David Lambert - Present and Future Judgement in Salvian

Salvian of Marseille is generally associated with the idea, put forward at length in his De gubernatione Dei (c. 440), that God intervenes in human history to punish the sins of Christians in the present world by disasters such as defeat and conquest by barbarians. However, in his other surviving full length work, Ad ecclesiam, written a few years earlier, this idea is completely absent, even though the work otherwise deals with many of the same issues. In Ad ecclesiam, rather than the punishment of whole communities in this world, Salvian uses the threat of post-mortem punishment of the individual. Ad ecclesiam contains some of the most sustained, rhetorically highly-developed, descriptions of Hell in western patristic literature, yet this element, in turn, is almost entirely absent from De gubernatione Dei. 

This paper examines the nature of this radical change in Salvian’s ideas about the judgement of sin. It investigates the theological and rhetorical reasoning which may have motivated such a development, and it attempts to trace the development which the change implies in Salvian’s ideas about the nature of Christian community.