>>51186123Well, I think you should explore other viewpoints. I find the breakdown of St. Agustine's view on slavery and the context in which he lived in and how slavery loomed large to be interesting. Even if he's sometimes credited as someone who was against slavery but in context it's much more complicated than that. The translation mentioned in the article which contextualizes the world he lived in says a lot, especially with regards on the way he frames the relationship between God and Christians.
Indeed people sometimes downplay ancient slavery but we don't need to do that. It was brutal and dehumanizing, it reduced a person to the status of a thing and takes away one's personhood instead the slave becoming an extension of their slaver. Even a slave that held power expirienced what is refered to as "social death", their power is simply an extension of their slaver and not of their own person. Herodotos of Halikarnassos recalls on how the people of Lesbian city of Arisba were reduced to andrapodon which translates to "men footed creatures" which is a sharp contrast to the word use for animals tetrapodon which translates to "four footed creatures". Authors of the Classical era would compare slaves to wild animals, it's all pretty telling. Saint Agustine could write of the wretched conditions slavery reduced a person while calling God a "master" and Christian's as "holy slaves. And this sort of comparisons loom large even in the Bible. When properly contextualized Saint Agustine was *not* against the instituion of slavery, in fact he advocated for it, but instead was against the enslavement of free-men which is a big distinction from being against slavery as an institution. And as the article notes, this all hangs deeply around us due to how ingrained slavery is in American history and how we deal with it, the early church was complicit with the institution of slavery.
