“Christianity was not alone among the major world religions in legitimizing slavery. Earlier we noted the contradiction in Islam between the rationalization of slavery as a means of converting the unbeliever and the continuing enslavement of the converted. We find the same contradiction in Judaism and Christianity. The slave, in the city of the Christian God, was declared an insider, an integral part of the brotherhood of man in the service of God; but the slave, in the city of man, remained the archetypical outsider, the eternal enemy within, in a formalized state of marginality.” “At first sight the contradiction is not obvious. Indeed, the opposite seems to be the case: the exclusion of the slave on the secular level was symbolically compensated for by his inclusion in the sacred community. The contradiction between marginality and integration, which slavery created, was apparently resolved by relegating each to a separate domain of cultural existence. But this theological solution on the part of a monotheistic slaveholder class works only where there is hegemonic imposition of a rigid dualism in the socioreligious ideology. This was exactly what happened in medieval Christendom under the conservative spell of Saint Augustine. But Judaism and Islam were too this-worldly and too strongly monistic for such an interpretation to be taken seriously. And the rise of Protestantism dealt a death blow to the neat symbolic compromise of the Middle Ages. Augustinian dualism lingered in the symbolic representation of Latin American slavery: hence the apparent anomaly that has baffled so many Anglo-American historians, that of a Catholic church stoutly declaring slavery a sin, yet condoning the institution to the point where it was itself among the largest of slaveholders.” Orlando Patterson “Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study” Page 72
Posted on: Mon, 11 Aug 2014 08:14:14 +0000
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