The Truth to Be Found in Death

The first chapter examines how early fourth-century histories dealt with the insecurity of Christianity’s place in the empire by portraying emperors dying well or dying badly. This literary trope was a tool that argued that bodies were a signal of an alternate, but ultimately correct, narrative of the immediate past, one in which the success of Christianity was both inevitable and unmistakable. This way of mediating the past introduced a relationship between bodily suffering at death and divine displeasure, a concept that took root in the construction of heresiology and orthodoxy; the latter part of the chapter considers stories about heretics who die badly and notes how, associating what they saw as the filth of heresy with the filth of the dying body, Christian writers developed a vocabulary that equated a difficult death with moral stain.

Considering Compulsion in Late Ancient Christianity

At the opening of the fifth century, Christian writers advocated explicitly for using force or the threat of force to produce allegiance among Christians. In this chapter the author disaggregates this act, compulsion, from the other kinds of violence in late antiquity that have drawn the attention of scholars. She then examines the most influential statements made in defense of compulsion, taking her bearings primarily from Augustine’s letters, to show how Christian reasoning about the propriety of compulsion depends directly on there being a vividly imagined and universally expected postmortal. In the latter part of the chapter, the author explains how the chronology for human life that includes the postmortal allowed Augustine to shift ethical questions about the act of compulsion onto more favorable ground. The shift to surrogated thinking persisted in Christian considerations of compulsion, and at the end of the chapter, the author reflects on the lasting effects of this approach.

Training for Death

This chapter explains how the experience of death became a topic for so many Christians from so many different areas of the ancient world simultaneously, and why they all seemed to approach it in the same, peculiar way. All the Christian writers whose work is considered in this book had a common educational background, not in the church but in the rhetorical classrooms that formed elite men for public leadership. Often, the rhetorical training they received along with non-Christian contemporaries is seen as contentless, a rote memorization of styles and forms. This chapter calls that assumption into question by demonstrating how one rhetorical exercise—speech in character—created a pattern of speaking about and thinking about tragic circumstances. Its method of dealing with time, its emphasis on the reversal of fortune, and its focus on the regret of the person at the center of a tragedy all became fundamental to how Christians imagined the moment of reckoning.

Creating the Experience of Death in Late Ancient Sermons

Chapter 2 examines how the sufferings of the individual at death were then raised to salience in Christian preaching. It investigates in detail a phenomenon that other scholars have remarked in passing: that late antiquity saw an increase in sermons that depicted death as a terrifying, awful situation, one that required fear and attention. The author says “depicted” because, as this chapter shows, such sermons were sophisticated rhetorical displays—the ancient version of inducing a virtual reality. The mechanisms by which they did their work were subtle, but had a specific effect: they existed not simply to convey information about what death would be like, but to enact a fully realized scene of death in which audience members could imagine themselves and thereby experience the moment of death in advance.

Conclusion

In the study of late antiquity, the rise of Christianity has most often been tracked through material changes: the number of churches built; the art and architecture that constituted the visual landscape of cities; the laws enacted to support Christian practice or criminalize other pieties; the number of Christians writing, serving in imperial offices, and leading communities. There is another metric by which we could also measure the dominance of Christianity, and that is by the depth of its involvement in the expectations for the future that Christians held. At a level similar to the practices of self-examination and confession popularized by monastic movements in late antiquity, thinking of death as a moment of reckoning claimed the intimate attention of Christians and shaped it in a forceful way. To participate in late ancient Christian culture was to know how death would be not only for oneself, but also and more importantly, for others. Their coming tragedies afforded all manner of intervention, because the terrible prospects that were imagined for others were also imagined to be mutable, if only these others could also be brought to see from the perspective of their deaths.

Introduction

The introduction reviews scholarship about death and deathways in late ancient religions, noting the emphasis of such scholarship on the experiences of those who survive the dead. It clarifies that this book addresses a slightly different topic: the anticipations of the living for how their own deaths will be. Locating this book in the history of scholarship that links cultural attention to the experience of death with the development of a sense of individualism, the author does not claim the origin of the focus on the individual within Christianity, but instead explores the synergy of ideas about the generic individual’s death that became salient in late ancient writing. This choice is contextualized to avoid doctrinal statements about death and to use instead performative sermons, narratives, and visions as sources for how early Christians imagined their last moments. A chapter outline for the book appears at the end of the introduction.

What Remains?

Chapter 4 considers the wealth of images of death as a fund of Christian thinking about the nature of humanity and argues that by putting more effort toward imagining death, Christians invented a new stage of human experience: the postmortal. While some early Christian literature speaks formally of death as the moment of separation between an eternal soul and a mortal body, the picture that emerges from the evidence in this book is far more complex. What remained was not just a soul, or a mind, but was often also a body that received physical punishment. The chapter argues that in the Christian imagination about death we can access an informal anthropology that stands at odds with formal theological teachings about humanity from late antiquity. Once established, thinking about death as a moment of reckoning shifted how Christians thought of a person and his life.