Did the Christian bishop Augustine of Hippo own slaves? While the slaveholding legacies of figures such as Jonathan Edwards and Thomas Jefferson have drawn attention and scrutiny in recent decades, Augustine’s personal ties to slavery have been overlooked. It’s easier to find information about slavery in St. Augustine, Florida than it is to find anything about the North African saint’s personal ties to slavery. Yet, the truth about Augustine’s relationship to slavery has the potential to radically transform how we view this classic figure of Christianity and “western civilization.”
I recently published a longer essay on Augustine’s relationship to slavery. Here, I want to zoom in on whether Augustine was a slave master.
From his own writings in the Confessions and elsewhere, it’s clear that Augustine interacted with enslaved people throughout his life. In fact, he grew up with slaves in his own household. Augustine talks about an enslaved person who was tasked with tutoring or watching him as a boy: “…even people like that disapproved of me for fobbing off with innumerable lies the slave who was in charge of me…” (1.30)
Shortly after Augustine’s revelatory experience in a garden leads him to quit his teaching job in Milan, he spends a season at a rented villa with his friends and mother discussing philosophy. The “Cassiciacum dialogues” record the group’s discussions and, in casual asides, the fact that a designated slave boy would announce the lunch break from morning debate. In his biography of Augustine, classicist Robin Lane Fox observes about the boy, “He and others like him were evidently doing the housework all the time.”
As a bishop in North Africa, Augustine explicitly stated that enslaved Christians shouldn’t agitate for actual freedom. “That is as it should be,” Augustine says. “[Christ] has not made slaves free, but turned bad slaves into good slaves.” (En. Ps. 124.7). In one sermon, Augustine addresses slave masters on their treatment of slaves,
…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. But do it in a loving rather than vindictive spirit. (Aug. Psalm 102:14; CC 40:1464-5)
The seemingly obvious question long left unasked in the pages of church history is whether Augustine himself owned slaves as a bishop.
Following recent scholarship, I think that there is a high probability that Augustine did own slaves as a bishop. No credible thinker could dispute that Augustine grew up with slaves and likely inherited slaves as part of his father’s estate. The uncertainty is whether Augustine transferred these slaves to his church or monastery later in life. As far as I know, no evidence has been found so far to establish this claim beyond a shadow of a doubt. However, during this time period, Christian ascetics of all genders owned slaves, and a community such as Augustine’s typically imposed manual labor on enslaved people in order to increase leisure for free people.
If lost material about Augustine and slavery were to resurface, it wouldn’t be the first time. In 1975, Johannes Divjak unearthed a trove of previously unknown Augustine letters in the Bibliothèque Municipale of Marseilles. One of these letters, likely written around 427 or 428 CE, has been described by contemporary historians as providing “the most detailed account we possess of the mechanics of the slave-trade in the Roman empire.”
Some Augustine apologists have used his letters on the ancient slave trade to inaccurately paint him as a proto-abolitionist or as exceptionally merciful. Augustine did display a degree of compassion in addressing the slave trade crisis in North Africa. As a bishop, he even interviewed victims who had been rescued by members of his church.
However, for Augustine, the problem wasn’t slavery itself, but the kidnappings of free people and tenant farmers who occupied a murky legal status. In one letter from this time, Augustine states: “we are able, according to the apostolic discipline, to command slaves to be subject to their masters, but not to impose the yoke of slavery on free men.” (Letter 24*)
Slavery in the Roman Empire was not exactly the same as slavery in the modern United States, but it was still brutal. You can read my longer essay for more details. Augustine’s own words also testify to this. In the Confessions, he refers to a nameless enslaved man who was locked within “the most degraded position, a state of slavery.” In Letter 10*, an exasperated Augustine asks, “Who resists these traders who are found everywhere, who traffic, not in animals but in human beings, not in barbarians but in Romans from the provinces?”
Augustine’s compassion for free people who were turned into slaves doesn’t mean he opposed owning slaves. Additionally, Augustine’s call for masters to be merciful toward their slaves doesn’t mean he was an abolitionist. Within the ancient world, this attitude was neither unique nor the grounds for abolitionism. A good example who illustrates this fact is the Stoic philosopher Seneca.
In the 1st century CE, Seneca could write to fellow masters, “Remember, if you please, that the man you call slave sprang from the same seed, enjoys the same daylight, breathes like you, lives like you, dies like you. You can as easily conceive him a free man as he can conceive you a slave.” (Letter 47). Expressing this viewpoint didn’t mean that Seneca freed his slaves. In fact, within this same letter, Seneca attempts to break down the distinctions between the enslaved and the free by declaring that masters who voluntarily enslave themselves to ambition or lust experience the meanest slavery of all.
As is typical of so many intellectuals from this time, slaves become springboards and props for free people narrating their own problems, aspirations, and idealizations of self-mastery.
Augustine’s context and theology would be wholly consistent with personally owning slaves. It’s well-documented that Augustine drew from actual slavery, as it was practiced in his day, to metaphorically talk about spiritual slavery and spiritual freedom in the Christian life. But it may go further than that.
When Augustine talked about God as his Master, it’s likely owned other people as his property.
Daniel Jose Camacho is an editor and writer who focuses on religion, race, and history. He has previously been a Contributing Opinion Writer at The Guardian and an Associate Editor at Sojourners. Daniel’s work has appeared in publications such as The Revealer, Religion News Service, America Magazine, ABC Religion & Ethics, TIME, The Washington Post, and in the essay collection The God Beat: What Journalism Says about Faith and Why It Matters. Daniel holds a B.A. in philosophy from Calvin University and a Master of Divinity from Duke University. You can read Daniel’s essay, “Saint Augustine’s Slave Play,” over at The Point.