Considering Compulsion in Late Ancient Christianity

Abstract

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.