Pub Date : 2019-05-30DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780190459161.003.0006
E. Muehlberger
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.
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Pub Date : 2019-05-30DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780190459161.003.0002
E. Muehlberger
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.
{"title":"The Truth to Be Found in Death","authors":"E. Muehlberger","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780190459161.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780190459161.003.0002","url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":167026,"journal":{"name":"Moment of Reckoning","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129121833","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-05-30DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780190459161.003.0004
E. Muehlberger
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.
{"title":"Training for Death","authors":"E. Muehlberger","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780190459161.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780190459161.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":167026,"journal":{"name":"Moment of Reckoning","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127720581","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-05-30DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780190459161.003.0003
E. Muehlberger
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.
{"title":"Creating the Experience of Death in Late Ancient Sermons","authors":"E. Muehlberger","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780190459161.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780190459161.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":167026,"journal":{"name":"Moment of Reckoning","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122666079","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-03-21DOI: 10.1093/OSO/9780190459161.003.0005
E. Muehlberger
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.
{"title":"What Remains?","authors":"E. Muehlberger","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780190459161.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780190459161.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":167026,"journal":{"name":"Moment of Reckoning","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126774506","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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