Augustine of Hippo, a major figure in philosophy and Christian thought, was wrong to accept slavery, according to Toni Alimi, assistant professor of philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences. Augustine believed that slavery – which he characterized as God’s just punishment of sin – is sometimes permissible.
And rather than being a peripheral issue, Alimi argues, this influential thinker’s acceptance of slavery – particularly his justification of chattel slavery – is central to his broader ethics and politics.
In his new book, “Slaves of God: Augustine and Other Romans on Religion and Politics,” Alimi traces the connections between Augustine’s understanding of slavery and his broader thoughts presented in works including “Confessions” and “City of God.”
“When engaging an influential thinker on a topic he got wrong, it can be tempting to do one of two things: minimize the wrongness of their position, or abandon the thinker, worrying that his errors make it impossible for us to learn from him,” Alimi said. “I am trying to avoid both these temptations. Rather than minimizing, I want to be clear that Augustine was wrong about slavery and that the wrongness of his position was horrific. Rather than abandoning, I wanted to create an agenda for what it would mean to think about Augustine’s ethics and politics in a way informed by his justification of slavery.”
In the book, Alimi shows that Augustine’s views on religion, law and citizenship are deeply entangled with his views on slavery. He situates Augustine in his ancient Roman context among earlier thinkers including Cicero, Seneca and Lactantius – an early Christian scholar who made arguments against slavery. And he connects Augustine’s philosophy to discussions surrounding the historical legacy of Atlantic slavery, through which African people were kidnapped and trafficked to the Americas.
The College of Arts and Sciences spoke with Alimi about the book.
Question: What main point do you hope to make about the wrongness of Augustine’s view of slavery?
Answer: Rather than minimization or abandonment, I want to offer Augustinians an account of entanglement, and invite those who think Augustine has much to teach us to attempt to disentangle the best parts of Augustine’s thought from his account of slavery.
Like many modern Augustinians, I take Augustine’s criticisms of triumphalism, materialism and imperialism to be incredibly powerful, even inspiring. It is troubling, then, that his rationales for these positions are so entangled with his case for slavery. This makes it all the more pressing, in my view, that Augustinians perform the disentangling work.
Q: What other Romans do you write about in this book, and what do they contribute?
A: I was especially interested in how Augustine’s beliefs about slavery, and related topics, reflect the menu of intellectual options of which he was aware. The most important thinkers for him on slavery, I think, were Cicero, Seneca and Lactantius. I argue in the book that we can best understand why his arguments about slavery take the shape that they do when we read him against the backdrop of these earlier Roman thinkers on slavery.
For many Romans – including Cicero and Lactantius, and, in his own way, Seneca – slavery was deeply connected to the concepts of religion, law and citizenship. Appreciating these connections in the earlier Romans in turn prepares us to see how slavery could be connected to religion, law and citizenship in Augustine’s thought, too. And so, I argue, situating Augustine in the tradition of reflection on slavery (and related ideas) opens ways for us to interpret his ethics and politics in ways that we may not have had access to otherwise.
Q: Augustine believed that all people are slaves to God, an idea you devote a section of the book to. Would you elaborate on this?
A: In one of his discussions of Psalm 123, a passage in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, Augustine writes: “We must acknowledge our condition: though sons and daughters through grace, we are still slaves because we are creatures, and all creation serves God” [Expositions on the Psalms 122.5, trans. Maria Boulding].
I think that this provides a key to understanding how Augustine thought about the divine-human relationship. He seems to have believed that humans are slaves of God because they are created by God. Since, for Augustine, all humans (aside from Jesus Christ) were created by God, all humans are God’s slaves.
For Augustine, this had significant pastoral implications. Drawing on the norms of the master-slave relationship, he insisted that just like human slaves ought not to question, talk back to, or challenge their human masters, so too humans ought not to question, talk back to, or challenge God. Because humans are God’s slaves, God does not owe humans an account of his dealings. Humans are only allowed to trust and obey God.
Q: How do you connect the philosophy and theology of this influential thinker to discussions surrounding the historical legacy of Atlantic slavery?
A: One thing I try to do in each section is discuss how we find Augustinian ideas about slavery and related concepts in play in modern Atlantic slavery. For example, one major question Augustine’s account leaves painfully unresolved is why it is permissible to enslave Christians.
In colonial America, the same question seems to have been at play and to have in part driven the racialization of slavery. Slavery had been justified in part as an evangelistic project – slavery would help Christianize enslaved Africans – but began to be justified on racial grounds when slaves began to convert to Christianity. Race was employed to solve a problem that Augustine left unsolved – a solution Augustine could not have predicted.
An unintended but happy consequence of writing “Slaves of God” is that slavery has become a central topic in my research. Numerous threads weave in and out of Augustine, threads which the book could only partially address. But I found them so interesting and worthwhile that I am now in the early stages of a second book on slavery: a broader philosophical history of the ideas of natural and retributive slavery.
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