Susanna Krizo

Great thoughts everyone!
What comps can never answer is why slavery exists in the Bible since it was abolished using biblical principles. They, as NN does here, say that Paul used the same word of both slaves and wives, and since we know slaves had to obey, so must also wives. They ignore entirely the fact that slaves were considered equals in the early church, as were women, and that it was only when the church married Rome that the freeborn Romans could not tolerate the idea of viewing their slaves as their equals, wherefore the slaves were returned to their former position of inferiority. Augustine wrote that slavery could not be abolished in the Christian Rome because it would have destroyed society and as a Roman, he was concerned foremostly that order should be preserved. He did however recognize that slavery was a result of sin and acknowledged the slave’s right to seek a better master if he lived under a harsh one, and to ultimately seek freedom. Augustine had some issues with his overbearing mother and his own inability to control himself, wherefore he chose celibacy. This is clealry reflected in his view on marriage which he sees through the eyes of Plotinus, the creator of Neo-Platonism in the third century. Because he equated the man with the soul and the woman with the body, and because Plato wrote that the body is always trying to control the soul and hinder its ascent to higher things, i.e God, he ascribed rule to the man. This rule began after sin, and in his writing on Gen 3.16 he calls the woman the flesh and the man the soul which rules the flesh. Prior to sin, at creation, Augustine saw the man representing reason and the woman appetite within the soul. He changed the terms a few times depedning on which book you read. But most significantly, he wrote in his treatise on Eph 5 that the woman is not called flesh in the epistle because the flesh is sinful. He wrote also that the man is called the spirit (i.e the soul), for he needed it for his model to work, but which is untrue, for the man is called the head. His contradictions clearly demonstrates that the woman’s subjection began after sin and that every attempt to make it a creation based model fails.