Conclusion

In the study of late antiquity, the rise of Christianity has most often been tracked through material changes: the number of churches built; the art and architecture that constituted the visual landscape of cities; the laws enacted to support Christian practice or criminalize other pieties; the number of Christians writing, serving in imperial offices, and leading communities. There is another metric by which we could also measure the dominance of Christianity, and that is by the depth of its involvement in the expectations for the future that Christians held. At a level similar to the practices of self-examination and confession popularized by monastic movements in late antiquity, thinking of death as a moment of reckoning claimed the intimate attention of Christians and shaped it in a forceful way. To participate in late ancient Christian culture was to know how death would be not only for oneself, but also and more importantly, for others. Their coming tragedies afforded all manner of intervention, because the terrible prospects that were imagined for others were also imagined to be mutable, if only these others could also be brought to see from the perspective of their deaths.