a mostly german debate on conversion and salvation tive to Pelagius.658 Also the happiness of the many could find its human victims – Steinbart for the sake of public security saw the penalty of death as necessary for murder and arson.659 The position put forward by Steinbart was more extreme than the ordinance – a few tried to voice more extreme positions in the following debates, but one can wonder if any succeeded? He proposed that the priests should not be allowed to visit certain of those condemned to death. It would be a precise retribution if the murderer that had not allowed her victim to prepare for death, herself would be executed without any preparation.660 His critique of the executions ranged from the indecency of priests present, in the company of the executioners, and in such a situation, to the negative effect of the presence of the priest. His presence, which was horrible for the many clergymen who were more afraid of dying than the delinquent, calmed the prisoner and restrained the, for the society so important, deterrence through the anxiety and despair of the condemned. Even worse, his presence inspired the ideas that the executed was saved and that the best way to find salvation was to commit amurder.661 Any depiction of the executed as saved, in printed material, posing as giving glory to God while spreading heresy, should therefore be prohibited.662 Peter Erickson sees this element in the proposals of Steinbart as central, because his primary aim was to ”re-conceptualize religious conversion narrative in a way that integrated it into the judicial establishment and incorporated recent trends in Enlightenment psychology.” The main 658 Schings 1977 p 190 sq. 659 Steinbart 1801 p 14. 660 Steinbart 1769 p 26 sqq. The idea did not lack predecessors. The refusal from secular authorities, despite ecclesiastical protest, to let condemned prisoners confess or receive communion has occurred, see e g Haring 1912 p 11 sqq, 24 and see also Lehmann 1883 p 236. 661 Steinbart 1769 p 14 sqq, 19, 23. 662 Steinbart 1769 p 25 sq. Criminalordnung 1805 §539 forbade any publications before an execution, Allgemeines Criminalrecht 1830 p195. The wish of Steinbart that the publications would not depict the executed as saved was not always fulfilled. See Umständliche Nachricht s a: ”Gott flöße ihm auf seinem sauren Hingang und diesen schmälichen Ende, die Ueberzeugung ins Herz, daß es wahr sey: Mein Heyland nimt die Sünder an.” Repentance and thereafter redemption and salvation seems to have been a common theme in literature at the time describing the condemned, Lewis 2016 p 152 sq. 190
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