Conversion and Coercion in the Sermons of Caesarius of Arles
Dennis Quinn California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, CA
This short communication draws from recent work done in the
scholarship of late antiquity. It draws from work on religious violence, such as .. It draws also on recent work by on Caesarius of Arles. It is clear that Casaarus is drawing from the rich Roman rhetorical tradition of and
Caesarius was also an an attentive student of Augustine
This paper focuses specifically on sermons whjich address what
Casarius characterized and remainling pagan practicesm or devil worship?
Caesarius charging the paterfamilias in his sermons with the task of
destroying shrines and punishing freedmen and slaves for alleged pagan practices served multiple purposes. At one level, it asked just that. For the landowners to take Christianization into their own hands on their farms and estates. The extent by which that was done, however, is certainly hard to measure. But at the level of rhetoric it had two even more subtle and perhaps even more powerful implications for the listeners. So at another lever, considering that the slaves and freedmen were also present with their masters in the village church when Caeasrius preached, though most certainly segregated and separated from the upper class members of the congregation, having the town bishop exhort theier masters to beat them if they find evidence of pagan practices must have had a powerful affect. The reaction of someone who may practive such questionable activities, wether they thought those behaviours were pagan or not, would have been to either be careful to hide such activities from their masters or cease them altogether. From the matrets point of view, out of sight out of mind. But there is another level by which Casariuss sermons against pagan practice worked on the wealthy landowners, a much more subtle, class based charge. As much of the work on late antique paganism has shown, practices considered pagan or superstitious were not only the provence of the lower classes. The upper classes also practiced identical behaviors. Caesarius charge the paterfamilias to destroy any vestiges of paganism of their slaves and freedmen through the whip was not only designed to instill fear in those social subordinates, but also to identify behaviours that the upper classes were perhaps still engaging in with the activities of their social inferiors. It would in fact shame the paterfamilias to change his behavior too, or at least further force them to take the behavior from the judging eyes of the bishop.