Creating the Experience of Death in Late Ancient Sermons

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.