Heirs of Roman persecution : Common threads in discursive strategies across Late Antiquity

Abstract

This final chapter takes the insights of the preceding chapters and develops them further. On the basis of the cumulative evidence that persecution discourse is pervasive in Late Antiquity and that it has certain common elements that are persistent regardless of culture or historical context, the chapter seeks to investigate why this is the case. The exploration proceeds in three parts. Firstly, two studies are discussed that bracket the period that is the subject of this book – one from early Islamic Egypt, one from fourth-century North Africa. The discussion here focuses on how the insights these studies produce intersect with those raised in the case studies. Secondly, a number of theories from social and cognitive psychology – in particular, from the domain of moral psychology – are introduced that help to explain why certain language and themes keep recurring across different cultures and regions in Late Antiquity. This section covers the topics of ideological narratives, sacred values and devoted actors, social–functional moral intuitions and moral “commonsense,” feedback loops, and addiction to difference. What is argued is that the features common to persecution rhetoric are common precisely because of how the rhetoric of persecution taps into and activates parts of the human brain that transcend culture, even though the specific narrative framing might be culturally encoded. Thirdly, what this has to say about when and why persecution rhetoric emerges within a social group, with particular reference to the intended as well as the actual effect of that rhetoric on its audience, is considered. In conclusion, consideration is given to the question of the relationship between rhetoric and reality.