Toni Alimi's "Slaves of God"

Toni Alimi is assistant professor in the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Slaves of God: Augustine and Other Romans on Religion and Politics, and reported the following:

Page 99 comes towards the end of my argument that Lactantius, a 3rd century North African Christian thinker, developed a novel theory of religion. This theory provided him with a framework for characterizing certain practices as “religions” and designating all religions as either true or false. Page 99 contrasts Lactantius’s account of religion with accounts offered by two earlier thinkers – Tertullian and Minucius Felix. I argue that Lactantius also thought that religion involves slavery to the object of one’s worship. True religion worships and is therefore slavery to the true God. False religions worship and therefore enslave people to false gods.

Page 99 wouldn’t give a browser a good sense of the book’s central argument. Indeed, it might give the impression that Lactantius is the book’s main character. He isn’t — that’s Augustine!

But there is a sense in which the test might give a browser a feel for the book. On page 99, I am trying to clarify Lactantius’s views by situating him in his intellectual context: identifying which ideas he may have borrowed from whom, and which ideas were “in the air.” Clarifying the intellectual milieu can help us determine more precisely what Lactantius’s innovations were. We can only know what changes he made to previous ways of thinking if we know how he was continuous with previous ways of thinking. This commitment – that we can only know what changed if we know what stayed the same – runs through the book. So page 99 does give a sense for the type of arguments the book makes.

Here's how page 99 fits in with the broader book. Augustine used Lactantius’s theory of religion to criticize Roman religion. He argued that ordinary Romans were slaves of false and abusive gods. Romans, who claimed to value liberty, should have liberated themselves from such gods. They failed to because they were superstitious.

He also argued that Roman elites treated the gods as their slaves, reversing the relationship between master and slave found in true religion. Elites did so because they were impious.

The true religion, Augustine thought, involves slavery to a benevolent God. However, this was also a crucial premise in his justification of chattel slavery. How? Read the book and find out.

Learn more about Slaves of God at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue