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Toni Alimi. Slaves of God: Augustine and Other Romans on Religion and Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024. 328pp. $42
Matthew Elia. The Problem of the Christian Master: Augustine in the Afterlife of Slavery. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024. 296pp. $45
When Christians confess that salvation comes through Christ, we are saying something very hard: that God’s salvation comes through a creation which bears the marks of sin. The salvation of the world does not happen by fiat, or by a pure act of will, but by God becoming incarnate in the same flesh through which the sin of the world came. All that God makes use of in the restoration of the world—the Scriptures, church tradition, the people of God—bear the marks of this damage. The question is thus not whether damaged goods are used by Christians, but what use they can be.
We are in an era in which what use we can make of damaged goods is a leading question, catching up art, music, historical figures, theologians. Consider a more recent example, and one closer to home for Christians. When Wendell Berry’s The Need to Be Whole—a substantial treatment of patriotism and racial prejudice—arrived in 2022, it was greeted with a mixture of appreciation and puzzlement. Readers quickly realized that the unspoken theme of the book was how to reckon with the most diabolical of American institutions: chattel slavery. Across this work of Berry’s, slavery and racism are treated as a complex wound, a wound both damaging to body and soul and also creating possibilities, alternately distancing whites and blacks while creating opportunities for cooperation and friendship between whites and blacks because of the proximity slavery created.
As two recent works on Augustine of Hippo and slavery demonstrate, Berry’s posture of trying to hold two things together—the reality of friendship and the abomination of slavery—is not unique. Matthew Elia’s The Problem of the Christian Master: Augustine in the Afterlife of Slavery, and Toni Alimi’s Slaves of God: Augustine and Other Romans on Religion and Politics, offer incisive investigations of the problem that Berry’s book raises: what do we do with Augustine, for whom positive attitudes regarding the institution of slavery and theological wisdom are so closely intertwined?
The stakes for how we answer this are much higher for Augustine of Hippo. He is the theologian, social philosopher, and bishop whose work sits at the river’s head of much of 1700 years of Christian theology. Without Augustine, western articulations of original sin, political life, hermeneutics, and free will are without a proponent. Augustine, a saint in the ecumenical church, affects the shape of Christian theology since the 5th century, both in his ancient appropriations and in modern interpreters looking to the saint’s work for political guidance.
But less appreciated and understood in the myriad appropriations of Augustine is the way in which his corpus consistently draws upon images of slavery, forming a “pervasive series of interrelated metaphors animating his treatment of God, sin, Christology, desire, order, virtue and freedom”, as Elia puts it. The question of Augustine’s use of slavery imagery burst back into view in Sarah Ruden’s 2018 translation of Confessions, in which every instance of “Lord” is rendered by Ruden as “Master”, lifting up Augustine’s persistent of use of dominus—the household master—as his preferred title for God. Augustine’s use of dominus as the title for God is part of the architecture of the “master’s house”, Elia says, a house which invites us to view the world—and indeed, theology—from the vantage point of the slave master.
Lest we try to rescue Augustine too quickly, we must attend to the evidence which Elia and Alimi marshall. In Augustine’s corpus, it is not that slavery is bad, but disobedient slaves are bad. That position toward slaves was common in Augustine’s day, but significant for Elia is the way in which this motif of slavery pervades Augustine’s thought: pilgrims are those who travel in contradistinction to slaves running away; political order is envisioned as a household in which the dominus benevolently rules; Christ is preeminently the humiliated slave who is exalted. Elia’s excavation, carried out in conversation with traditions of black political thought, highlights the manner in which Augustine’s corpus is inseparable from viewing slavery as not just an ordinary feature of social life, but a providential one which helps organize his theological categories.
It is the afterlife of this connection which Elia finds the most troubling. Rather than examine the explicit links between Augustine’s views of slavery and his doctrinal positions, the former has been treated independently of the latter, or worse, the latter is left untreated. Consider, for example, that for Augustine, slaves are the extensions of the master’s own body, and how this reflects Augustine’s understanding of divine providence. Or how Augustine held that it was right and good for masters (Christian or not) to discipline their slaves, and how this view reflects his understanding of governmental interventions on matters of religion. Even if we disavow slavery as an immoral action, the theology which descends from Augustine still taken up Augustine’s presumptions about the justification of slavery. And these presumptions, Elia describes, are everywhere: celebrations of policing, justified violence, and uncritical labor—and indeed, presuming the need for subordination. All of these are just some of the ways in which contemporary Augustinian thought continues to operate from the vantage point of the master. Elia’s primary target is Augustinian interpreters and inheritors here, but one can quickly see that these presumptions are taken up even by those who have never read Augustine.
Elia’s work stages a conversation between Black Studies and Augustine, and thus moves back and forth between past and present, concerned more with Augustine’s long shadow over the present as it has shaped theological sensibilities about tradition, power, and freedom. In doing so, there are moments in Elia when the historical Augustine is obscured or incompletely rendered, in order to give attention to Augustine’s influence in the present. But these quibbles with Elia’s work are minor compared with the questions which Elia raises concerning what we do with the imagery of slavery, prominent not only within Augustine’s work, but within Scripture itself.
It is easy for people living in political freedom to read Augustine's use of slavery as a spiritual metaphor, Elia suggests. But for those living as slaves in Augustine's day (and since), viewing the language of slavery as only metaphorical is insufficient. For Augustine’s own view was that slavery was not only justified, but providentially apt. His language of slavery to sin, slavery to God, and Christ as the doulos or “slave” needs to strike us, not just as metaphors but as social realities Augustine wants us to accept. As Elia writes, “I propose we let ourselves be troubled and stay troubled,” by the implications of the social reality Augustine builds. This is the first step to being able to ask questions about what it might mean to be good, true, or beautiful, what it means to be holy or free, if we do not assume that slavery—to God or to others—is something to be lifted up.
If we suspect that Elia is overreading Augustine’s position on slavery, Toni Alimi’s book comes with all of the receipts. Alimi’s Slaves of God is a first-rate work of classics scholarship, comparing the writings and treatment of slavery by Augustine against the backdrop of his own era. Drawing in the writings of Cicero, Lactantius, Seneca, and numerous other Christian and Roman authors, Alimi slowly paints a picture of Augustine very similar to Elia’s, but in many ways, more damning.
Elia’s descriptions of Augustine have one eye turned toward the present, and thus, are concerned with those elements of Augustine which have most directly shaped present reflections on theology and ethics. Alimi’s concerns are not with those of the present, but with Augustine’s own context, beginning with Augustine’s vision of the world as one in which slavery to God is universally expected. Slavery to false gods brings unhappiness, and only slavery to God brings true rest. God’s coercion of humanity, Alimi notes, serves this motif: we are unruly slaves who need to be brought back into the house of the good master, God.
Faithful slaves of God receive God himself as their inheritance, Alimi writes, and are expected to conduct themselves as representatives of the Master at every turn. In contrast to the Romans, who seek gods who allow them to behave violently and with abandon, the slaves of God are expected to renounce certain forms of coercion and domination. This theological vision is consonant with Augustine’s political thought as well. Chattel slavery, for Augustine, is one of those ways available to the world to help move the world toward its eternal good: good masters are those who help direct their slaves toward God. Chattel slavery, neither inherently moral nor immoral for Augustine, can be used morally and immorally, moving a slave toward God and true happiness, or away from God.
In summarizing his work, Alimi writes, “slavery was a controlling theme in Augustine’s thought. Chattel slavery is legitimated by slavery to God, which is in many ways Augustine’s fundamental description of the divine-human relationship. True religion returns fugitive slaves to their original master and establishes the city in which all of God’s faithful slaves are also citizens. Once one starts looking for slavery in Augustine’s thought, one finds it everywhere.” By everywhere, he means everywhere: in how Augustine construes creation, divine agency, divine friendship, Christology, political life, the working of God on the will. At every juncture, the “master’s house” motif which Elia highlights appears, beginning with humans as those creatures meant to be God’s slaves, all the way down.
It is not that Augustine simply a man of his age, for Augustine, Alimi shows, could have seen things otherwise. Citing examples from Cicero—from whom Augustine draws regularly—and from Lactantius, one of the extant contemporaries of Augustine, we see how these concerns for divine order, God’s activity, and virtue are accomplished without having chattel slavery as a governing motif. Cicero, opposing the use of chattel slavery, makes Augustine’s defenses all the more baffling, given Augustine’s pervasive citations of the Roman philosopher.
The subject of these books—Augustine’s relationship to slavery—has been taken up before, and the fine work of these two books will be taken up by scholars anew. And there seems to be no way out of avoiding their conclusion: the theological world of Augustine illuminates the dynamics of sin and salvation, even as it sees actual slavery as one of the vehicles by which God redeems the world. One way forward is that of sheer avoidance. We cannot, for example, read Augustine’s work on the dominating lust of the pagans as if it was only the pagans who exercised domination in the world, because of their slavery to sin. This is not a path available to us in reading Augustine: the slavery of the pagans to lust is only a bad form of slavery, with the slavery exercised by the Christian master the good form. The opposite of slavery to sin, for Augustine, was slavery to God. Indeed, for Augustine political and economic slavery could themselves be a providential vehicle for spiritual renewal of slaves.
But another way forward is that which both Elia and Alimi’s work offer. Elia’s work makes use of the concept of signification, that words have multiple meanings, and can obscure as much as they illuminate. Elia ends his book with a meditation on how reckoning with Augustine’s slavery imagery helps us to see the ways in which our own worlds are built on the domination of other people. Augustine’s use of slavery, for example, illuminates the dynamics of sin, but also for Elia invites us to ask what hides in the shadow of this metaphor: the justifications of power and coercion, and the denials of freedom and love which are now theologically justified in the present day. But Elia does not apply this logic to slavery itself: in what ways might the motif of slavery be resignified?
Alimi’s project—a largely descriptive venture—ends with a cryptic note which takes up briefly this very possibility. Augustine’s slavery imagery, Alimi concludes, is that which was appropriated both by slave evangelists of the 17th century, and by political mystics like Simone Weil. In the hands of William Edmunson, the language of slavery was designed to retain slaves in the political place, while freeing their souls toward God: Augustine’s best-case scenario for slaves. But in the hands of Weil, the language of slavery became a call to work for political liberation: she was God’s now, and her destiny was to give herself endlessly for the dehumanized workers of 20th century France. Slavery to God, for Weil, meant working for the economic and political liberation of the dehumanized worker. Strategies of reading theological figures against the grain—whether Augustine, Aquinas, or John Howard Yoder—have their limits. There is only so much that can be done by asking questions of internal consistency, of reading one aspect of a corpus against another, to try to repair internal weaknesses. What Alimi and Elia propose is something more radical: to let the troubling image stand, and ask how the image might undo itself.
Weil’s example is instructive here. She read slavery as meaning first a literal call to submit to God, but then second a call for her to undo political slavery. The call of God comes to her in a way which invites us to repair the damaged site of the call itself. The gold of the Egyptian is melted down for the temple of God. The high places of Asherah become the high places of God’s own worship. The cross, a weapon of torture, is tarried with and remade as the vehicle of God’s salvation. And, in Philemon, being co-slaves to God becomes the opportunity for Paul to invite Philemon to set Epaphroditus free from his own debt slavery. If there is a future for reading Augustine—or any theologian who, in pursuit of understanding God’s ways, justifies the unjust—it is this: the call of God, through damaged goods, entails healing the vehicle itself. No pure vehicle exists save Jesus himself.
The payoff for following Weil’s example here is that it likewise affords us a way to reckon not just with Augustine’s theology, but with the font of Augustine’s theology: Scripture’s own language surrounding slavery. Augustine’s own views on slavery did not emerge out of thin air, or simply as a matter of being a Roman citizen. As Alimi amply notes, there were contemporaries of Augustine who saw slavery differently. For Augustine was nothing if not a careful reader of Scripture–the imagery of slavery comes from the Scriptures themselves: in the Old Testament, in the Gospels, in Paul’s letters. The same difficulties come in Scripture as we see in Augustine: slavery is present as the debt slavery viewed as a providential mechanism in the Old Testament, as a metaphor for disciples in Jesus’ parables, as part of the conditions of church life in Paul’s churches.
And in each of these cases, as we see with Philemon, repair–and dissolution–of the institution seems to be in view. Slaves are not held forever, but set free in Jubillee; the disciples are no longer called slaves but friends; Onesimus returns to his master not as a fugitive but as a prospective (political) equal. That Augustine saw human enslavement to God as part of what it meant to be a time-bound creature does not mean that we need follow his lead here. Rather, it means that repairing Augustine’s theology has a Scriptural precedent in how Scripture itself treats the slavery of its own day: as that which we see clearly and that which we have the liberty to live without. As Weil demonstrates, we can read Scripture’s language on slavery in the spiritual sense, and in doing so, see the poverty of slavery’s literal sense, as Augustine himself did not.
This work of repair involves, as Elia points out, asking hard questions—and making even harder commitments—with respect to what that repair looks like. This is done not out of guilt so much as acknowledging that receiving a gift of God—in this case, Augustine’s theological wisdom—means receiving it in such a way that we honestly name the ways in which it damages, and the way in which it heals, and enabling the damaged aspects of these gifts to not be hidden away. For only if they remain troubling before us might the bearers of the gift too be healed.
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