turn your minds particularly to the vigil we are keeping this night. We have been
204 SAINT A UGUSTINE - SERMONS are exercising their spiritual muscles against this deadly dead weight, in order to gain themselves merit in life everlasting. On the other hand, you see, those people are not being consistent with themselves, who want to live forever, and don't like slightly longer drawn-out vigils. They want death not to exist at all, and don't want to cut down on its image.8 So that's the reason, that's the explanation why Christians should frequently exercise their minds by keeping awake in vigils.
The particular vigil
4. And now, brothers and sisters, while I remind you of a few other things, turn your minds particularly to the vigil we are keeping this night. We have been saying, you see, why we ought more often to deprive ourselves of sleep and increase the number of our vigils; but now we have to say9 why we keep watch with such a tremendous kind of celebration as we do on this particular night. That the Lord Christ rose again from the dead on the third day no Christian has the slightest doubt about. Now that that happened on this night is something for which we have the evidence of the holy gospel. It's undoubtedly the case, you see, that the whole day is reckoned from the preceding night,10 and not according to the order of the days mentioned in Genesis—though even there darkness came first, because there was darkness on the face of the deep when God said, Let there be light, and there was light-, but because that darloiess wasn't yet night, there weren't yet any days. God, in fact, divided between the light and the darkness, and first called the light day, and only next called the darkness night, and from the making of light until the next morning mention was made of one day.11 It's quite clear that those days began with the light, and that each ended after the night was spent, with the next morning.
But after the human race was created, and deviated from the light of justice into the darkness of sin, from which the grace of Christ delivered them, it came about that we now reckon the days from the nights, because we are striving, and with the Lord's help hoping, to proceed not from light to darkness, but from darkness to light. That's also how the apostle puts it: The night is far gone, while the day has drawn near; and so let us throw away the works of darkness, and don the weapons of light (Rom 13:12). Thus the day of the Lord's passion, on which he was crucified, followed its own night that was already spent; and that's why it came to a close and ended with the Parasceve, which the Jews also call the Cena pura,n with the observance of the sabbath starting from the onset of that night. Next the sabbath day, which began with its own night, ended with the evening, as the night began that belongs to the beginning of the Lord's day—so called because the Lord has consecrated it by the glory of his resurrec¬ tion.
And so now we are celebrating in this solemn manner the memory of that night, which belongs to the beginning of the Lord's day. We spend the whole night awake, in which the Lord rose again, and inaugurated for us in his own flesh that life which we were talking about a few moments ago, in which there