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Welcome to the new Books Network.
Hello, and welcome to New Books in Late Antiquity presented by Ancient GeoReview.I'm Mike Motia, and today we're talking with Tony Elimi about slaves of God, Augustine and other Romans on religion and politics.
One way to do philosophy is to trace a seemingly small thing to get at a bigger trend.You can think of Jacques Derrida on Plato's Pharmacon or Lucie Rigaret on Nietzsche's Fear of Water.
Those kinds of studies, they trace an almost unconscious drive that steers philosophers without their quite being aware of it. With Augustine on slavery, we're talking about something quite different.
Whether by late antiquity Rome was a slave society is up for debate, but what's not really up for debate is that for Augustine of Hippo, slavery was the basic model of relationship between heaven and earth.
He didn't just take it for granted, it wasn't just the background norm of life.It was, consciously and clearly for him, the way the universe was.That is, slavery isn't that little footnote or the detail that cues us into the larger trend.
Slavery, Tony reminds us, scaffolds all of Augustine's thought.Religion and politics are all about slaves and masters. The Roman world was full of slaves.Some people in antiquity opposed slavery.Lots of people questioned its morality.
Nearly everyone had thoughts on it.Avoiding or escaping slavery occupied Romans' minds because slavery was a real option.A conquering group of barbarians or a failed harvest could push people into servitude.
And so Romans, they thought a lot and in a lot of different ways about slavery.We know something about the daily lives of slaves, which could range from the nobility to full servitude.
But when we try to understand social attitudes about slavery, we often ask questions that are a little bit too blunt.We ask things like, do the Romans think that slavery was right or not?
And that's not a bad question, but Tony shows us that it's a pretty narrow one.It doesn't tell us as much as we might think it does.
Because to understand what makes slavery good or bad or better or worse in Braun requires understanding their aims of politics and religion and the proper means for bringing about those goals.
To think about slavery was to think about the biggest questions of right and wrong and good and bad.Questions of religion, questions of politics.And those big questions, of course, they were up for big debates.
Any reception of Augustine Hippo, probably the most influential Western Christian author from late antiquity, has to reckon with just how central slavery was to his understanding of Christian life.
His views on slavery weren't just given, or natural in any way. Often readers trying to be generous to Augustine don't stand off at part of his thinking, so in translations we might get things like servant instead of slave, or lord instead of master.
We might even try to excuse his stances on slavery as being part of the times. But the problem with that sanding and historicizing is that, Tony argues, there's almost no part of Augustine's thought that isn't totally soaked in slavery.
Slavery was inescapable.Everybody is ultimately a slave of God, the good, just master.And so, Augustine argued, slavery has to in some way be just. Now that didn't mean for him that slavery was all good.
Human slavery was different from that universal slavery to God, and on Earth, slavery and coercion could be better or worse.But it couldn't be avoided.There were good masters and there were bad masters.There were good slaves, there were bad slaves.
But the problem with slavery, Augustine argued, wasn't slavery.It was about how to best get people to love God and to love their neighbor.And if slavery was the way to do that, so be it. Everyone, Augustine argued, is a slave to what they worship.
And so, we all worship, and we all serve something.Humans, they could be faithful slaves, or they could be fugitives, but either way, they're slaves.To be made in God's image was to be made God's slave.
And for Augustine, real freedom, or real happiness, it was slavery to God.It was only by locking into that master-slave relationship, and by submitting to that greatest good, that our restless hearts could find peace.
And there's a metaphysics to that, you know, in Paul's words, what do you have that you didn't receive?Or more platonically, how could a dependent creature separate from their source of life?But lots of people had that basic metaphysics.
Not everyone had Augustine's view of slavery or its religious implications.
Tony's work pushes readers to see Augustine's writing as one option among many in the Roman world, and it asks readers to consider the implications of Augustine's views for the world that his writings continue to shape.
Let me give one example before turning it over to Tony. During a controversy with a rival group of Christians, the Donatists, a rival group here, Augustine is preaching about how Christians should, he says, love and do what you will.
And that might sound nice, that might sound like the kind of thing you say at a wedding, love and do what you will.It might even sound like, you know, mind your own business.That's not what Augustine was talking about.
Love didn't mean letting people do what they want.It meant getting people, through force or coercion if necessary, making them come to church, the church, the true church, and making them love God and give God what we owe God.
Now for some, it's easy to kind of separate art from artist, or to use Guston's phrase, it's easy to separate the sin from the sinner.But Tony asks readers to see how that original sin of slavery corrupts everything.
And he challenges readers to understand just how pervasive slavery is. in Augustine's thinking, how pervasive slavery is in Augustine's thinking before trying to move forward with any Augustinian politics.
To get into that sense of Augustine's thinking about slavery and why it still matters for today, we're lucky to have Tony with us.
Tony's an assistant professor at the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University, and he's joining us from his office in Ithaca.Tony, thank you so much for being here.Can you introduce yourself?
Who are you, and how did you come to write this book?
I'm so pleased to be able to chat with you, Michael.And I want to start by saying how grateful for and amazed by the work you and your colleagues do on this podcast.So I live in Ithaca, New York, with my wife and our daughter.
My wife and I moved here in 2021, when I began as a postdoc in the Department of Classics at Cornell. I've just finished the postdoc and have started teaching as a professor of philosophy.
And the postdoc gave me ample time to revise what was then my doctoral dissertation into the book that you very graciously read.
I'd started grad school planning to work on Augustine's ethical theory, but became interested in the topic of slavery through a course on the history of ideas about freedom.And I wrote an exam for that course on Lactantius and slavery
like tense just ends up featuring significantly in the book.And my professor encouraged me to see whether I could extend my analysis to Augustine.
So at the time, I didn't have a systematic account of Augustine's views on slavery, and I worried that I wouldn't be prepared to answer my questions about Augustine and Lactantius without filling in this gap in my knowledge.
So I went to the secondary literature, searching for answers to three topics.First, what were Augustine's reasons for judging slavery permissible? Second, what the relationship is in Augustine's thought between chattel slavery and slavery to God.
And third, what areas of Augustine's broader ethics and politics are most implicated by his account of slavery.
I figured that once I had a good sense for where the field was on these three questions, I'd be able to better answer my own questions about Augustine and Lactantius.
Much to my surprise, there wasn't a significant literature on Augustine and slavery, and certainly there was nothing out there that answered these three questions.
I found this especially striking because the secondary literature on Augustine is so immense.So I broached the problem to my advisor, and he suggested that I write the book that addresses that, and I'm so glad that he did.
Yeah, I'm glad he did too.Great.So the book, it has three kind of big parts.The first asks about the kind of markers of human slavery and how Roman philosophers thought about human slavery.
The second part gets us thinking about slavery between heaven and earth.And then the third part comes back and asks how slavery organized thinking around religion and politics.So let's start off with the first section.
I mean, this is broad, but can you tell us what was slavery like in Rome?And what kind of characteristics did these philosophers kind of think marked somebody as a slave?
Yeah, so that's a great question.And I'll preface my answer with the caveat that slavery's details look different at different times in Roman history and at different parts of Rome.
But we can, in general, say that slavery was a crucial aspect of the Roman economy and also the social life for much of Rome's history.
It's difficult to determine the precise size of the slave population, which is one question people are sometimes interested in.But some scholars have pretty good estimates.
Walter Scheidel estimates that when Roman slavery was at its peak, about 15% to 25% of the population of Italy was enslaved.
Karl Harper has estimated the population of slaves during the later Roman Empire, so closer to Augustine's day, at around 10 to 15%.So these figures are better at giving us a sense of the order of magnitude rather than really precise numbers.
But in any case, what we're talking about is millions of slaves. So slaves were property and a source of labor.Many large, wealthy landowners depended on slaves or tenant farmers for agricultural labor.
But slaves were even more commonly found in the domestic context, especially in Augustine's day, running the house, taking care of children, waiting on their masters and mistresses.
That's not to say that slaves were only used for what people today might carelessly call unskilled labor, by which I think people often mean jobs for which formal education is not required, unlike in the antebellum United States, for instance, where many slave states made it illegal to educate slaves.
In ancient Rome, many slaves worked in what Molenski has called knowledge production and curation. So for example, you had many slaves who were doctors and accountants, architects and business managers, jobs like that.
Slaves were not generally assumed to be subhuman per se.Still, we should be clear-eyed about the legal status of Roman slaves.So fundamentally, slaves lacked the rights of citizenship.
They could not vote or bring complaints against their masters, and their testimony was considered inherently untrustworthy They therefore lacked one especially important instrument of social power to contend with mistreatment from their masters.
It's no surprise then that they were often beaten, whipped, and sexually abused.Slaves tended to die far younger than did the average Roman.
Of course, since slaves were property, if a master's slave was harmed, the master could bring a case against the party that harmed his slave.But legally speaking, the victim in this case would have been considered the master, not the slave.
Accordingly, redress for such a wrong would have been given to the master rather than the slave. So in the book, I emphasize that Roman jurists and philosophers, including Augustine, understood slaves to be human, to be dominated, and to be property.
As humans, they could be entrusted to develop skills and to perform functions that are property humans.As property, they could be bought and sold and lacked legal rights of their own standing.
And as dominated, they lacked recourse to shield themselves from the abuse that comes with being human.
Yeah, that's a really helpful way to see how they're conceptualizing this.Human-dominated and property.And sometimes those can seem like contradictions, but those seem to be everywhere.And if they're contradictions, so be it.
It gets us from what was slavery like in a broad general daily life sense to how four different Romans, Cicero, Seneca, Cantius, and Augustine, thought of slavery.So we're really working with a long duree here.
We've got four Romans over five centuries. And part of the point here is to show that even at the highest levels of society, people are still disagreeing about the morality and the aims of slavery.
So it's not just that slaves are thinking that slavery is bad and that the emperor thinks that it's great or something. like that.
But people whose writings we still read today, they're really disagreeing about what the point of slavery was and those kinds of things.So can you tell us some of the big questions that slavery is pushing philosophers to ask?
And what, if anything, makes Augustine distinctive in that kind of genealogy that you're drawing out there?
Sure.So some of the main questions that many ancient philosophers who are thinking about slavery ask are first, is slavery bad?And if so, why?Is it wrong?If so, why?Second, do masters have duties towards their slaves?If so, what are those duties?
And third, what are the relevant kinds of freedom?And how does chattel slavery fit in or not fit in with these kinds of freedom? So as you say, I trace four Romans accounts of slavery, Cicero, Seneca, Lactantius, and Augustine on this question.
And I'll say something about each of them.For Cicero, we should remember that he's a statesman and a lawyer in addition to being a philosopher.
And his writings that discuss the concepts of slavery and domination were produced towards the end of his life against the specter of the ascendant Julius Caesar. It's in this context that Cicero developed a conception of slavery as political.
So borrowing from Roman law, Cicero took slavery to be being under the arbitrary rule of another person. And he worried that tyranny, and here he had in mind Julius Caesar and then later Mark Antony, he worried that tyranny enslaves citizens.
But of course, in Roman law, one of the primary benefits of citizenship was your liberty.And so Cicero thought tyranny robs citizens of the very thing that makes them citizens.It is, in this sense, the ultimate political crime.
Now, Augustine interpreted Cicero as holding that only some people are eligible for citizenship, and therefore slavery is fitting and beneficial for the others.Whether Cicero in fact believed this, last point, is not at all clear from his writings.
But what matters for my argument is that Augustine thought that this is what Cicero believed.So Augustine attributes this to Cicero. If we jump forward to Seneca, we see him taking a rather different approach to analyzing slavery.
So Seneca was writing during the imperial period, and he even served as an advisor to the Emperor Nero.Cicero's worries that kings and emperors are not so distant from tyrants was not Seneca's concern.
Rather, he was a Stoic, and like other Stoics, he believed that the only matters of ultimate significance are those under your control. For the most part, you can't choose whether you're a slave.
You were likely a slave because you were born as one or because you had been captured in war.And since this is out of your control, Seneca thought, it isn't of ultimate significance.By contrast, Seneca says, you can control your character.
You can control whether you're virtuous.Seneca argued that virtue is true freedom and truly good.Vice is true slavery and truly bad.But whether you're chattel is morally indifferent.
Now, if we jump forward to Lactantius, so Lactantius is a third and fourth century North African convert to Christianity.
And much of his writing emerged out of an explicitly polemical context in the wake of the Diocletianic persecution that began in the year 303.
So before 303, Lactantius had been a professor of rhetoric in Nicomedia, which was the eastern capital of the Roman Empire at the time.And during and after the Diocletianic persecution,
like Tantius took to defending Christians and Christianity against Roman traditional religionists, including philosophical critics of Christianity like the Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry.
One of the things like Tantius sought to do was to render Christian theology continuous with and even superior to the best of traditional Roman literature, history, and philosophy.
He wanted to show that it was the non-Christians rather than the Christians who helped to bad impious and superstitious religion.So writing within this framework, Lactantius argued that everyone is a slave of God.
He said that non-Christians flee from the true God and take on other gods as counterfeit masters.He thought that chattel slavery is a result of bad religion.
So humans who enslave other humans usurp the role of master that belongs to the true God alone. And he argued that the practices of slavery in Greece and Rome were evidence that Greece and Rome were fundamentally unjust.
A century or, yeah, a little over a century later, Augustine, a North African Christian bishop, like Lactantius, was writing City of God, which is the book from which we get sort of his most extended discussion of slavery.
what Augustine had also converted to Christianity.
I described him as a bricoleur borrowing from this philosopher or school and that philosopher or school, usually without much anxiety about whether the pieces he was cobbling together were compatible with each other on their own terms.
When repurposing earlier thinkers in this way, Augustine's primary goal was to show that the best thinkers properly understood in their own ways pointed to Christianity.And I argue that Augustine's account of slavery reflects this kind of bricolage.
From Lactantius, he took the idea that everyone is a slave of God.He agreed with Lactantius that this means that God has the authority to discipline and punish humans in whatever way he so chooses to bring them back into faithful service.
And one such punishment that God uses, Augustine thought, is child slavery. Augustine would have disagreed since he thought that chattel slavery usurps God's authority.
So Augustine needed to explain why chattel slavery is not inherently bad or wrong, the way Lactantius thought it was.So to do this, he borrowed from Seneca.
He took up the idea that the only kind of slavery that's ultimately significant is that which makes a person vicious.And for Augustine, that's sin.So since you can be a chattel slave without being a slave of sin, chattel slavery isn't inherently bad.
But then you might think, well, but isn't everyone kind of subject to slavery to sin?So isn't it arbitrary that some people end up as chattel and other people don't?
And to address this problem, Augustine takes from Cicero the idea that chattel slavery can benefit slaves.Again, it's not clear this is Cicero's view, but Augustine thinks it's Cicero's view.
And in particular, Augustine held that when all goes well, masters help their slaves become Christians. he helps them return to faithful slavery to God.We can use this framework to then sort of turn to the three questions that I raised.
So for Augustine, is chattel slavery inherently bad or wrong?No, not inherently.Do masters have duties to their slaves?Yes, to help their slaves become faithful slaves of God, which is to say, to help their slaves become Christians.
And what are the relevant kinds of freedom?Well, the most important freedom is freedom from sin. Slavery to sin is the only absolutely bad form of slavery.
Childless slavery turns out to just be one tool that God might use to free people from this kind of slavery.
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Yeah, that's, that's a really helpful kind of breakdown and there's, there's a lot in there, you know, listeners may need to like go back and try to get some, some of that again, but part of what I'm hearing you say too is that that kind of, you know, bricolage type message, I mean, Augustine is doing that, but also if we're trying to think about a broader Roman understandings of slavery.
you know, one thing that you're showing us is that, you know, with these four different Romans, you know, it was possible to think a lot of different things about slavery, and kind of seeing how they're all doing this kind of recollaging, like, you could hold some of Cicero's view and some of Seneca's view and some of Augustine's view, like, that probably all just kind of, you know, mashed around in your head for a little bit.
And, you know, one of the kind of remarkable things that you that you show is how Augustine ends up kind of winning the day with some of those arguments, even as the other ideas are kind of still out there.
There might still be a sense of like, well, slavery is kind of wrong, but maybe it's also inevitable. It's one of these contradictions that just lives on, and there's no resolving it because the things on the ground just aren't resolved.
Slavery still is everywhere, and so people have these contradictory thoughts, and they're just trying to mishmash different views together to reconcile what they're thinking.
Yeah, you know, so when we turn from slaves of men or kind of human slavery to slaves of God, the book kind of pauses and tries to explain, you know, what do we mean by religion in the Roman Empire?
So Augustine is a Christian, of course, but he's also a Roman, and his literary and philosophical formation was as if not more invested in Cicero than it was in, I don't know, Tertullian or Ambrose or someone, right?
Like, he's reading a lot of Cicero in his life. So for Romans, like Cicero or Seneca, and for Romans like Titius or Augustine, religion is about virtue and it's about justice.
And if I'm reading you right, you say that justice is about giving God what we owe God, and virtue is both about dispositions, like our orientation towards the world, and it's about actions, like what we actually do.
And he describes it as a mean between superstition and impiety. So maybe you can tell us about this kind of nexus of religion, virtue, and justice, and how Christians draw on those classical ideas as they end up forming their own.
Yeah, thanks.I want to say something about that, but maybe I can say something really quickly about the sort of complex intellectual milieu that you were referring to earlier, which is, I think, really perceptive.
Just to give one or two examples of the complexity
So one of the great third century Roman jurists is a fellow named Ulpian, and Ulpian's legal writings form a great deal of the theoretical basis for so much of what Roman legal theory gets developed in late antiquity, especially.
And Ulpian has this sort of fundamental contradiction that he maybe doesn't see as a contradiction, but to the contemporary reader, you can't help but and is seen as a contradiction when he discusses the problem of slavery.
So opium is explicit that there is no such thing as natural slavery, that nature does not designate anyone as a slave.
And some of his contemporary interpreters, including Tony Honore, the great scholar of Roman legal theory in the 20th century, has said that for opium, this actually means that slavery is immoral, because if something contradicts what the natural law designates,
then it's wrong, that's Bonneret's interpretation.And yet for Olpian, slavery is just a matter of civil law.It's a matter of, so it's politically justified.And so the contemporary reader is apt to think, wait, how in the world is slavery both
illegal, immoral, and legal in the civil sense.And yet this is just the complexity of Roman law and philosophy.
And as you say, the complexity is one that just, it doesn't get resolved at a theoretical level, it just sort of has to work itself out in practice.
Yeah, yeah.And we see similar things around, you know, like slaves being both, like, property and human at the same time.And like, that just seems like, like, you know, like, they weren't they were viewed as like animals.
And like, yes, that is part of the rhetoric, but they were also quite human.And like, part of, you know, studying slavery in the Roman world, and like, requires being able to see both of those things at the same time.
I mean, I think I think you showed that really Well, sorry, I'm interrupting you again.So let's get to religion.So religion and virtue and justice, how is it that the Christians draw on those big ideas as they're forming their own?
Sure.So probably, as you say, the most important person for Lactantius and Augustine in thinking about religion is Cicero.Think about the concept of religion is Cicero.So I'll start with him.One of the things
that Cicero was trying to do in his texts on the nature of the gods and on divination, is he's trying to explain what religion is and how it works.
For him, the word religio, from which we get our English word religion, picks out several interrelated concepts.
And so one challenge when you're reading Cicero is just getting clear on which of the things he means to refer to when he uses the word religio.
One of the things I argue in the book is that one sense of religio that Cicero sought to establish was religio as a virtue.
And for him, religio is the virtue that governs how a person relates to the practices, traditions, and institutions that have been passed down to you that concern the gods.
So a person who has the virtue of religio relates to those practices, traditions, and institutions properly. What does that mean?Well, Cicero sort of clarifies this by distinguishing religio from the vices of superstition and impiety.
He associated impiety with neglecting the gods.If you completely ignore the received practices, institutions, and traditions, if you think, well, this is all just sort of bunk,
Well, then you're going to neglect the gods, he feared, and you're going to neglect the gods that the practices, institutions, and traditions refer to.On the other hand,
The problem of superstition is associated with credulously, uncritically taking up the received practices, institutions, and traditions.
So for instance, Cicero thought that professional soothsayers who took people's money to perform specious practices that they called divination were just preying on common people's superstition.
So the virtue of religio is what helps a person to sort of critically examine what she's received and then make wise choices about what to continue and what to adapt and what to leave by the wayside.
Now, Lactantius endorsed a lot of Cicero's picture.He agreed that religio charts the path between the vices of superstition and impiety. And he thought that religio gives the true God his due, which Lactantius took to be absolute worship.
Impiety fails to give the true God absolute worship, and superstition directs worship to the wrong deity.Notice, though, that on this framework, everyone who worships the wrong deity is both superstitious and impious.
They're superstitious, and by stipulation, they direct worship to the wrong deity. But they're also impious because they direct worship to the wrong deity, and in doing so fail to give all worship to God, which is what God is due.
And so for Lactantius, superstition and impiety are usually two sides of the same coin.
I was going to say, well, then Augustine, I think, endorsed Lactantius' account of religion essentially wholesale.He also thematized an idea that Lactantius the tensions have developed, that true worship involves slavery to whatever you worship.
And so Augustine held, since true worship, true religion, involves the true worship of the true God, true religion is marked by a sort of voluntary submission to your status as a slave of the true God.
Anything less than this, anything less than sort of the devotion of a faithful slave is impiety, and Augustine associated this with fugitivity.Our word fugitive, your listeners may know, is just, it comes from the Latin fugit, which is to flee.
So a fugitive is just one who flees, and that's what Augustine is referring to when he talks about non-Christians as non-faithful slaves of God.Those who fail to submit to slavery to the true God are runaway slaves.
Many such people end up worshiping false gods, and therefore become slaves of those gods, and Augustine called that superstition.And so for him,
the concepts of impiety, religion, and superstition turn out to never be so far from the concept of slavery.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.That's what I was going to just kind of make sure that the listeners got, is to see just how central slavery ends up becoming for these ideas of religion and virtue and justice.
I mean, I know that in some accounts, like, I don't know, from like Aristotle on, where there were, as you said before, ideas that people are kind of naturally born slaves, and Augustine really doesn't think that.
But he doesn't think that kind of for the opposite reason that somebody might think.It's because he thinks everybody is actually born and essentially remains a slave, that liberation is not the goal of a Christian life.Real freedom is real slavery.
But can you kind of flesh that out for us?Why is slavery inescapable, according to Augustine?
Yeah, thanks.There are at least two senses in which Augustine thought slavery was inescapable.The first is his commitment that everyone is a slave of God.So Augustine thought that this was true in virtue of humans being created.
Everything that's created is a slave of God.He's explicit about that.Everything except for God is created.And so everything except for God is a slave of God.And that includes humans.So in this respect, slavery is inescapable.
You can't escape having been created. And so you can't escape being a slave of God.Some humans, he thinks, try to resist this.And as mentioned earlier, Augustine called such people fugitives, runaways.
So in his picture of the world, all humans are either faithful slaves of God or runaways.Now, Augustine thought that runaways are looking for freedom from God.
But what they get instead is slavery to other things, namely to whatever it is they care the most about.
So he thinks that some people are obsessed with pleasure, and other people are obsessed with honor, and other people are obsessed with discovery, knowledge. Augustine thought that each group of people just described is enslaved to something.
So the first group is just enslaved to pleasure, and the second group is just enslaved to honor, and the third is just enslaved to knowledge.You're a slave of whatever it is you value most.
So in this sense, second sense, slavery is also inescapable because God's runaway slaves only end up running to other masters and becoming slaves of those new masters. their search for freedom lands them in an alternative form of slavery.
Augustine thought that since slavery is inevitable, you might as well have a good master.And the only good master, the only truly good master, he thought, is God.
And so for this reason, slavery to God is the most preferable situation a person could end up in.It's preferable because every other alternative is a slavery to a bad master.
Yeah, yeah.One of the examples he gives, if I'm remembering this right, what a fugitive slave looks like is the prodigal son.Is that right?Am I remembering that right?Yeah.
So, I mean, that teaches us both something about what it means to be a runaway slave, but also, I mean, thinking about that story, he's trying to say something about what it means for God to be the master, right?
So maybe we can kind of turn from, you know, what does it mean that slavery is inescapable to what does it say about God, that God is a slave?So I go, yeah, sorry, that God is the master.
Can you kind of flip that for us and say, you know, what do we learn about God by calling God the master?
So, as you rightly know, some Christians have thought that the image of slavery to God indicates that humans depend on God.And Augustine agreed with this, but he also thought the language of slavery to God tells us even more.
Namely, he thought that because God is our master, we are not entitled to question or talk back to God.God is not accountable to us.
Now, one reason that this is very interesting for Augustine is that, in general, he actually held that legitimate authority requires accountability.
He explicitly said that this is true of the rule of priests over parishioners, of civil magistrates over citizens.He even thought it was true of the Roman gods over the Romans.But he carved out one exception, and that's for his god.
Why this exception? because God, only God, is absolutely master over humans.So this is a constant theme of the sermons.
He says to his parishioners, if you think that, if you don't understand what God is doing, if you think that God is mistreating you, your responsibility is to trust and obey.Who are you that you should talk back to God?
He says, citing Romans, you are, you're just a slave, and just like a slave, your job is to just obey and to take it.
Yeah, yeah.Can you say a little bit more about kind of the role of coercion in that kind of mastery?
Sure.So one of the primary images of the master's course of power over the slave in Roman antiquity is the whip. The whip symbolized the master's power to interfere with his slave with impunity.
Because his slave lacked legal recourse to resist his master or to hold him accountable, slaves were at their master's mercy.And this power was central to the master's coercing slaves successfully.
Augustine understood that this subject position being at the mercy of another person, though central to the experience of a slave, was not wholly unique to them.It's worth emphasizing that in Confessions, Book 9, we find a disturbing juxtaposition.
Augustine's parents were named Monica and Patricius. And at first, Patricia's mother, Monica's mother-in-law, disliked Monica.But as Augustine tells it, Monica's patient and meek disposition eventually won her mother-in-law over.
In fact, Patricius's mother became so fond of Monica that when she would hear Patricius's slaves speaking ill of Monica, she would beg Patricius to whip the slaves as punishment.This is the household in which Augustine grew up.
He understood that the violence of the lash was a central tool for masters to control their slaves. So why do I call this the disturbing juxtaposition?I mean, it's disturbing on its own, but then there's a further disturbing part.
So immediately before telling this story, the one I've just told you, Augustine reports that when he was growing up, many of the men in the town in which he lived were violent and they beat their wives.
These were men, some of whom were actually not reputed to be especially violent, and yet they'd still beat their wives. By contrast, Patricius, among the townspeople, had a very violent reputation.
And as we've just seen, he was clearly capable of violence.And yet Augustine says that Monica never bore the marks of Patricius's violence.
And it seems that other women in the town had the same judgment that Augustine did because they asked Monica, how do you avoid your husband beating you?What is it that you're doing that he's not hitting you the way our husbands are hitting us?
Monica's response to them was that they should think of themselves as their husband's slaves, to not set themselves against their masters, but instead obey their husbands with meekness and with patience.
So Monica seems to have understood her own position as, in important ways, analogous, though of course not identical, to slavery.
And as such, making peace with her own subjection was a strategy for avoiding violence and a strategy she committed to other women.And so we see that violence was an instrument of coercion.
Violence as an instrument of coercion was a means for controlling not just slaves, but other members of the Roman household, especially wives.
Now, it's hard to read Augustine's encouragement to Christians confused or frustrated with God and not hear echoes of Monica's exhortations to the other wives in the town.What should a Christian do when she is unhappy or confused by God's decisions?
Don't talk back to God or even question him.Trust and obey because God is your master. He holds the power of the whip over you.And indeed, Augustine says, all your life on earth is your beating.
So accept your position, submit to his will, and cry out to the hands that are whipping you.Augustine says, have mercy on us, O Lord, or O Master, have mercy.For Augustine, God's coercive power over humans is a central aspect of his masterly rule.
And the proper human response to this mastery echoes what he took to be the proper human response to at least some other forms of intra-human domination.
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Yeah, that's like you said, kind of like disturbing, but clarifying. Yeah, that part of the book then leads into the final section.
So we kind of start off with what human slavery is like and then what this kind of universal slavery or slavery between heaven and earth is like, where we get these ideas around justice and virtue and religion.
And then we jump into kind of how that more nuanced understanding of how slavery is kind of saturating all of those big ideas. And we get back into how to think about religion and politics in Rome most broadly.And you start off with the law.
And laws for Cicero were a kind of, he calls them a shield against the sharp rule of slavery, right?So maybe you can kind of compare Cicero's understanding of what the point of the law is with Augustine's idea about what the point of the law is.
Or maybe like, how is Augustine's different understanding of slavery helping us understand how he sees the law differently than someone like Cicero might have.
Sure.So remember that for Cicero, the main form of slavery that exercised him was the phenomenon of citizens being dominated by pirates.
Cicero took law to be one of the central means, perhaps even the central means, by which a people can resist tyranny.So here's how.
When a city is ruled by laws that are controlled by the citizens, then the citizens can use these laws to govern themselves, and they are therefore not under the arbitrary rule of a tyrant.Accordingly,
One of the first things that someone who aspires to dictatorship or tyranny will do in his attempt to usurp the rule of law or otherwise hijack the legislative process.
For Cicero, laws help secure self-governance and therefore freedom since freedom, or since for him, the most important kind of freedom is the freedom to rule oneself, right?
So for him, slavery, freedom, law kind of work together this kind of nice tight picture.
Augustine had a quite different conception of slavery, and therefore a different conception of freedom, and therefore a different conception of what the laws can and should aim to achieve.As we've said, he thought that slavery was inevitable.
You're going to be God's slave.The only question is whether you're going to be a runaway or whether you're going to be faithful.
On self-rule, well, fugitives think they're ruling themselves, but Augustine thought that this just leads to all kinds of self-harm.And anyway, they aren't really ruling themselves because even they submit to these other masters.
And so Augustine agreed with Cicero that the best aim of law is to help you live well.And he even agreed with Cicero that law at its best can help you achieve a kind of freedom.
But unlike Cicero, Augustine did not think that freedom consists in self-governance.Rather, freedom consists in submission to God's rule.
For this reason, while Cicero wanted to make sure that citizens have a say in the laws that govern them, Augustine wasn't concerned about this at all, from his perspective.It is good that God rules us without our input.
If we were to have a say in God's law, we would only mess things up.Law helps secure freedom, but it's a freedom that's constituted by faithful slavery to God. rather than self-governance.
For this reason, it's reasonable to think of Augustine's view of law as a kind of paternalism, a kind of theological paternalism.He says things about humans vis-a-vis God, the kinds of things that sometimes parents will say about their own children.
We can't let our children make all of these decisions for themselves.It'd be bad for them.That's kind of how Augustine is thinking about God's law with respect to humans.
Yeah, yeah, because kind of, I don't like like for Cicero there's a kind of, I don't like a dualism between slavery and law, like, like, you only have one kind of rule or the other like either we have a master servant relationship or we have a citizenship type relationship, but, but for Augustine.
There really is no outside of that slavery relationship.You can make laws, but they're all going to exist in that broader context of slavery.I don't know, do what you want, but the laws are part of this bigger slavery type relationship.
They're not the opposite of it. Yeah, and we see something similar with citizenship, right?For Cicero, slaves are kind of the opposite of citizens, right?
Citizens rule themselves, slaves are ruled, citizens hold authorities accountable, slaves are dominated.But Augustine has a different kind of model of citizenship.So it's like citizenship in the city of God rather than
Rome, but it's also a city of, you call them citizen slaves.Can you tell us what you mean by that?
And maybe more specifically, how does Augustine, as you write, turn Roman political theory against Roman political practice, especially in his kind of critique of Roman imperialism?
Yeah, so these are big questions, and I'll try my best to answer them as simply and straightforwardly as I can.So Augustine recognized that an important aspect of Rome's self-conception was that Romans were free people.
They valorized their freedom in their history and literature and political theory.They had propaganda about Romans as free people emblazoned on their coins.But as most of us know, what we often call freedom comes at a price.
Augustine noticed that the price of Roman freedom was its subjugation of its neighbors. Rome enjoyed the thing it called freedom, but it secured this by enslaving and dominating and exploiting surrounding peoples.
And Augustine thought that this was a serious problem for those who wished to valorize Rome.Augustine thought this was unjust.Securing the political flourishing of one people by wronging another people is by definition wrong.
And Augustine didn't think that Rome had any good answers to this problem. He considered at some length one answer pursued by Cicero in On the Republic and On Duties.
In these two texts, Cicero argued that justice ought to be done even when it apparently conflicts with one's own personal benefit.But Augustine thought that Rome never actually enacted this kind of Ciceronian principle.
So that's what I mean when I say he turned Roman political theory against Roman political practice. Rome never lived up, he said, to the high-minded principles its best political theorist laid out.But this isn't just Rome's problem.
He actually thought that it would be impossible for any political community to live according to such principles unless it recognized itself as slaves of God and unless it was committed to living as faithful slaves of God.
So the reasons for this are somewhat complicated, but I think they boil down to this. political communities are fundamentally committed to their own survival.And they're also organized around the things they value.Augustine called those things goods.
So citizens of a political community are those who share in those goods.And political communities are organized around the goods that citizens share.And one of those goods is its own survival.
So suppose that you have a community that has shared goods like land or other material resources or even something a bit less material like glory.
Augustine thought, well, it's going to do whatever it can to retain and expand its control over those goods.If it doesn't do that, it'll die off. And so this is why Rome expanded its land and its control over material resources.
This is why Rome sought glory in conquering neighboring peoples.
Rome's political success was necessarily at odds with its justice towards its neighbors, since acquiring the goods that constituted the political community required that it subjugate its neighbors.
And like I said, Augustine didn't think this was peculiar to Rome.He just thought that Rome was sort of the perfect example.
Because Augustine thought every community, or almost every community, is organized around goods in this way, almost every community will have a conflict between its political survival and justice.
The only solution, he thought, is a community whose shared goods are themselves values like justice and goodness.
The only way for a political community's survival to not conflict with justice is if the goods that constitute the community include justice itself.
And so each citizen of such a community must share in the good of justice to be a member of that community.For Augustine, the only way that a human could actually be committed to justice in this way is if they submit their will to God's will.
But this is just what Augustine meant by slavery to God. And so the only way to have a just political community is if the community is constituted by citizens who are slaves of God.And so that's why I call them citizen slaves.
It's worth just also emphasizing quickly that for Augustine, such a community is necessarily kind of expansive in the sense that it draws in people everywhere.So Romans defined themselves against their neighbors.We are Romans, they are not.
This is how citizenship works in pretty much every nation state that exists today, as I understand it.
You have citizens of one country, and while dual citizenship or multiple citizenship is in general possible, to be a citizen of one place is in general to not be a citizen of some other place.It's certainly to not be a citizen of every.
But for Augustine, the kind of justice he's after is only achievable if every single person on earth is in principle capable of citizenship in your political community.
Otherwise, this sort of conflict between self and other is always at least potential.It's always at least on the horizon.
Yeah, yeah.And that's, that's a really nice transition into the last chapter.
So we move there from kind of individuals where like every single person needs to become a slave to God or a citizen slave to kind of, well, like, what does a republic look like?
So we move kind of from, you know, lots of individual people to kind of thinking more, I don't know, like a a pre-modern sociologist or something, kind of like as a collective, right?
And you focus in on the city of God here, you know, it's Augustine's back, Mopus, and the city of God, it's a defense of Christians, and it's a rejection of the blame of the sacking of Rome, right?
So pagans are accusing Christians of ending Rome's nearly thousand-year-old dominance, and You know, they say Christians kind of lost the republic.
And Augustine has this kind of counterintuitive take, kind of like his take on slavery, where he says, like, look, like, you know, it's not the case that some people are born natural slaves.It's just the case that everybody is a slave.
And he gives a similar kind of spin on Rome.He says, like, you know, I'm not saying Rome isn't falling.You know, he didn't see that, like, Rome would really fall.But he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, like, sure, Rome is falling.
But the problem was, Rome was never really a republic. And you're like, what?And he says, well, because where there's no justice, there is no republic.And in Rome, there was no justice like that.
So it's a, you know, it's, it's almost like a cheeky response.But it's, you know, it's a it's a hot take, but it is.And so, you know, why was there no justice in Rome?Like, how does he actually kind of spin this out?
And maybe you can get it at the importance of slavery to this, this idea of true justice, according to Augustine.
Yeah, absolutely.So the question, why did Augustine think Rome lacked justice or true justice, is really complicated.It might be the single question that has vexed scholars the most in City of God interpretation.
In book two of City of God, Augustine brings up Cicero's definition of a republic.So Cicero defines a republic as a group of people who share amongst themselves justice.
And he says, Augustine says, that by the end of City of God, he'll have shown that according to Cicero's definition, Rome was never a republic.
That's a tall order since Cicero's raised the definition of Republic in order to mount what he took to be a defense of the Roman Republic.
So Augustine thinks he's going to use Cicero's definition to prove precisely the opposite of what Cicero is trying to do.
Okay, then Augustine seems to drop the question for almost 17 books until essentially what feels like out of nowhere in book 19, he says, and so we've shown that by Cicero's definition, Rome was never a republic.
Why he takes himself to have answered this question is not at all obvious.It's challenging in part because Augustine leaves the details of what seemed to be the answer really underdeveloped.
And so a lot of scholarship is trying to fill in the gaps of what Augustine probably meant when he said, well, not justice.I take up this question over two chapters in the book, so I'm just going to try and give a broad picture here.
So Augustine thought that the virtue of justice is what's required to get you to pursue justice, even at the cost of significant benefits to yourself.So this is the kind of thing that we have seen in Cicero, as I mentioned earlier.
The virtue of justice helps you pursue justice when it's easy, but especially when it's hard.
Augustine thought that if you test Rome's history against the Ciceronian standard, you'd have to conclude that Rome didn't pursue justice when doing so was hard.
And so that's why he spends so much time outlining Rome's moral failures in sometimes painstaking detail.And so this is the sense in which they lacked the virtue of true justice.Justice, like all virtues, is difficult.
In the political arena, it's difficult because of the temptations that confront earthly cities.Earthly cities, as we talked about earlier, tend to be preoccupied with acquiring material goods, with becoming glorious, with exerting power over others.
And Augustine thought that because earthly cities have these preoccupations, it's going to be very difficult for them to have the virtue of justice.
The only solution is that people submit their will to the good itself, which of course he identified with God, and that's slavery to God.
And so the human preoccupation with material goods and glory and power turns out to itself be rooted in a kind of human resistance to divine mastery.
Only a community that prefers suffering injustice to inflicting it will be able to avoid these wrongs.And only a community that accepts its slavery to God will have those preferences.
Yeah, you have this really great passage in your book.Maybe I can just read it quickly.You write, The heavenly city is a commonwealth.God is the good held in common among its citizens.
The true religion establishes the heavenly city, binding its citizens together by being each of them to God. The true citizens of the heavenly city are the faithful slaves of God.
Earthly cities, by contrast, are organized around scarce competitive goods.
Seeking control of these competitive goods, members of earthly cities either seek to dominate one another or dominate members of other cities, but they end up dominated by their lust for domination.
I think that's a nice kind of clear way that he's putting it there. Okay, great.I've taken a lot of your time already, but maybe we can take a step back a little bit as we wrap up.
Where do you see this book intervening within scholarship on Augustine or late antiquity or philosophy?What do you hope readers outside of our small professor circles, what do you hope they will take from a book like this?
Yeah, thanks for this question.It means a lot to me.I'll try to answer it. a few levels of abstraction.So most narrowly, as I said at the start, I began writing this book because I had a bunch of questions about Augustine and slavery.
And at the time, the secondary literature on the topic was rather thin.But thankfully, things are changing a bit, which is really encouraging.
I hope that people who are interested in early Christianity or in Augustine or the history of slavery will find in this book a clear account of Augustine's reasons for justifying slavery
of the relationship between chattel slavery and slavery to God and his thought, and of some of the ways the concept of slavery functions in his broader ethics and politics.
So if someone picks up this book and reads it and comes away with a clearer sense of those three topics, I'll be delighted, even if nothing else happens.But if we step back a little,
One thing that Augustine scholars often note is that many of Augustine's readers come to him because he has a way of gripping your heart and your mind when you read him.
Even if you fiercely disagree with him, as I often do, there's something compellant that readers find difficult to shake.And this is, I think, one reason that it's so troubling that Augustine was essentially uncomplicatedly okay with slavery.
The most common responses to his justification of slavery are either to minimize slavery, minimize the badness of his view, or minimize the importance of slavery to his broader thought, or to abandon Augustine altogether, to suppose that there's nothing one could learn from him, since he was so horribly wrong on this matter of significant consequence.
One thing I'm trying to do in the book is chart a path between minimization and abandonment.
I want to show that we can't actually know what to do with Augustine, given his views on slavery, until we know what role slavery played in his broader thought.
That's the first question, and I don't know that we have, as a discipline or as a community of Augustine's readers, sufficiently handled that.So that's one reason I speak in the book so often of entanglements.
Augustine's views on a range of topics are entangled with his views about slavery. And we just need to identify the entanglements.We have to get eyes on the threads that connect the various topics.
Then, for those who think that Augustine may have something to teach us about the areas entangled with his views on slavery, be it his account of law, or his account of religion, or his account of citizenship, what such people will need to do is some hard work of disentangling the good from the bad.
And you can't disentangle unless you know what the entanglements are. And so I'd love if this book helps people understand those entanglements and prepare those who care about Augustine for the hard work of disentangle.
And then even for those who don't care about Augustine as such, I do think his position in the history of theology and philosophy and religion is so profound that we might expect to see reproductions of Augustinian ways of thinking in the many later thinkers who'd be influenced.
identifying slavery's entanglements, and his thought then puts us in a position, I hope, to look for similar entanglements in as many medieval and modern.
The last thing I'll say is that I hope that this book can help exemplify a way of thinking about slavery in the history of philosophy.
Trying to tease out entanglements between thinkers' views on slavery and their views on other topics gives us a strategy for reading.So my way of reading Augustine, or my reading of Augustine in this way, I should say,
has been influenced a great deal by how some other scholars have read other figures.I'm thinking especially of Joaquin Adler on Kant and Robert Bernasconi on Kant as well, as well as Charles Mills on law.
So I don't take my method in this book to be wholly original to myself, but I'm excited that it seems that more and more scholars are adopting this kind of method.And I hope that my book shows its usefulness in an underexplored area.
I'd love to see more people applying this method to other thinkers, other figures in the history of philosophy.
Yeah, yeah, that's great.You know, charting a path between minimization and abandonment, it's such a helpful way to just try to understand what you're doing in the book and kind of the broader project there.Great.
So, all right, I'll always our last question.What are you working on next?
Too many things.I'm most excited about a new book on slavery.I'm in the early stages of writing.It's a philosophical history of slavery, trying to trace the interweaving histories of natural slavery and penal slavery. as justifications for slavery.
As listeners, I'm sure, are aware of in the 13th Amendment, we have this justification of slavery as a punishment that's retained even as slavery in general is abolished.And of course, natural slavery is an idea with a long and complicated history.
And so one thing I'm going to try and do in this new book is tell the story of how these justifications come together and tease apart from one another across a long scope of philosophy.
Great.Well, that sounds really great.I hope we can have you on when that's out.Tony, this was really great.Thanks for talking.
Thank you.Thanks for having me.
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