Review: Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity, by Chris De Wet

Abstract

Chris De Wet. Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. Pp. xiii + 329. ISBN: 9780520286214. $95.00. Slavery has attracted considerable attention in recent scholarship on Late Antiquity. This book, a Foucaldian reading of the scattered but abundant references to slavery in John Chrysostom's gargantuan oeuvre, constitutes a powerful and important contribution to that rising wave. Its first chapter, “Introducing Doulology: The Discourse of Slavery,” is broken into four sections. The first follows Jennifer Glancy in showing that ancient slavery was a sort of cultural habitus that was assumed into Christian discourse like some ancient corporal vernacular. It then turns to the economy of slavery, both as part of the supply and demand structure that commodified human bodies, and as a Foucauldian “carceral mechanism” that bound slaves into a web of power relations whose every fiber reproduced the system De Wet calls “kyricarchy.” This “carcerality” included obvious devices of domination, like chains and whips, but also social relations many of which tend to be recast by moderns as ameliorative of the slave condition, such as family relations, peculium , and even manumission. Thus, for De Wet, “outside of abolition there are no aspects of slavery that are truly in the greater interest of slaves” (24). We then turn to the “heteronomy of the body”— the way that ancient bodies were assumed to require domination from some exterior agent—and to “moral slavery” as conceptualized by the Stoics and Philo. These interiorized slavery as a condition of the soul, creating a moral code in which all bodies required domination. This universalization of slavery through metaphor rendered the institution banal and its practitioners indifferent to its inhumanity. The second chapter, “Divine Bondage: Slavery between Metaphor and Theology,” is concerned with Christian variations on the theme of heteronomy as these were manifested in slavery to the passions and sin. This notion traces to Paul, who described himself as the “slave of …