AAR/SBL 2019 Review Panel | Reckoning with Death: A Cross-Disciplinary Engagement

The Moment of Reckoning: Imagined Death and Its Consequences in Late Ancient Christianity, Ellen Muehlberger’s new monograph, has the best cover in the field. It is also a rich, well written, interesting story. Or, rather, many stories; I reference here Muehlberger own interest in the question of story-telling, revealed best in her epigraph:

To express an essence of the dead to the living

takes storytelling, and the story I like best to tell is this. . .

- Raymond McDaniel, “The Concealed” (p.vi)

Moment of Reckoning covers a range of texts and languages, from the Latin of Augustine of Hippo in western North Africa to the sermons of Jacob of Serugh in Syria, from materials from Egypt to the Cappadocian Gregory of Nyssa. It deliberately moves across ancient genres—sermons, histories, letters—to show a widespread concern about death in late antiquity. In this work, Muehlberger participates alongside other scholars like Eric Rebillard and Philippe Ariès. She offers a new vantage in the combination of sources and in her argument that individuation was already happening at this time period. As Muehlberger puts it,

Though Ariès claimed to see “no place for individual responsibility” in Christianity before the European Middle Ages, that is precisely what we see in fourth- and fifth-century historiography and sermons: a supposition that the last hours of life would be a pitched event—stark, frightening, and a time when a summary judgment of a person’s actions throughout life would be rendered. Late ancient Christians learned to think on the process of dying as a moment of reckoning. (10)

Muehlberger instead finds the phenomenon of an individual’s wrestling with the significance of her or his own death (its pedagogical power) earlier. She is not interested in

stak[ing] any claim on the late ancient origin of the tendencies of the imagination that it exposes. Rather, [the book] details the synergy that emerged when preachers, historiographers, and others in this small window of time and place imagined death in a particular way; it feels out the ramifications of an idea that was widely espoused and that, in turn, enabled other ideas. (10)

Muehlberger shows how, through sermons, a preacher tries to indicate what Muehlberger calls a “durable response of imaginative transposition” for the hearers—a moment of practice, through the sermon, by which they will be able to console themselves later. She carefully shows that this individuation was not without its community effects. The individual’s process of thinking through death and its implications for their ethics in the present and their continued existence in the future had a lot to do with others. People were called upon, individually to remember deaths at which they had been present. They stood in community to listen to a sermon that moved one to think through one’s own moment of death. They thought together with Christ about Christ’s taking on her and others’ sufferings at the moment of death.

Muehlberger contributions start with her introduction, which gives us a grand scope, even bringing in data from post-Soviet Eastern Europe and Civil War America to challenge the reader to ask: What do the dead do? What do we do with the dead? How does society organize around the dead? Moment of Reckoning is interested in the anticipation of death, and what this does to a culture. This is a great topic, which stands in line with various earlier philosophical practices, such as the Cyrenaic idea that anticipation of death or loss is a philosophical practice meant to inure oneself against pathē or emotions, discussed, for example, in Cicero’s third book of the Tusculan disputations.

Along the way, Muehlberger engages in serious historiographical battles. In the introduction she critiques historiography in patristics which has focused too much on doctrinal development as inevitable, rather than imagining a robust contingency, and I quote her, “by which I mean the capacity of the proximate future for past actors to turn out differently” (14). Chapter 3 engages in wrestling with colleagues, especially Rebillard and Daley, over the causes of increasing “dread” in the late fourth century and following (107). So too the same chapter (among other parts of the book) contests previous historiography of late antique Christian paideia (education, culture) (118-19); Muehlberger clearly shows how its foundation was the techniques and content of classical education, the paideia set forth in so called pagan progymnasmata (121). (This insight alone is a significant contribution, with rich evidence, standing in a long and good tradition: think of Werner Jaeger’s 1961 Early Christianity and Greek Paideia.) Chapter 4 on “sighting the dead” has a fabulous section on the pseudepigraphical Visio Pauli, in which Muehlberger develops an economical and smart understanding of that phenomenon that moves us beyond the idea of pseudepigraphy as inauthentic, forgery, or copyright infringement that too often characterizes historical study, although some scholars in the Classics and in New Testament Studies are trying to move past it. Muehlberger writes: “pseudepigrapha can be a reliable indicator of shifts in cultural attitudes that are in the process of happening, though everything about their generic and narrative presentation is calibrated to suggest that no change has occurred” (177). Chapter 5 also contains a searing analysis of historiography on violence in early Christianity, and a truly thought-provoking and even grim conclusion. She writes, “Christians learned how to anticipate death in a particular way. They nursed that habit, and it changed how they thought of human beings. That, in turn, changed what they thought it right and even necessary to do to other human beings.” In clear and somber prose, Muehlberger lays bare that the injunction to visualize and imagine one’s individual death was at the same time an injunction to “realize the errors and sins” one had committed, and thus to “regretfully grasp the truth that she should have known all along.” This, in turn, implies judgment of the other. As Muehlberger writes, “Viewed through this lens of inevitability, opponents were not the people who happened to think differently; they were willfully misguided, recalcitrant” and it was the job of some Christians to force other Christians to change. Muehlberger continues: “I have been examining late ancient Christian thought, but it is worth wondering about parallel situations in our own contemporary ethical reasoning. The products of our imagination can be magnetic. They can inexorably pull us to accept new positions and actions, especially when they depict for us a difficult and frightening future.”

Muehlberger’s conclusions have significant implications for our research on the machine of narrative and ethics. They match well with some of the theories developed by Sara Ahmed about the “affective politics of fear.” Using a story from Fanon, Ahmed writes:

Fear may also work as an affective economy. . . it does not reside positively in a particular object or sign. It is this lack of residence that allows fear to slide across signs and between bodies. This sliding becomes stuck only temporarily, in the very attachment of a sign to a body, an attachment that is taken on by the body, encircling it with a fear that becomes its own. . . . Such fantasies construct the other as a danger not only to one’s self as self, but to one’s very life, to one’s very existence as a separate being with a life of its own. Such fantasies of the other hence work to justify violence against others, whose very existence comes to be felt as a threat to the life of the white body.[1]

Sara Ahmed is absent from Muehlberger’s book, and I wonder whether Ahmed could stand alongside Muehlberger in her future work. Muehlberger points toward the implications of her own historical analysis regarding Christians compelling other Christians. She raises for me the questions: How is a story implanted in the imagination, and what work does that story then begin to do, whether the story is bundled into exegesis of a commentating sermon, as relief sculpture that evokes a death like that of Medea’s children, a historiola embedded within a curse tablet.

The contribution of the book lies not only in these impressive historiographical analyses, and the opening up of new vistas of possible research, but also in Muehlberger’s analysis of late antique Christian texts and exposition of the ways in which thinking about death came to form the Christian’s ethical, physical, etc. choices in antiquity. Let me give one example to show how beautifully Moment of Reckoning does this. In her analysis of the little-studied Jacob of Serugh, Muehlberger explicates what his sermon on death does:

The framing events—God’s gesture, the angels’ mobilization—are beyond the world that can be seen; until Jacob describes them, they remain invisible to the average Christian. With them, though, the death of this generic sinner becomes the center of a whirlwind of divine action, its mundaneness transformed, a “small thing” made “great” by its location at the center of a cascade of cosmological significance. (82)

Muehlberger provides a beautifully written analysis and she also beautifully translates portions of the sermon (“The body takes three blows from the angel, since the soul is a lovely dove sheltered inside it. . .”, 83). She then introduces graphic novels, as well as the medieval The Somonyng of Everyman and McCarthy’s The Road to think about the power of not specifying a protagonist: how readers, hearers, viewers then put themselves into the central role of a story. Her analysis of this sermon brings alive the possible experience of ancient Syrian hearers of this sermon and showing how Jacob’s use of imperatives must buffet the hearer:

Jacob is. . . intoning a command directly to them: “Say goodbye. Say goodbye. Say goodbye.” It is not simply Jacob speaking to the departing soul he has imagined; it is also him, in real time, speaking to the body of Christians gathered to hear his voice. He brings their moments of death to life in this sermon and pronounces over them at its end the sign of their own end, saying, “Rest in peace.” The effect must have been as chilling as it was vivid. (87)

Muehlberger supports this analysis by pointing to Jacob’s self-consciousness regarding rhetoric and writing. This is great stuff, and it should not escape us that with this work Muehlberger also brings into the center of our gaze someone usually considered marginal to the study of early Christianity—marginal only because many aren’t trained in Syriac or to think of the eastern edges of late antique Christianity as important. Muehlberger is part of a groundswell of scholars moving toward Coptic and Syriac as key languages for the study of late antique Christianity and late antiquity in general.

If I must, I can critique the book and ask further questions of it; this is not an encomium alone. Perhaps Muehlberger would like to take up some of the following questions, now or in future work:

1. Would this book have looked different if its sources extended into epitaphs, analysis of funerary spaces, and other evidence from material culture?

2. What are the problems of reconstructing the audiences which heard sermons and were the recipients of so much of this rhetoric (a project the book sometimes takes up and sometimes rejects)? [2]

3. How and why did this discourse of individual death became so prevalent in so many places around the Mediterranean in the fourth and fifth centuries CE? Were non-Christian contemporaries were also doing the same thing? Muehlberger argues, for example, that “expectation for death secured nothing less than a new affective topography for a Christian life, and with that, a new definition of the human person.” But is this only for a Christian life?

4. The prevalent theoretical interlocutors of the book are Foucault and Hadot. How might this have been expanded upon with some more recent thinking about death, power, judgment, mourning, and the self? I think of Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being or Sara Ahmed’s Cultural Politics of Emotion, among other works. Given Muehlberger’s interest in story-telling, I think about analyses of how Toni Morrison’s work, among others, functions between what we call fiction and history, as mentioned in Margo Natalie Crawford’s “The Twenty-First Century Black Studies Turn to Melancholy.” [3]

Muehlberger has given us a smart, complex, sophisticated book that contributes greatly to the study of early Christian history, late antiquity, and more.

[1] Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004; 2d ed.; Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2014), 64.

[2] This is a topic also engaged in Maria Doerfler’s new Jephthah’s Daughter, Sarah’s Son: The Death of Children in Late Antiquity (Stanford, CA: University of California Press, 2020).

[3] Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Margo Natalie Crawford, “The Twenty-First Century Black Studies Turn to Melancholy,” American Literary History, 29.4 (2017) 799–807, which reviews Cultural Melancholy: Readings of Race, Impossible Mourning, and African American Ritual, by Jermaine Singleton, and Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress, by Joseph Winters.

Laura Nasrallah is Buckingham Professor of New Testament Criticism and Interpretation at Yale University (Department of Religion and Divinity School).