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One of the most difficult things about studying religion as an academic is convincing people that things in the past were different from what they are now. To put it another way, what most people think of as essential elements of "Christianity," or "Judaism," or "Islam" (just to take the 3 major monotheisms of the world) have not always been there. The simple phrase of "things change over time" has to be the mantra of any historian and is particularly relevant when applied to concepts. We have to take our subjects of study on their own terms and not impose our own modern assumptions onto them - to be wary of, as James T. Palmer has coined it, falling into the Jurassic Park paradox and grafting frog DNA into dinosaur DNA, thereby creating a hybrid monster.
One easy assumption we make - even as historians sometimes - is that Christianity has always had a defined relationship with death. We assume that the early "Jesus Movement" always offered a sense that the individual Christian was responsible for their own soul, that each person needed to police their behavior in order to ensure their entrance into Heaven.
But not so.
A new book, Moment of Reckoning: Imagined Death and Its Consequences in Late Ancient Christianity, to be released this April 2019 by Oxford University Press, suggests something very different. Prof. Ellen Muehlberger, an associate professor at the University of Michigan lays out a compelling case that attitudes towards death among Christian communities changed radically between ca. 300-600 CE . Death became a moment of reckoning. As she explains:
that cultural narrative enabled Christians to think of others with whom they disagreed as recalcitrant, willfully misguided, and in need of correction, rather than simply differently minded; such people would regret their stubbornness when faced with pain and judgment. Eventually this logic was applied not just to the moment of death, but also to compulsion, punishment, and even torture.
In other words, this change in attitudes towards death could - and did - justify violence. Prof. Muehlberger was kind enough to speak to me over email.
The book charts a shift in perceptions of death in late antiquity. What led you to that research focus?
The last project I worked on was about angels, and there was a strange thing I kept running in to in my research that I couldn’t really understand: lots of ancient Christian sources told stories about people who died and were taken away by either angels or demons, depending on how they had lived their lives. Those stories were very physical, especially in the case of demons, who did things like drag people away after death or pull them away by the hands or feet. This suggested that there was a dead body and then another body, a postmortal body, that could be dragged away.
So, when I investigated, I found an entire literature that said human beings persist after death with a body that can be dragged away by demons for physical punishment. It wasn’t theological treatises but rather visions and dreams and other kinds of narrative. So, a big step in my research was to turn away from all the usual places you’d look to see what ancient Christians thought and to look at other kinds of texts.
As you were approaching this new topic, were there any moments in which you wished the sources would tell you something and they were reluctant?
No. I try very hard not to go looking with notions already in mind. It’s impossible, of course, not to have some preconceptions; after all, writers start books and put in all this time because we think there’s something there. That said, there’s a fascinating thing that happens to me in long projects: what I think I know before I start reading for a project falls by the wayside as I read and discover other, more interesting things.
It’s as if those initial ideas are the map that gets you to the trailhead, but they don’t have anything to do with the actual terrain you’ll be hiking—and you’d be totally lost if you went on to the trail assuming they were the same thing.
This book (and really, everything I write) starts with noticing something that seems "weird" to me. Then I ask how this seemingly “weird” thing fits - because nothing in a culture is weird to the people who live in that culture, and if it seems weird to me, it’s just because I don’t understand it yet.
I like this analogy of the trailhead and starting with an idea. Indeed, your new book could be seen as an “intellectual history,” but not in a traditional sense – more about how ideas made people do things. Is that fair?
I think it’s long been clear that ideas about the past can get people to act certain ways, or can justify for certain actions. But in this book I thought about something else: whether the future that people imagined for themselves would influence how they acted. And, I found that ancient Christian preachers taught people to imagine how they would feel at death, it seems in order to get them to reflect on their behavior in the present.
In the sermons that survive, preachers almost always talked about death as a terrible, frightening, painful event, a moment of reckoning—hence the title of the book!—for people who acted immorally during their lives. But, eventually, that frightening, painful death seemed to be waiting for everyone. That idea changed how Christians were willing to act toward one another. The logic was: if you were doing something immoral now, you would clearly experience a terrible death, so I could be justified in intervening to stop you from doing that immoral thing. My intervention would be doing you a favor.
On that basis, Christian writers like Augustine made a case that was right to force others, including through violence, to think and act rightly—and, what’s more, you could ask the empire to exert that force. That’s a radical step for a tradition that started by venerating a man (Jesus) whom they thought unjustly executed by the state.
It proves, though, something that other writers have already noticed: what we imagine for other people’s futures affects a lot of what of what we’re willing to do for them, or to them. If I think you have a bright future and successful career ahead of you, I might be tempted to let you slide on a criminal charge, or to give you an easy sentence; if I don’t think you have a bright future, I will treat you quite differently. So, there’s an ethical lesson here, too: unexamined assumptions about who other people will become drive so much of society and we should be responsible for the assumptions we make about others’ futures, because we say that we hold all people to be equal.
But do we? Do we imagine all people to have equally open and promising futures? Have we ever?
