The Significance of the Fleeting: Happiness and Mortality in Augustine's De Trinitate

This paper challenges Augustine's claim in De Trinitate XIII that the universal human desire for happiness entails a desire for immortality. Augustine argues that because mortal life is inevitably subject to loss, suffering, and death, it cannot satisfy the conditions required for genuine happiness, and that the will to happiness must therefore be oriented toward eternal life. I argue that this inference is unpersuasive, as it depends on the contested assumption that genuine value requires permanence. After reconstructing Augustine's account of happiness as structured by the possession of what one wills, the right ordering of the will, and the absence of unwanted harms, I contend that his framework mischaracterizes the nature of human happiness. Many forms of human fulfillment are not merely compatible with finitude but are constituted by temporality, vulnerability, and the possibility of loss. Meaningful projects and experiences derive their value from unfolding over time, admitting risk and failure, and remaining subject to change. I further argue that Augustine commits a modal error by inferring from the desire for a good to continue within a temporal context to a desire for that good to exist eternally; wanting an experience to last longer does not entail a will for its eternal preservation, and in many cases its value depends on its impermanence. Finally, I suggest that finitude also renders suffering intelligible by situating it within a bounded temporal horizon, allowing happiness and suffering alike to be integrated into a coherent life. Absent the assumption that value requires permanence, the human desire for happiness does not entail a desire for immortality; mortality is instead a structural condition of meaningful human fulfillment.