The title of this short but engaging monograph alludes to the Platonic notion, influential to early Christian theology, of the ideal divinity as free with everyone else as enslaved to it. The book follows Chris de Wet's highly successful Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity (University of California Press, 2015) and serves as a companion piece to his The Captive Monk: Slavery and Asceticism in Early Syrian Christianity (Routledge, 2018). As in those related volumes, this book advances an innovative methodology, influenced by Michel Foucault, to view slavery as a power discourse. De Wet thus introduces new analytical vocabulary for studying the problem of slavery in Western culture. His use of “doulology,” the main neologism, aims to lay bare the discursivity of slavery (Greek douleia) in ancient literature to communicate a process in which mastery and slavery function together to order knowledge and behavior.
The book's central questions are: “How and why did the early Christian ‘think/communicate’ with slavery—and to what end? How did they use slavery and mastery to make sense of their own position in the world and society, and to better understand their relationship with God, the self, and others?” (8). The main thesis argues that “slavery was an indispensable conceptual and intellectual tool for nascent Christianity,” which rightly challenges any single trajectory of church history that claims to show a growing amelioration of slavery toward its abolition (8). Yet the scope aims not to be encyclopedic. A series of individual short studies, organized thematically, selects significant historical moments in the transformation of biblical slavery motifs in late ancient Christian literature. The juxtapositions, even within the same chapter, of different Christian writings not normally combined in historical theology can be instructively jarring for the reader. De Wet admits this move to be a “deliberate strategy” to show both the continuity and the diversity of early Christian thought (9).
The first chapter, an introduction, asks how the institutions and ideologies of ancient slavery shaped the Christian understanding of the self as “Slave of God.” The self-designation should not be dismissed as metaphorical, de Wet argues, because the term retained its evocative power to point to the actualities of legal slavery—namely, the varieties of jobs that slaves actually performed in the late Roman household. The sources examined include the Testament of Solomon, the Acts of Thomas, and the Syriac Book of Steps (a late fourth- or early fifth-century collection of homilies on Syrian monasticism). Very interesting is the description of the performative attire of monks (neck collars, heavy chains around the body) that signaled humiliation as a slave to be the central principle of ascetical theology. The chapter thus shows a clear intersection between vertical slavery (of humans to God) and horizontal slavery (of humans owning fellow humans).
Chapter 2 examines the reception of the Apostle Paul's Christ hymn (Phil. 2:6–11) in the interpretation of Origen of Alexandria, a case study in the liturgization of slavery in Christology. Origen, as a Neoplatonist, struggled over this problematic Pauline passage to disassociate the incarnation of Christ from any enslaved status. To solve this conundrum, scriptural exegesis developed a Christology refashioned as a cosmic drama—the King dressing up in a slave's disguise to free his subjects from tyranny. This trope, known as vestis servilis, was performed by such figures as Julius Caesar, Mark Anthony, and Nero, at least according to legend. The tradition of Christ's flesh being the vestis servilis, but without indicating slave status, avoided any form of subordinationism. This “spectacular kabuki of slavery and deception” (65) proved useful in later patristic Nicene Christology combatting Arianism.
Chapter 3 takes as its case study the Trinitarian debate between the “Nicene” Basil of Caesarea and the “Arian” Eunomius of Cyzicus to show the impact of slavery on early Christian pneumatology. De Wet contextualizes this debate broadly as participating in Platonic and Stoic conversations about spiritual hierarchies and taxonomies that affirmed the cosmic head ruler as adespotos (unbound, not subject to governance). To refute Eunomius and his subordinationism, Basil and his younger brother, Gregory of Nyssa, moved to deny distinctions between slaves and free servants, thus subsuming the notion of free servanthood into the discourse and actualities of legal slavery. De Wet draws disturbing conclusions: “The defense of the equality of the Trinity was also a defense of slavery, and thus did not do much in addressing the problem of enslavement. . . . In Basil's emancipation of the Holy Spirit (and Christ) from Arian subordinationism, we may have the worst affirmation of human slavery” (99–100).
Chapter 4 turns to hamartiology, soteriology, and eschatology. Comparative analysis of the Curse of Ham (Gen. 9:18–27) in the interpretations of John Chrysostom, Augustine, and the later Syriac Cave of Treasurers shows a discursive association of slavery and sin. Detailed comparison of these interpretations is no academic enterprise for de Wet, for he concludes that the discursive association justified and even made facile the punishment of the slave, who is now the personification of sin. He writes: “Perhaps more than ever before, the figure of the slave was assimilated into religious discourse and practice, and technologies of slaveholding became representative of religious practice” (134). A final chapter, then, urges church historians and theologians toward the moral imperative of ending the legacy of ancient slavery that unfortunately persist in these discursive formations.
This book is an important contribution to the cultural and intellectual history of Christianity in late antiquity. The Unbound God ranges widely among Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Syriac patristic and monastic sources to investigate the complex ways in which the discursive practices of ancient slavery formed the central doctrines of church theology.
