Slavery was ubiquitous in late Antique Rome, and the concept of slavery profoundly shaped Augustine’s theological, ethical, philosophical, and political thought. Recent work in Augustine studies has begun to explore these topics critically analyzing Augustine’s account of slavery and its role in his broader ethics and politics, exploring slavery’s central but often disavowed role in the Augustinian tradition of political thought, while also pressing toward constructive alternatives in conversation with the resources of Black Studies. Given Augustine’s importance to the history of slavery and the role of the Augustinian tradition in the development of modern logics of racialization, there is ample opportunity for further work on Augustine, slavery, and race. This panel brings together three papers with different approaches to the topic.
Augustine argues that the good Christian should make use of violence in the correction of the disobedient slave and in the case of Donatism violent religious coercion. However, Lactantius writing less than a century earlier in his work the Divine Institutes argues not only that religious coercion and slavery are unethical, but that these institutions of violence should not be part of Christianity specifically. I argue that the source of the disagreement lies not only in these authors’ different historical circumstances, although this certainly plays a significant role, but in how they categorize Christian identity. Lactantius depicts Christianity as a unity of philosophy and religion that existed independently of the institutions of the Roman empire, and thus as a means of which they could be corrected. However, Augustine depicts as a guiding institution of the Roman Empire which must make use of its institutions of violence such as slavery.
In Conf. 7.9, Augustine describes how Platonism gave him the ‘forma dei’ but not the ‘forma servi’, or ‘the form of the slave’. Recent commentators such as Matthew Ella (2020) have explored the way in which the ‘form-of-a-slave’ rule from Phil 2:5–11 deeply shaped Augustine’s Christology. This paper will explore the connection between the pilgrimage motif and Augustine's use of the forma servi or slave imagery in order to undo or problematise any ultimate affirmation of slavery due to its subversive connection to the ideal pilgrim who humbly follows the order of God's love in the form of Jesus Christ.
Almost 1500 years after Augustine’s *Confessions*, Nat Turner, leader of the 1831 Southampton slave rebellion, dictated his own. These two texts represent vastly different forms of confession: a classic spiritual autobiography and an account of the rebellion haunted by the editorial presence of a white lawyer. Yet each confession found language in Scripture that made sense of their world and offered them a role to play in it. While increasing attention has been paid to Augustine’s writing on slavery, attention to how Scriptural narratives shape his sense of moral agency can contribute a further dimension to the discussion. Comparing his sense of Scripturally-narrated agency with that presented in Nat Turner’s *Confessions* highlights their accounts of moral agency and their divergent choices of biblical texts, language, and symbols. This paper will compare these two *Confessions* to discover how Scripture has been used to narrate human moral agency—its possibilities and limitations.