Training for Death

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.