Saint Augustine of Hippo on the Pious Practices in Favour of the Dead

Abstract

The Church has always tried to give guidelines – on the basis of catholic faith – regarding the correct and permissible burial customs. In the 5th century, St. Augustine of Hippo also dedicated a treatise specifically to this topic, at the request of his fellow bishop St. Paulinus of Nola, entitled De cura pro mortuis gerenda. The work starts from the fundamental question of whether there is any spiritual benefit to the deceased from the pious practice of being buried near the tomb of a venerated saint. St. Augustine deals first with the theoretical possibility of interceding for the dead, combining the message of Scripture with the tradition of the Church. He then passes to the question of funeral in general: for whom and why is it important that the deceased be buried at all; and if natural law binds us to bury the fellow human beings, what is the point of providing them special burial conditions? In the second part of the work, the author discusses the nature of the contact of the dead with the living, since there were those who argued for the absolute necessity of burial by means of the apparitions of the dead. The author argues, tactfully but forcefully, that the burial of a corpse is important first and foremost for the living, as a human and Christian duty, and that the care for the deceased is essentially spiritual in nature.