The Truth to Be Found in Death

Abstract

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.