Chapter 9 considers how Augustine features some of the most extreme expressions of the spiritual resurrection and of hope for the fleshly resurrection as Christians approach their bodily deaths and handle those of others. Augustine’s teaching and preaching on Christian dying, celebrating the Christian martyrs, handling Christian funerary and commemorative practices, and consoling Christian survivors serve to highlight the embodied spiritual life and activities of Christians whose souls have already been resurrected and whose bodies will eventually be resurrected, hopefully to eternal life. Among these discussions, Augustine acknowledges that Paul, the martyred apostle of the resurrection, provides some of the deepest theological insights not only into the mystery of the resurrection, but also into the interim condition of the human person after physical death and before fleshly resurrection. Despite the personal brokenness of death, Augustine sees that the continuity of human identity always remains in the hands of God.

This chapter unveils the author’s view of what was at stake in demythologization: the viewer’s attitude to chronology, to temporality, to characters defined by their residence in earlier time. For confirmation of this claim, the chapter studies archaeological evidence from Rome’s suburbium, examining the altered spatial relationships between house and tomb that came to dominate in the Late Empire. This reveals what was at stake in the third-century disappearance of mythic figures from sarcophagi: new demands among the living, manifested in multiple domains of Roman life, for greater proximity to their dead.