Abstract
This essay finds in the thought of Augustine of Hippo a key moment in the development of a strand of the Western theological tradition I will call slave Christologies: theological accounts of the person and work of Jesus Christ that, drawing from the Philippians hymn (Phil 2:5–11), symbolically identify his body with the body of the enslaved, and in so doing, weave the order of slaveholding into the texture of Christian thought. I approach the political and theological implications of this tradition under the pressure of a twofold haunting: of the perennial, if hard to specify, interplay between ideas and forms of life, between the symbolic and the social; and of the contingent, specific historical afterlife of racial slavery which provides the conditions for contemporary Christian thought.
Introduction: A Tradition Haunted
Across the emerging Atlantic world of modernity, Christian slaveholding flourished. 1 For contemporary Christians, the notion that there is a slaveholding plausibly called “Christian” often unnerves, provoking a set of defensive counter-assertions—that slaveholders were clearly not true Christians at all, that abolitionists were the real Christians, that slavery results from secular modernity instead—with ensuing high dramas to sort out guilt and innocence, villains from heroes. 2 But the history we have, the history we inhabit resists moralizing of this kind. Instead, it yields entanglements—ambiguous, complex, unnervingly intimate relations: Christian thought entangled in the rise of global networks of commerce, entangled in the catastrophic violence of anti-Black slavery and anti-Native genocide, and entangled in an emerging order of racial hierarchy, one which linked “the intimacies of four continents” and extends slavery’s brutal afterlives into the present day. 3 Christian theology both envisioned and at times resisted this racial order, 4 and so it is inside its ongoing histories—particularly in the form of racial capitalism—that theology today must receive, inhabit, and remake the resources of its tradition. 5 It is precisely this sense of being haunted in thought, entangled in a past that is not yet past, which the present moment demands: to be responsible to histories of irreparable loss, if not responsible for them. 6
At issue in this essay is not whether something as large as “Western Christianity” or as internally variegated as “the Bible” can be said to be for slavery or against slavery, as vital as such debates have sometimes been. 7 Instead, I am interested in exploring the contemporary significance, for this tradition’s inheritors, of an unnerving possibility: what if the tradition’s widespread uses of slavery qua symbolic resource cannot be as neatly separated from its approach to slaveholding qua social institution as we usually assume? 8 By slavery qua symbolic resource, I mean the use of “metaphors”—let’s call them this, for now—drawn from a slave society, slavery imagery which enables the articulation of key theological ideas: that fallen human life is slavery to sin; that God is Dominus, master over creation; 9 that salvation is a kind of manumission, or a good enslavement to one’s divine Master (which paradoxically provides “true” freedom); and that central Christian virtues—obedience, humility, fidelity—find their exemplar in the figure of the good slave, while the fugitive slave forms a reliable image of human disobedience, pride, and rebellion. Such uses of slavery as symbolic resource would prove enduringly entangled in how Christians engaged “actual” slavery as a social institution: how slavery’s role in a fallen world was sanctioned theologically by God’s providence, how masters ought to conduct themselves, how (or if) enslaved people can be baptized or become monks, and how the moral status of enslaved people’s resistance is assessed within Christian forms of life.
Slavery symbols permeate the “high” theological resources which remain at the heart of much Christian thought today, especially in the mode of ressourcement—retrieval of classic sources for contemporary questions—while the “low” texts in this same tradition, its practical reasoning about the social realities of slavery, tend to fall quietly out of view. But the two went hand in hand. Theologies of retrieval long for the stability and coherence of tradition reclaimed, yet remain mostly undaunted (or perhaps, unhaunted) by the vexed relation of slavery symbols to the stolen lives of enslaved people, whose subjugation is the very form of life whereby such symbols could do coherent signifying work.
The present essay pursues two aims. The first is to introduce readers to a key moment in the development of a strand of the Western theological tradition I will call slave Christologies—a term which does not appear in standard introductions to Christian doctrine, nor is directly employed by Augustine of Hippo, the figure in whom we will watch this strand taking shape. Rather, it is a term stipulated, a term for bringing something into view. For my purposes, slave Christologies is a term that isolates that strand of the tradition—from ancient to medieval to modern—which develops a theological account of the person and work of Jesus Christ through the figural identification of his body with the body of the enslaved. In so doing, it weaves the symbolic order of slaveholding into the texture of Christian thought, while operating in the context of practical reasoning about the social order of slavery. 10 Slave Christologies emerged in Christian thought principally as reflection upon the “form of a slave” (Phil 2:5–11), and so I limit my inquiry’s scope to a partial, selective account of Augustine’s theological reception of the Philippians hymn. 11
My second aim is to search for and struggle toward a theological method adequate to the entanglements introduced above. I want to avoid, on one hand, the abstraction which renders an intellectual tradition detached from the forms of life—material, social, political—by which alone it occupies space in the world and finds adherents in the first place, and on the other, the reduction which treats tradition solely through “ideology critique,” as though the only task is sorting out how ideas “caused” certain social effects or material consequences. 12 Instead, I want to rethink slave Christologies theologically as a troubled grammar, troubled but also energized by a twofold haunting: haunted by the perennial, if hard to specify, interplay between ideas and forms of life, between the symbolic and the social; and haunted by the contingent, specific historical afterlife of racial slavery, especially as rendered in the vivid resources of Black religious and political thought, so profoundly neglected by much mainstream (read: White) Christian theology. What would it mean to be driven, methodologically, toward neither guilt nor innocence—but deeper into that haunting? Perhaps this is what traditioned forms of inquiry, at their best, make room for. We do not think from scratch or from nowhere. Our lives are embedded in localities and memories and histories. What if “tradition” entails neither a cultural property to be defended, nor only arguments extended through time, but a space for remembering and reparation, for dispelling illusions of innocence, for being transformed by encounters with the dead? 13 And yet when we invoke tradition in relation to memory and historicity, we do so challenged by the contested and fragmentary nature of memory itself. Whose memories? Which histories? 14 One thinks of Lucille Clifton’s poem, “why people be mad at me sometimes,” recently invoked by writer Kiese Makeba Laymon in the context of the slave-haunted landscape of monuments in the American South: “they ask me to remember but they want me to remember their memories and i keep on remembering mine.” 15
In search of a method under the pressure of this twofold haunting, then, I offer a reading of Augustine’s slave Christology which weaves together “high” and “low” texts—doctrinal treatises with sermons and letters—with an eye toward how slavery’s symbolic order facilitates and so haunts his christological meditations upon “the form of a slave” in three key themes: intimacy, ascent, and obedience. Then, I will briefly sketch how one resource from Black thought brings us closer to the problem underlying “the form of the slave,” the one which confronts us yet today, namely, the enduring problem of the master.
Augustine’s Slave Christology
Augustine did not invent slave Christology, nor is it self-evident that slave Christologies are inherently virtuous or vicious, and so Augustine will not be treated here, as he so often is, as a tragic figure of declension—the corrupter of an emancipatory faith into a repressive religion. 16 He is preceded by and forms part of a rich tradition in the Latin West of theological reflection upon the Philippians hymn, from which he emerged, as Jaroslav Pelikan’s magisterial history of doctrine notes, “its most creative interpreter.” 17 It is difficult to convey how massively influential this hermeneutical creativity would prove. 18 In a memorable passage of the Confessions, Augustine says the Platonic books gave him a great deal of knowledge—about time, materiality, and knowledge itself—but one thing they did not give him: “the form of the slave.” 19 The forma Dei they gave him, he says, but the forma servi they did not. Why is the form of the slave so crucial, such that it can serve as a stand-in term, encapsulating all the truth that was missing from Platonic wisdom?
If slave Christology is, on my terms, a key “strand” of the Western tradition, then here I turn to three major “threads” of that strand which emerge in Augustine’s slave Christology, three organizing themes for his theological use of the Philippians hymn: intimacy, ascent, and obedience. These three would travel together in the tradition again and again. Inside “the form of the slave,” a powerful Christian longing would come into view, a project which would look upon the body of the subjected, and build from it a model for speaking of human life with God: of the intimacy which existed in the person of Jesus Christ between two natures, human and divine, which in turn makes intimacy possible between fallen humankind and the God of Israel; ascent, in that the vision laid out in the Philippians hymn was not a static picture of the state of creation; rather, it would come to offer a program of education, the transformation of our attention and desire, and from this formation would emerge a profound habitus of being in the world; and obedience, in that the relation of Jesus to his Father would involve his acceding to divine demand, yes, but most crucially, in that this obedience would come to stand in an utterly fraught relation to the world Jesus entered, a world already structured by “command and obedience,” 20 to use Augustine’s terms. It was inside this world that the vision of belonging found in the Philippians hymn would have to make sense of itself.
Intimacy: God in Human Flesh
At the heart of Augustine’s Christology, like that of the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE) it anticipated, was the drive to preserve, rather than resolve, the central mystery of the incarnation—in Christ, God the creator is joined in unthinkably intimate union with the humankind God created. “Jesus is not,” Linn Tonstad writes, “a hybrid of divine and human that would be neither divine nor human. Jesus is both divine and human. For most Christian theologians, this surprising, unimaginably intimate union between divinity and humanity is possible because God is intimate.” 21
In De Trinitate books 1 and 2, Augustine’s central concern is to preserve the theological and scriptural basis for this intimate union by arguing—against the Homoians and various anti-Nicene traditions—for the fittingness of speaking of Christ as one subject in two natures, divine and human, inseparable and yet without confusion. He wants to do this while maintaining the absolute equality of Father and Son and preserving the immutability of the Word in taking on flesh. To these opponents’ credit, Augustine acknowledges, “many things are said in the holy books to suggest, or even state openly that the Father is greater than the Son.” 22 Based in a nontrivial reading of Scripture, it was a serious argument, meriting serious response.
Augustine grounded this response in Phil 2:6–7, finding there an exegetical and theological regula, a rule for interpreting such passages as upholding Nicene orthodoxy, whereby Christ is absolutely equal to the Father according to his divine nature, less than the Father according to his human nature—and indeed, “in the form of a slave he is less than himself” (I.3.14). This is precisely the genius of the terms forma Dei and forma servi, form of God and form of a slave: they provide a conceptual distinction internal to the scriptural witness itself which enables Augustine now to refer all passages that seem to imply Christ’s inferiority to the Father to the form of the slave. “Provided then that we know this rule for understanding the scriptures,” Augustine writes, we “can thus distinguish the two resonances in them, one tuned to the form of God in which he is, and is equal to the Father, the other tuned to the form of a servant which he took and is less than the Father” (I.4.22). So when Christ says in John 14:28, “the Father is greater than I,” Augustine argues, Christ is speaking in forma servi—according to his human nature. When Christ says in John 10:30, “the Father and I are one,” he is speaking in forma Dei—according to his divine nature. Augustine offers a litany of scriptural examples in chapter 4 of De Trinitate I, underscoring the equality of Father and Son: for to be in forma servi is to take on “the likeness of man” (similitudinem hominum), while yet being in full equality with the Father in forma Dei. The distinction between assuming the form of the slave and being in the form of God is likewise crucial. This is what enables Augustine to preserve a way of speaking not only of the Son’s equality with the Father, but also his immutability.
In this way, the Philippians hymn emerges for Augustine as what Lewis Ayres calls his “Panzer text,” a kind of “tank” he trundles onto the battlefield of doctrinal struggle, mowing down all heterodox positions in its path. 23 The form of the slave provides the regula for harmonizing the scriptural witness with the emerging grammar of orthodox Christology.
Ascent: The Way of Humility in the Master’s House
And yet the Philippians hymn is also more than this, Ayers continues, more than merely a rule for sorting out various kinds of text: “It is a rule which Augustine presents as implying and revealing a comprehensive conception of what it means to read Scripture at this point in the life of faith.” What is this moment? “A point when we should seek to see what is said and done in forma servi as a drawing of our desires and intellects towards the forma Dei that will remain hidden until the eschaton.” 24 This drawing of our desires, the movement of our attention toward God, is “ascent” in the Augustinian sense: the Incarnation of the Word is not static, but involves transformation, the education of our inner life as it is formed, ordered, and trained upon the mystery of God. As Ayers shows, the early Augustine inherits “ascent” from ancient Platonist educational theory, but by his mature period has shifted its significance “towards a conception of ascent that is always a building on faith in humility.” 25 To understand how the regula above, what Augustine calls “the form-of-a-slave rule,” 26 relates to ascent through humility, we must first grasp descent—how humankind has fallen. And that requires clarifying how the symbolic order of slavery works for Augustine, how it lends intelligibility and force to his slave Christology, by way of two remarks.
First, at the general level, it is important to note—following Christopher L. de Wet—that when we find Augustine using slavery as a “metaphor,” we must pause over the distinction between “actual” and “metaphorical” slavery, or literal and figurative slavery. This distinction is vital, for reasons that become clearer below, but is slightly anachronistic to how Augustine thinks. This is because in Augustine, like most writers in Roman antiquity, slavery is not so much a “metaphor,” for which other language could just as easily substitute the same underlying content, as much as it is a cosmology. De Wet calls this “the doulological [from doulos, Gr., “slave”] structuring of the cosmos—that is, placing God exclusively in the position of master, and creation in a subordinated position.” 27 Or as Thomas Aquinas would put it eight centuries later: “God is Master [dominus] not in idea only, but in reality.” 28
Roman slave collar. Iron with bronze plate. The inscription states that if this slave should run away, whoever brings him back to the owner, Zoninus, will received a reward of a gold coin. Imperial Roman, 4th–6th century CE. Museo Nazionale Romano (Terme di Diocleziano), Rome, Italy. © Vanni Archive/ Art Resource, NY.
Second, more specifically, when approaching master-slave relations in Augustine, we must be careful to avoid—under Hegel’s influence perhaps—imagining a personal struggle between lord and bondsman, two individuals abstracted from any wider organization of social life. Augustine thinks about master/slave relations within the structure of a domus (“household”) headed by a dominus (“master” or “owner”), a lived social reality we might refer to as the master’s house. 29 Of special importance for slave Christology is Augustine’s use of a three-layered hierarchy within this house, a structure recurring all over his corpus which is especially clear in Sermon 159B, dated 404, around the time Augustine likely began composing De Trinitate.
Here Augustine begins from Psalm 118: “It is good for me that you have humbled me, so that I may learn your justifications.”
30
In elaborating what this means, Augustine invites hearers to “take a look at this point in everyday life” by introducing the image of a master beating his slave not in anger, but as an act of mercy.
31
Imagine a household, Augustine says, in which there is “one man who has a slave and also has a master, as it frequently happens that property-owning slaves have slaves themselves. Pay careful attention; he has a slave, he has a master; he’s subject to one, in command of the other; he is over his slave, under his master…he is secure in his possession of his slave, provided he doesn’t offend his master.”
32
We see a three-layered hierarchy: position (1) the absolute master (dominus who is also a paterfamilias), ruling over position (2) the slave (servi peculiosi, often a vilicus, a managerial slave), who in turn rules over position (3) his own slave (servus vicarius, the slave of a slave). Augustine seizes upon this configuration of the master’s house and then weaves it seamlessly into a picture of the cosmos itself: So if three men, though they are all equally human, are related by some social arrangement of this life in such a way that one of them is lord and master only, another is slave only, while the third is both slave of the master and master of the slave, don’t you think the whole creation would be both more readily and more distinctively arranged on those lines—the nature and substance of mind placed under God, the nature of material bodies as a whole placed under mind?
33
In the context of this argument in Sermon 159B, Augustine uses the structure of this “social arrangement” to conceptualize humility as man’s proper recognition of his own “middle” position within the order of the cosmos: in being made in the image of God, with faculties of mind, he stands under God as slave; in bearing this image as a rational creature within the material world, he stands over all the rest of material creation as its master. 34 It is difficult to overstate the extent to which this threefold structure, the master’s house with its three levels of hierarchical authority, permeates Augustine’s thought as a cosmology, a framework encompassing reality itself, whereby “the whole creation [is] distinctively arranged on those lines,” and nowhere is this clearer than when we see how his account of sin and slavery fits into the picture.
“The first sin of man was pride,” Augustine continues, “that’s what we read in Genesis,” where in paradise man was placed “under a certain commandment…which was imposed upon him [to] show him this: …humility was always to be held onto [because] all things were under him, but over him was the one who made all things.” Once solidly at position 2 in innocence, man in sin is punished by falling under the wrath of the slave of position 3, that is, by becoming under the power of bodily creation, which now “flogs” him at the command of God in position 1, just as a dominus would order the elite slave to be beaten by a lower slave for disobedience. 35 How does Genesis display this? There Adam’s pride issued in “wishing to be its own authority,” 36 or as Augustine puts it elsewhere, returning us to the grammar of the Philippians hymn, Adam sought to “make himself equal to God,” following the devil who told him: “Seize illegally what you are not according to your creation because I too fell by stealing what was not mine.” 37 In other words, both man and the devil reach up to “grasp” or to “seize” (rapinem) position 1 in the hierarchy, and in grasping fall to position 3—”cast down to the level of the beasts.” 38 This is where pride leads. Meanwhile, Augustine goes on, although Christ was “born equal to the Father” as Son, he “did not regard being equal to God as something to be grasped at (Phil 2:6). He did not usurp divine equality, but had it by being born with it…He emptied himself, taking on the form of a slave (Phil 2:7).” 39
With this framework established, Augustine will again and again envision humility not as a position of unqualified lowliness, 40 but rather as precisely the only way of ascent, the virtue proper to being ordered and restored to position 2, the middle point and center—the one who both rules and is ruled, one who, as we’ll see in more detail in a moment, is a master who can command others precisely insofar as he is also a slave who obeys. “Surprisingly, then, there is in humility something that lifts up the heart, and there is in exaltation something that brings down the heart.” 41 To clarify this, I now turn toward what has already been implied here: the question of obedience, and in particular, the relation of the obedience of Christ in the form of the slave to the obedience of human beings inhabiting a social order of slavery.
Obedience: Christ Brings Order to the Household
The implicit work of “non rapinam”—equality with God as “not a thing to be grasped”—has slowly emerged in this picture: both humankind and the devil are like thieving slaves, ungratefully reaching and grasping to take what belongs, by right, to the Son of God, namely, equality with God. 42 Hence, the rightful Son, who naturally is equal with God, must take on the form of the slave, in order to show what a “good slave” looks like. Christ in the form of the slave will present humankind with an example, “by Wisdom itself becoming visible in the flesh and laying down for us an exemplum vivendi, an example or pattern of living.” 43 In Sermon 359B, also preached in 404 CE, Augustine employs the tripartite hierarchy of the master’s house again, while making explicit appeal to the slave Christology of Philippians 2. The context is a particular “disturbance” that occurred the day before among the laity, some kind of rumpus forcing Augustine to abandon the pulpit before returning to provide them a remedial lesson in obedience.
To that end Augustine again brings his hearers back into the Genesis scene of the garden, where he again invokes slavery imagery to clarify the purpose of the divine prohibition: “because among all the good things put in paradise,” Augustine says, “obedience was better still, God slapped a prohibition order on one of them, or else by not forbidding anything he might have ceased to be master.” 44 In this way, Adam’s sin is again framed as a prideful act of disobedience, as a bad slave lacking the humility to submit to his master’s commands: that, Augustine says, was “the first ruin of mankind.” Into that scene of ruin, Augustine rolls out the Panzer text once more: “Adam was for us the author and model of disobedience,” he says, “Christ of obedience. And how is Christ the model of obedience? Though he is equal to the Father, he says he is the slave of the Father…Since he was in the form of God, he did not think it robbery to be equal to God (Phil 2:6). For Christ…equality is not robbery, but nature. The one for whom it was robbery stood up and fell; the one for whom it was nature stayed on his feet even as he stooped down.” 45 Augustine goes on to repeat the climax of the Panzer text: Christ “humbled himself, becoming obedient to the death.” If Christ himself is willing to take the form of the slave, to be humble and obedient, Augustine reasons, such that the Dominus and the one who took the form of the servus are joined—in intimate concord of position 1 and 2—how dare you disobey the bishops of his church? “Listen, slave, if your bishop were not one who obeys as a slave, he would not be fit to command you as slaves.” 46 The bishop is precisely the one restored to position 2, one who is fit to master other slaves, because of his humility—because he has become obedient to the master. In such texts we begin to glimpse how slave Christology was no mere “metaphor,” but instead authorized particular political and social practices, arrangements of bodies, space, and power.
Yet not only was this obedience demanded of laity to bishops on the basis of Christ’s obedience. More to the point, we can now turn to see how the master’s house, working in tandem with the slave Christology of Philippians 2, emerges into view in the sort of haunted, tightly-interdependent relation I mentioned in my introduction between the symbolic order of slavery and the social order of slavery. Or more precisely, we can raise the question: what is the relation between the obedience of Christ in the form of a slave given to his Father and the obedience demanded of enslaved people to the people who enslaved them? At the heart of this question, we might begin to unfold the normative implications of a profound ambiguity at the heart of Christ’s identification with the form of the slave. Augustine emphasizes, polemically, that “the Jews” saw that Christ was claiming to be equal with God, and in this way were closer to the truth than the Arians, but their problem was this: they could not recognize Christ’s equality with God because they “despised the slave form.” 47 If humble, faithful Christians, then, are willing not to despise the slave form, but to recognize Christ there, what does this recognition mean for enslaved peoples—for the oppressed and the dispossessed, for the incarcerated and unfree? Does his identification intensify the salience of their voices, or cement their status as an obstacle to be overcome? Are they to be looked to as partners in discerning the good, or “looked through” as a window into the path of ascent? Does Christ in the form of a slave make their presence visible, or take its place and so erase it from view? Is the whole point to get beyond the embarrassment of the slave form to the God form, such that the degradation of the enslaved person is reified, or does the slave form a place from which, against all cultural expectations, the Creator of the world is governing creation?
For a troubling window into these questions—a text which brings together intimacy, ascent, and obedience—it is worth quoting at some length from another of Augustine’s sermons. After citing Paul’s words to enslaved persons in Ephesians 6, “obey those who are your masters according to the flesh…like slaves of Christ,” Augustine expounds them: [Christ] is the true and eternal slavemaster [dominus], whereas those others are masters only for a time. While you are walking in the way, living in this present life, Christ does not want to make you proud. Perhaps it happened that you, having become a Christian, found yourself subject to a human master. That is as it should be…he has not made slaves free, but turned bad slaves into good slaves. What a debt of gratitude rich people owe to Christ for bringing peace to their households! If in such a house there were an unbelieving slave and Christ were to convert him, he would not say to him, “Leave your master, for now you have come to know him who is your true master…” No, that is not what Christ has said; rather he commands, “Do your duty as his slave.”
48
A passage like this complicates the common suggestion among modern readers that certain theological insights in Augustine “should have” pressed him to reconsider his stance on slavery, since here, to the contrary, his discourse on slavery works quite seamlessly with precisely those insights—the model of pilgrimage, the critique of pride, and the valorization of humility. In the lines that follow, Augustine appeals explicitly to the slave Christology he has developed so profoundly: “And then, to strengthen the slave, [Christ] tells him, ‘Follow my example in being a slave, for I went before you in submitting to evil men.’…If the Master of heaven and earth…bore himself like a slave to the unworthy…how much less should an ordinary man or woman disdain to serve a master with sincerity, total good will, and love—even if the master is bad?” 49 Christ appears here both in the form of the slave modeling obedience, and the master to whom all obedience is owed, both in intimate union, without division or separation or confusion. The path for people who finds themselves enslaved is to search the face of the one who enslaved them—even if they are “bad”—for glimmers of their true Dominus, and on these grounds, obey, stay humble, and continue in the journey of inward ascent.
Conclusion
Most inquiries have tended to ask whether Christian sensibilities challenged Roman slavery. I have left that question aside and instead underscored how the tradition of slave Christologies, in this case in the Augustinian strand of that tradition, culminates in an inverse question, often left unasked: how did slaveholder sensibilities—more precisely, the alignment of Christian thought with the position of the master—shape the grammar of the Christian political and theological thought we still employ? What effects emerge when the voice of Christ comes to us speaking the language of the master’s house? I am less interested in anachronistic moral judgments of Augustine’s character. I am more interested in unfolding the moral significance of what emerges in the sermon above, that is, in how the master’s household has shaped Augustine’s Christology, and thus, the significance of his political theology for readers who inhabit the afterlife of slavery and confront its racialized legacies in the present. To get at that, and following now broadly-recognized strategies for comparative studies of slavery, I think we need subtler, stronger analytic tools for grasping the logic of slavery itself. For that in turn, and in closing, I look to one intervention from the African American intellectual tradition, particularly Black feminism, which arose from fugitive spaces and has long excavated the position of the master, then gesture toward paths for further inquiry. 50
We might notice that when Christ’s voice emerges in Augustine’s sermon above, it emerges in the subjunctive mood—the grammatical mood expressing wishes, doubts, possibilities. If there were an unbelieving slave in the master’s house, Augustine says, and if Christ were to convert him, and if that person wanted to leave, Christ would not tell him to become a fugitive; Christ instead would tell him, do your duty as his slave. 51 This subjunctive mood implies something about the logic of mastery itself, I suggest, something Black feminist critic Hortense Spillers examines in her classic essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” What Spillers notices from reading the legal codes of U.S. slavery is that in order to sustain slavery’s fundamental contradiction—the “transforming [of] personality into property,” of person into thing—the legal code itself has to make recourse to the subjunctive mood. In a sentence from the law like, “Slaves shall be reputed and considered real estate,” Spillers notices that “reputed and considered [function] as predicate adjectives that invite attention because they denote a contrivance, not an intransitive ‘is,’…The mood here—the ‘shall be’—is pointedly subjunctive, or the situation devoutly to be wished.” 52 In a society built on domination, maintaining order demands that law enforce this wish of masters: that the living, breathing person be considered a thing, that an agent in motion be made still, a verb calcified into a noun. 53
What this insight from Spillers helps us see is twofold: first, if the subjunctive expresses wishes, doubts, possibilities, then when the subjunctive Christ of Augustine’s sermon appears, we may wish to ask: whose wishes are being expressed here? Whose anxieties and doubts, whose possibilities and desires? Given that this Jesus denounces fugitive resistance as sinful, given that his explicit aim is to secure earthly peace for the master’s house, the answer to that question is clear enough: though “the form of a slave” is speaking, it is the master’s desires shaping who Christ is and what his voice sounds like. Second, what Spillers suggests is that the master’s subjunctive—his wishes and doubts, his desires and anxieties—is linked to a prior, underlying linguistic act: the transformation of person into property, that is, the enslaving logic of slavery itself. And so it is not only that the master’s Christ is a fantasy, but that it is a fantasy in response to slavery’s own wobbly construct—the regarding of person as property. 54 It is the very unresolved antinomy of this construct, the fiction of human chattel, its unresolved and unresolvable act of self-deception, which calls into being the master’s illusory Christ. We might say, building from Saidiya Hartman’s term “scenes of subjection,” that the master’s house is a scene of subjunction, in which even the voice of God must be filtered through the self-deceptions the master needs to sustain his position as master. 55 And this means, to the extent that a way of living has been built up around this position, the master is fundamentally unable to recognize, or at least, unable to truthfully acknowledge the very conditions of his own life. His own house is to him opaque. And thus, it is worth considering the deep structures underlying how, in Augustine’s thought, the master’s house—with its distinctive desires and anxieties and self-deceptions—gets built into the very grammar of Christian thought and the politics which follow. Christians today who—especially by way of Whiteness, status, social power—have inherited the afterlife of the master’s position must revisit the lingering effects of mastery upon our forms of life, our theological imaginations, and our attempts to retrieve tradition.
To that end, I raise three questions for further inquiry, taking in reverse order the Christological themes above. First, on obedience. Amid the global uprising of Black Lives Matter against carceral violence, we might wish to ask, whose obedience is demanded by the structures of the world as it presently exists, the world of racial slavery’s afterlives? When another Black person is killed by police, how often are we told that if only they had obeyed the officer’s commands, they would be alive? What is the relation of Christ’s obedience to this world of racialized order and racialized criminality, structured by command and obedience? More pointedly, within this world, what does it mean that when Christ “became obedient unto death,” his obedience looked like “death on the cross” (Phil 2:8), which is to say, it looked like disobedience—given that the cross was the punishment given precisely to the seditious and the fugitive, to those whose lives in motion could only appear as violent threats to “law and order”? 56 These theological and scriptural considerations must haunt how Christian leaders respond not only to “peaceful” protests, but to the very framing which posits an easy, simple moral distinction of “peaceful” from “disruptive,” of protest from riot, of violence from nonviolence. Second, on ascent. If Christ’s obedience appears within this world’s structures as disobedience, how would this affect the movement of our attention, the formation of our desire and our interior life? Some of us will need to begin to reckon with how our formation, yes, even our theological education, has yet to interrupt our investments in the order of racial hierarchy, in the profit, stability, and coherence it still promises. Others of us will need to reckon with how often our very attempts to resist this order subtly reproduce it. We sometimes reinscribe the figure of “the oppressed” as an object of thought, rather than a partner in action—as a “noun” to be looked at, talked about, or helped, rather than a “verb,” an agent in motion, to be joined with in solidarity. What spiritual disciplines, what practices of social life, what modes of assembly make our lives most open to the divine work of unmaking and remaking, to education into alternative modes of attention, care, and desire? Third, and all too briefly, on intimacy: What would it look like and sound like to press toward the intimacy of human and divine which God made possible in Christ by returning again and again to a scandal: “The real scandal of the gospel,” wrote James Cone, “is this: humanity’s salvation is revealed in the cross of the condemned criminal Jesus, and humanity’s salvation is available only through our solidarity with the crucified people in our midst.” 57
Footnotes
1
A full survey of the literature would be enormous. For a recent point of entry, see Katharine Gerbner, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).
2
Much writing on Christianity and slavery remains unhelpfully locked in this defensive mode, especially with respect to an oft-anachronistic division between religion and the secular. Compare David Bentley Hart’s fairly nuanced treatment of slavery in ancient Christianity in Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) to his casual reference to New World slavery as a product of “secular modernity” in “What is Postmodern Theology?” in Theological Territories (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020).
3
Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). On the afterlife of slavery, see Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2007), 6.
4
We are only beginning to grasp the founding intimacies of Christian theology and racial origins. For a starting point, see J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), and Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). It would be impossible to specify each place in the essay that is indebted to these two mentors, while all its shortcomings remain of course my own.
5
6
I repurpose the notion of “if not for, then to” from Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 369.
7
For a starting point, see Molly Oshatz, Slavery and Sin: The Fight Against Slavery and the Rise of Liberal Protestantism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
8
From its inception, as Albert Harrill points out, Christian thought found the bodies of enslaved people “good to think with.” J. Albert Harrill, Slaves in the New Testament: Literary, Moral, and Social Dimensions (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006), 26.
9
For a discussion of the theological and ethical stakes involved in the translation choice of dominus as “master” rather than the long-standard, but now-challenged choice of “lord,” see Matthew Elia, “Ethics in the Afterlife of Slavery: Race, Augustinian Politics, and the Problem of the Christian Master,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 38.2 (2018): 93–110.
10
The most compelling survey remains Jennifer Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
11
For one recent overview of the scholarly literature, see Joseph A. Marchal, “The Hymn within (and among the) Philippians,” Philippians: Historical Problems, Hierarchical Visions, Hysterical Anxieties (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 13–28.
12
For an extreme example, see Stephen F. Brett (Slavery and the Catholic Tradition: Rights in the Balance, American University Studies, Series 5, Philosophy 157 [New York: Peter Lang, 1996], ix): “generations of slaves lost their rights because of theories upheld by well-meaning but critically inadequate scholarship.” Often associated with the work of Louis Althusser, the approach of “ideology critique” is more complex than crass claims of causality, however. See Michael Morris, Knowledge and Ideology: The Epistemology of Social and Political Critique (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), esp. 1–5.
13
For two interesting accounts of “tradition” which disrupt the common opposition among theologians between traditionalism and liberationism, scrambling their respective associations with reactionary and subversive, see David Scott, “On the Very Idea of a Black Radical Tradition,” Small Axe 40 (March 2013): 1–6, and Luke Bretherton, “Political Theology, Radical Democracy, and Virtue Ethics; Or Alasdair MacIntyre, the Decolonial Concept of Buen Vivir, and the Paradoxes of a Revolutionary Consciousness,” Political Theology (forthcoming).
14
This is of course a reference to Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), and the notion above of tradition as “argument extended through time” is found on page 12.
15
16
For one example of Augustine as villain in relation to slavery, see Arthur A. Rupprecht, “Attitudes on Slavery among the Church Fathers,” New Dimensions in New Testament Study, ed. Richard N. Longnecker and Merill C. Tenney (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1974).
17
Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Volume 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 256.
18
For an introduction, see Wanda Cizewski, “Forma Dei—Forma Servi: A Study of Thomas Aquinas’ Use of Philippians 2:6–7,” Divus Thomas 92 (1989): 3–32. For a wider look, one would consult various entries in the massive Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine, ed. Karla Pollmann and Willemien Otten (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
19
Conf. 7.9. Throughout I use the abbreviations of the Zentrums für Augustinus-Forschung, and unless otherwise noted, references are to the translation found in WSA–Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the Twenty- First Century (Brooklyn, NY: New City Press), with the sole modifications being adjustments of places where Augustine’s “master/slave” imagery is softened, and in my view distorted, into English “lord/servant” language.
20
Civ. 19.16–17.
21
Linn Tonstad, Queer Theology: Beyond Apologetics (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018), 33 (emphasis mine).
22
Trin. I.3.14. All parenthetical citations in this section are to Trin.
23
Lewis Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 144.
24
Ibid., 146.
25
Ibid., 124, 41. See, for a classic example, his engagement with the Platonists, referenced above, in Conf. 7.
26
Trin. II.1.3.
27
Chris L. de Wet, The Unbound God: Slavery and the Formation of Early Christian Thought (New York: Routledge, 2018), 15. It is worth noting, however, that contemporary metaphor theory has moved far beyond the “substitution” theory of metaphor alluded to above. Treatments abound, but the most lucid starting point remains Janet Martin Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 24–25.
28
Summa Theologiae I.13.7, reply 5.
29
Using “the master’s house” as a symbolic space which encompasses both Augustine’s literal and metaphorical uses of slavery echoes what historian Kate Cooper notes about the double-valence of the domus concept within Roman culture. It names a “physical space” and a way of “represent[ing] the household as a lived social reality…[as] the crucial unit in the pyramid of social order.” See The Fall of the Roman Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 110. In accordance with my second aim—to rethink theology as haunted by racial slavery’s afterlives—the notion of ‘the master’s house’ also evokes the enduring significance of the plantation household, as explored for instance in Thavolia Glymph’s pathbreaking Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
30
Serm. 159B.
31
Serm. 159B.4. This is fairly standard for Augustine. In another sermon, he anticipates being asked about beating slaves, “Shall discipline sleep?” and clarifies: “That’s not what I’m saying…if you see your slave living badly, what other punishment will you curb him with, if not the lash? Use it: do. God allows it. In fact he is angered if you don’t” (Enarrat. Ps. 102.14, as quoted in Kyle Harper, Slavery in the Late Roman World: 275-425 AD [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011], 230). Similarly, in Civ. 19.16, Augustine notes that if a slave “disrupts domestic peace by his disobedience,” then whipping him is “for the benefit” of the slave himself, to bring him “back into line with the peace from which he had broken away.”
32
Serm. 159B.5.
33
Serm. 159B.7.
34
In this section I follow Augustine’s use of gender-exclusive pronouns advisedly, in order not to erase the gendered nature of some aspects of his thought.
35
Serm. 159B.5.
36
Serm. 159B.7.
37
Io. eu. tr. 17.16.
38
Civ. 13.3.
39
Io. eu. tr. 17.16. Augustine’s intertextual reading, weaving the slave Christology of Philippians 2 together with the account of the devil’s fall in Isaiah 14 and humankind’s fall in Genesis 3, would set the terms of medieval interpretation for centuries. See Cizewski, “Forma Dei—Forma Servi,” 7–8.
40
Cf. Conf. 7.7.11, De Vera Religione 35.65.
41
Civ. 14.14.
42
As Harper notes, theft by enslaved people was an omnipresent threat in the Roman household. See Harper, 254. Augustine himself regularly refers to this. See for example Serm. 113.4.
43
Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity, 133.
44
Serm. 359B.7.
45
Serm. 359B.
46
Serm. 359B.10.
47
Io. eu. tr. 17.16. On the complexity of Augustine’s relationship to the Jewish people, see Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
48
Enarrat. Ps. 124.7. Although texts like the City of God and the Confessions are more well-known to modern readers, it’s worth remembering that Augustine’s Expositions of the Psalms, as one scholar point out, “dominat[ed] the interpretation of the Psalms in the West for more than a thousand years” (Allan D. Fizgerald, OSA, ed., Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999], 290).
49
Enarrat. Ps. 124.7.
50
For a lucid overview of scholarly debates concerning the comparative approach, see Enrico Dal Lago and Constantina Katsari, “The Study of Ancient and Modern Slave Systems: Setting an Agenda for Comparison,” Slave Systems: Ancient and Modern, ed. Enrico Dal Lago and Constantina Katsari (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 3–31.
51
It is all the more striking that here Augustine explicitly stages an instance of Christ “speaking” given that, as Rowan Williams notes (drawing from the work of many others), “in the Enarrations…the Psalms represent the unifying of the divine and the human voice in Christ.” In other words, for Augustine’s Enarrations, the Psalmist is already speaking in the voice of Christ, so that to explicitly invoke what Christ would say may be usefully read as an intensifying of the Christological significance of the statements issued here to masters and slaves. Further, it is all the more striking that for Augustine’s hermeneutics of the Psalms, “Jesus speaks in the voice of the suffering Christian” according to Williams, since in this passage (Enarrat. Ps. 124), I am arguing that Jesus’s voice is essentially the voice of the master camouflaged in the voice of the slave. See Rowan Williams, “Augustine as Interpreter of the Psalms,” On Augustine (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 27.
52
Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 203–29 (225). I anticipate objections here from readers who believe the semantic and syntactical dynamics Spillers identifies cannot retain any intellectual force when applied elsewhere, in this case, to Augustine, and in response I offer two points: first, there certainly are features of her analysis specific to the modern context, but this aspect pertains to the central definitional feature of slavery itself—the contradictions which must be resolved as a result of slavery’s central premise, the transformation of person into property—apart from which slavery is not slavery at all; thus, such an objection would need to go beyond simply reminding us that Augustine’s slavery was in some sense “different” from what Spillers is analyzing, and instead identify some specific feature which, when considered properly, would materially alter the account offered here; second, it is worth simply pausing over the fact that categories of analysis drawn from other domains of modern thought—whether philosophical, sociological, etc.—are regularly employed to illumine ancient thinkers, but there seems to be something about Black thought, and especially Black feminist thought, that is often assumed bound to context in a special way, insufficiently rigorous and expansive to do intellectual work more broadly.
53
Nathaniel Mackey, “Other: From Noun to Verb,” Representations 39 (Summer 1992): 51–70. I anticipate future work expanding this noun/verb distinction into a broader approach to method, pressing toward a sensibility which connects theological uses of metaphor and analogy in the tradition to contemporary liberationist aims and concerns.
54
Lest this be misunderstood along the lines of those inclined to insert an entirely preposterous “just” in front of “construct”—those who say things like “race is just a social construct”—we should remember that slavery’s wobbly construct is, as Fred Moten reminds us, indeed a “necessarily fictional, but materially brutal, standpoint.” To call it a construct is not to call it less than real. See “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh),” South Atlantic Quarterly 112 (2013): 738–40.
55
Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
56
I thank Willie James Jennings for continually pressing me to think through these questions of obedience and disobedience in the “form of a slave.” I have further explored this theme of the cross, the fugitive, and Augustine’s thought in “Fugitive Signs: Augustine’s Cross, Slavery, and Black Thought,” Studia Patristica (forthcoming).
57
James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2011), 162 (emphasis original).