Christianity's Addiction: The Metaphor of Debt-Bondage in Roman Theology

The concept of addiction has a long history, and the term has circulated among a number of different discourses. Over two-thousand years ago, Roman judges used the word *addiction* to condemn debtors to bondage. During the Reformation, Protestant theologians celebrated being addicted to God. Today, neuropsychologists are searching for addiction in the human genome. Moreover, we use the term colloquially to refer to anything from alcoholism to brand-loyalty. After all these years and many different meanings, the concept of addiction has become overdetermined, and many scholars have tried to sift through the layers to find a core sense. Etymologists, cultural historians, lawmakers, psychologists, therapists, and addicts themselves consistently arrive at a fork in the road in their respective quests for the meaning of addiction: choice or compulsion, crime or disease? Despite these many inquiries, one significant aspect of addiction's past remains unexamined—its deep theological history. Christian theologians writing in Latin from the second to the seventeenth century used the term Roman legal term *addictio*—originally denoting debt-bondage—as a metaphor to describe the sinful human condition. 

In this talk, I analyze the genesis and development of the Christian addiction metaphor in the writings of three important Roman theologians, Tertullian of Carthage (c. 155 - 220), Ambrose of Milan (339 - 397), and Augustine of Hippo (354 - 430). Through this analysis, I show how the language and logic of Roman financial jurisprudence—imported through the addiction metaphor—structured their thinking about the human condition. First, I will describe the literal meaning of the term *addicere* in Roman private law. Next, I will explain how Tertullian, Ambrose, and Augustine each build their theologies—specifically the central Christian notion of the individual free will—around the Roman legal metaphor of debt-bondage. In conclusion, I suggest based on preliminary research that the disease-crime ambivalence constitutive of our contemporary understanding of addiction does not merely resonate with but in fact derives from their oxymoronic definition of original sin as both generational enslavement and willful servitude.

Tertullian of Carthage, Ambrose of Milan, and Augustine of Hippo are three of the most important theologians in Latin Christianity, as they helped develop the language and logic of Western theology that would become orthodoxy in their wake. Each of these theologians employed the Latin term *addicere* to describe the human condition. They used it as a metaphor borrowed from Roman pecuniary law, where it referred to a state of debt-bondage. If a Roman judge found someone guilty of defaulting on a loan, he could authorize the defrauded creditor to bind the delinquent and take them as a bondsman. The judge's sentence authorizing the creditor to take the defaulter away in chains was referred to as an *addictio*; hence, the convicted debtor was known as an *addictus*. Importantly, Roman law distinguished between *addictium* (debt-bondage) and *servitium* (enslavement). Unlike a *servus*, an *addictus* had supposedly entered debt by choice and had therefore chosen servitude freely. Addiction was thus described as "voluntary enslavement." Also unlike a slave, an *addictus* could, in principle, regain their freedom. Either the debtor could perform compensatory labor for the creditor, or a third-party could pay the outstanding debt on the addict's behalf. This third-party debt-buyback through which *addicti* could recover their freedom was known as a *redemptio*, coming from the Latin verb *redimere*, *to buy back (re + emere)*.  

By cross-referencing the original Latin texts of Tertullian, Ambrose, and Augustine against their predominant translations into English, French, Italian, Spanish, and German, I have found that variations of the term *addicere* have been ubiquitously erased from their works. In short, translations of their writings from Latin into modern European languages during and after the Reformation have consistently rendered their term *addictus* as *slave* or *enslaved*, which elides the important Roman legal distinction between addiction and slavery. While context often demands that translators use strategically inexact phrasings, such choices often come with a cost. These renderings of *addicere* are plausible, but they have created lacunae in our understandings of Latin theological history and the conceptual history of addiction. The translational elision of addiction from Western theology has obscured not only the specific sense of the Church Fathers' central legal metaphor—and hence Western theology’s debt to Roman pecuniary jurisprudence—but also, by extension, the deep Christian legacy of the modern concept of addiction.

Economic anthropologist David Graeber wonders in his book *Debt: The First 5,000 Years*, "Why do we refer to Christ as the 'redeemer'? The primary meaning of 'redemption' is to buy something back, or to recover something that had been given up in security for a loan; to acquire something by paying off a debt. It is rather striking to think that the core of the Christian message, salvation itself, should be framed in the language of a financial transaction" (Graeber 2011, 80). If redemption is "the very core of the Christian message," then so too is addiction. While the language of redemption has remained central to Christian discourse through today, redemption is only one half of the Roman legal metaphor that has structure Christian thinking about salvation and the human condition for nearly two-thousand years. The other half of that metaphor is addiction, which has been lost through the translation of Christian texts from Latin into modern European languages following the Reformation. As philosopher of religion Devin Singh alerts us, "Metaphors can contribute to a legacy of substantive linkage and potent affinity between disparate discourses . . . Metaphors linger, ossify, and become embedded in social understandings and resultant institutions" (Singh 2018, 18-19). This talk shows how Latin theologians using the metaphor of addiction initiated a "legacy of substantive linkage" between Roman debt law and Christian soteriology and indicates preliminarily how that legacy persists in the dominant psychiatric and legal theories of addiction today.