Enslaved to God: Slavery and Divine Despotics in the Shepherd of Hermas

Abstract

Early Christians were not only among the enslaved and enslavers in the ancient Mediterranean world, but some also used the ancient discourse of enslavement to conceptualize believers as enslaved to God and God as an enslaver. This dissertation examines how some Christians crafted the ideal subject through the discursive context of ancient Mediterranean enslavement. I focus my analysis primarily on the Shepherd of Hermas, a first- or second-century CE text. It is attributed to a Roman man named Hermas who records the visions, mandates, and parables he is given through encounters with divine interlocutors. I argue that through participation in the language, practices, and logics of ancient Mediterranean enslavement discourse, the Shepherd both exhorts believers to be obedient enslaved subjects and portrays God as an enslaver capable of possessing, surveilling, punishing, and rewarding the enslaved. The analysis consists of four parts. In order to demonstrate that the Shepherd participates in a broader Mediterranean discourse of enslavement, I first examine how God’s enslaved are encouraged to be useful, loyal, and commodifiable for their enslaver. I then turn to the figure of Hermas himself, who is portrayed in the Shepherd as an enslaved literary laborer. The textual composition, dissemination, and reading of the Shepherd itself is framed by enslavement insofar as Hermas textually produces and copies revelatory material with the express purpose of circulating the Shepherd among God’s enslaved. Third, I demonstrate that a central aspect of the Shepherd’s presentation of God as an enslaver is spirit possession. The anthropology and pneumatology of the Shepherd depict the holy spirit as the presence of the indwelling enslaver, capable of entering the bodies of God’s enslaved in order to surveil them and affect their cognition, behaviors, and actions. Finally, I take up the issue of agency and explore how God’s enslaved are treated as God’s instrumental agents in the Shepherd. God’s enslaved who fail to be used as effective instrumental agents and conform to God’s will are encouraged to repent or suffer death through separation from God. The significance of the dissertation lies in showing that slavery shapes the ways that some believers constructed themselves as ethical, loyal, and pious subjects so as to be in right relationship to God. My reading of how the Shepherd crafts such subjectivities and relations of believers to God in light of enslavement exposes how deeply entrenched some early Christian literature and practices were in ancient Mediterranean discourses of enslavement.