Christianity's Addiction: The Metaphor of Debt-Bondage in Roman Theology

Is addiction voluntary self-enslavement or an inherited disease of the will? Lawmakers and clinicians have debated this question for hundreds of years; however, despite centuries of investigation, one important aspect of the concept of addiction remains entirely unexamined—its deep theological history. Christian theologians writing in Latin from the second to the seventeenth century used the Roman legal term addictio—originally denoting debt-bondage—as a metaphor to describe the sinful human condition. In this talk, I uncover the genesis and development of the Christian addiction metaphor in the writings of Roman Church Fathers Tertullian, Ambrose, and Augustine. I analyze their theologies of addiction to show how the language and logic of Roman pecuniary jurisprudence structures their thinking about sin, salvation, and the free will. I contend that the disease-delinquency ambivalence constitutive of today's understanding of addiction originated in their paradoxical definition of sin as both generational enslavement and willful servitude.