Were slavery and social injustice leading to dire poverty in antiquity and late antiquity only regarded as normal, ‘natural’ (Aristotle), or at best morally ‘indifferent’ (the Stoics), or, in the Christian milieu, a sad but inevitable consequence of the Fall, or even an expression of God’s unquestionable will? This monograph shows that there were also condemnations of slavery and social injustice as iniquitous and even impious, and that these came especially from ascetics, in Judaism, Christianity, and occasionally also in Graeco-Roman (‘pagan’) philosophy. It is argued that this depends on a ... More

Were slavery and social injustice leading to dire poverty in antiquity and late antiquity only regarded as normal, ‘natural’ (Aristotle), or at best morally ‘indifferent’ (the Stoics), or, in the Christian milieu, a sad but inevitable consequence of the Fall, or even an expression of God’s unquestionable will? This monograph shows that there were also condemnations of slavery and social injustice as iniquitous and even impious, and that these came especially from ascetics, in Judaism, Christianity, and occasionally also in Graeco-Roman (‘pagan’) philosophy. It is argued that this depends on a link not only between asceticism and renunciation, but also between asceticism and justice, at least in ancient and late antique philosophical asceticism. A careful investigation leads readers through all of ancient philosophy (not only Aristotle and the Stoics, but also the sophists, Socrates, Plato, the Epicureans, Sceptics, Platonists, and more), ancient to rabbinic Judaism, Hellenistic Jewish ascetic groups such as the Essenes and the Therapeutae, all of the New Testament, with focus on Paul and Jesus, and Greek, Latin, and Syriac patristics, from Clement and Origen to the Cappadocians, from John Chrysostom to Theodoret to Byzantine monastics, from Ambrose to Augustine, from Bardaisan to Aphrahat and Jacob of Sarugh, without neglecting the Christianized Pythagorean Sentences of Sextus. Special (but by no means exclusive) attention is paid to Gregory Nyssen and the interrelation between theory and practice in all these ancient and patristic philosophers, as well as to the parallels that emerge in their arguments against slavery and social injustice.