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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.

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