Moment of Reckoning takes as its starting point the observation that the fourth and fifth centuries saw a proliferation of texts composed by Christian authors dedicated to describing what it feels like to die. The imagined deaths that Muehlberger surveys in this study are not the spectacular deaths of Christ or of the martyrs but depictions of “normal” deaths, made no less terrifying for their banality. This phenomenon is worth noticing, Muehlberger argues, because the cultural turn toward contemplating the moment of death and its immediate aftermath had surprising consequences for late ancient culture—consequences that “enabled a cascade of changes in the concept of the human being, which shifted both relationships and responsibilities along an entire spectrum of expectation about the character of human life, what should be done with it, and what could be done to it” (7).
Muehlberger's study begins with a consideration of a handful of prominent deaths which are narrated in Eusebius's The Life of Constantine, Lactantius's On the Deaths of Persecutors, and Athanasius's History of the Arians. These texts associate opposition to orthodoxy with painful, disgusting manners of death, so that persecuting emperors and heretics alike are depicted as literally rotting from the inside out. For late ancient Christians, one's manner of death—whether easy or torturous—becomes a clear indication of God's judgment of the newly dead's moral merit, one made all the more certain by its finality.
Chapter 2 turns to the prominence of narrated deaths in late ancient sermons. Muehlberger emphasizes the performance aspect of preaching, demonstrating how late ancient preachers used rhetorical techniques to transport their listeners to distant times and places—such as to the moment of their own death. Drawing on examples both prominent and obscure from authors including Augustine, Jacob of Serugh, Cyril of Alexandria, and Shenoute of Atripe, Muehlberger argues that this style of preaching produced in its listeners “a memorable sensory approximation of a future event” intended to frighten them into asking: “What will I come to regret at my future death?” Furthermore, the audience should then be inspired by this experience to make behavioral changes in the present (101).
Chapter 3 builds on the previous chapter's description of the rhetorical strategies employed by late ancient preachers, demonstrating how the traditional rhetorical and grammatical training program shared among the educated elite of the ancient Mediterranean world influenced both the form and the content of late ancient sermons. In particular, Muehlberger shows how training in the elementary exercise of “speech in character” taught preachers rhetorically to embody the pain and suffering of the dying, and to make their listeners feel that pain, too.
Deeper questions about the sinner's fate immediately following his death are addressed in chapter 4. Muehlberger identifies a break in late antiquity with both the classical conception of death as the endpoint of personal consciousness (and, therefore, an ultimately neutral event) and from earlier Christian understandings of death as initiating an undefined waiting period until the bodily resurrection and final judgment. In the fourth century, Christians devoted more attention to the period intervening between death and resurrection, a span of time that Muehlberger calls “the postmortal.” While philosophers imagined incorporeal souls leaving their bodies at the moment of death, texts such as The Vision of Paul and The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas (which Muehlberger dates to the late fourth century) describe the soul in corporeal terms. In these texts, souls are presented as being individually identifiable, physically substantial, and—crucially—vulnerable to pain.
Chapter 5 fleshes out the consequences of this new attention paid to the moment of death and the postmortal period. Muehlberger argues that “how Christians imagined the hour of death and what followed it changed the boundaries of their ethics, in particular what they thought it acceptable to do to one another” (184). Specifically, she contends that the turn toward using force to compel belief in the late fourth century was a response to the new emphasis on postmortem punishments that awaited sinners. Because these punishments were imagined to be torturously painful, comparatively less painful measures taken to compel obedience prior to death were justifiable, even merciful. This is the most original and stimulating argument put forward in Moment of Reckoning, but it is not without its problems. Helpfully, in this chapter Muehlberger isolates late ancient Christian thinking about the ethics of compulsion from the perhaps overly broad analytical category of “early Christian violence” used by previous scholars. This move enables her to demonstrate that “the prospect of a future, regret-filled death and postmortal punishment for sinners is what anchors Augustine's justifications for compelling religious dissidents in his church” (201). The framing of coercion as a species of benevolent, if problematic, paternalism may be a more useful way of understanding this phenomenon than lumping it with the wide range of other phenomena that modern scholars categorize as “violence.”
I am less convinced, however, that the specific threat of physical tortures during the postmortal period—rather than the risk of eternal condemnation at the final judgment—motivated Augustine and his contemporaries to justify forceful compulsion in matters of faith. Muehlberger's observation that it was the terrors of death, and what comes after it, that made compulsion in matters of faith ethically plausible for fourth-century Christians is, I think, correct. I wonder, however, whether extensive meditations on the moment of death were necessary to arrive at this conclusion. Her argument that the final judgment at the end of days was “simply too far away to be threatening” seems to me to ignore too much Biblical and patristic evidence to the contrary (202). In spite of these concerns, Moment of Reckoning makes a stimulating contribution to the study of Christian cultural transformations in late antiquity and will be of interest to scholars and advanced students of this period.
