is so great, that he can only say:
— Factus eran ipse mihi magna questio.
That is to say, the death of his friend has become him an enigma about himself. The experience of death is thus revealed not as one more question, but as a global problematization of existence.
Knowing that what we love when we love temporal things must disappear, what can we do? Well, if it turns out that the being of everything we know in time and in the world consists in passing until its final dissolution in nothingness, life would be nothing more than a walk towards death.
This discovery, rooted in vital experience, allows us to consider death as an ontological experience. In it, the being of what exists in the finitude that constitutes it is revealed to us; in the precariousness that permeates the creature whose life is, thus seen, a gradual death.
But, said with Miguel de Unamuno, it seems that in the man of flesh and blood there is a hunger and a thirst for eternity that no finite reality can satisfy. We are not referring here to something other than that restlessness of the heart pointed out by Saint Augustine at the beginning of the Confessions, whose rest can only be given in eternity.
For this reason, the saint of Hippo will affirm that the enormous pain produced by the death of a loved one is not entirely inseparable from a disordered love for the rerum mortalium, that is, an excessive attachment to temporal things.
It follows, then, that we must reestablish the ordo amoris that allows us to love the different orders of reality according to their measure. Thus, Saint Augustine will examine the different strata of reality with his soul focused on them, asking whether the created can satisfy that metaphysical thirst that dwells in the creature aware of its finitude.
And when St. Augustine questions the earth, the stars, the animals and all the beauties of Creation, he only gets one answer:
— Neque nos sumus Deus quem quaeris: they are not what the hunger for God needs.
Given the constitutive insufficiency of worldly realities, the journey of the search for meaning in the face of the reality of death, that possibility of absolute impossibility, as Heidegger would say in the 20th century, demands retreating to a position of interiority that transcends the sensible and forces us to examine the soul.
That is why the saint says in the Soliloquies:
— Deum et animam scire cupio. Only God and the soul itself are the search to which St. Augustine aspires.
It is in this investigation that he will discover that the way in which the soul transcends its temporality in prayer, conversion and ecstasy allows us to experience the elevation from the ontological precariousness of the creature to the eternity of the full being, that is, the path of salvation.
On the other hand, the way in which God intervenes in the finite time of the creature will also be the object of study, and here we come across the mystery of grace. In both cases, although in different directions, it is a matter of examining the mysterious link between time and eternity, and perhaps it is precisely here that we must recognize the lesson that death presents to us.
The inexorable nature of the passing of things, when it is lived to its ultimate consequences, forces us to confront the finitude that is proper to us. However, this moment coincides with the discovery of the possibility of transcendence.
Thus, the analysis of temporality will be the existential key to trace the trace of eternity in our being. St. Augustine will do so by examining how the love for eternal life refers to a kind of metaphysical memory that makes us recognize a coincidence between this memory of the desired plenitude of our being and the substance of our hope.
It seems, then, that learning to die is, at least to a certain extent, learning to hope, since hope is the way in which the finite creature can touch eternity from time.