Masters and Slaves: Our Lust for Domination vs. the Lord’s Dominion

In The Brothers Karamazov (Bk VI, ch 2) Markel at one point says to his mother, “Mama, my joy, it is not possible for there to be no masters and servants…” This is a truth most men and women fear to acknowledge about the human condition, namely, there will always be masters and slaves (servants) among us. It is not an abstract idea either, but a fully embodied human reality.

St. Augustine named it as a fruit of the Fall, calling it libido dominandi or “lust for domination.” In the area of human sexuality, it comes from a dark place and commonly goes by the name of “abuse,” if by force, and “kink,” if by consent. Either way, it mirrors the upward surge of Satan who deemed equality with God something to be grasped and who, once thrown down to earth, tempted our ancestors to reach for the same. They did, and now the master and slave polarity is so rooted in our human condition that when God became man, He had to choose between one of them:

Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness. (Phil. 2:5-7)

It’s no secret that we project our predicament onto God, throwing up our heals and refusing to be enslaved by the Patriarchal Father. Jean-Paul Sartre even asserted that atheism was the pre-condition of freedom for becoming your own master.

Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) was a master so insane in his evil that he can be faulted for what he did with the slaves. Unlike the Romans who forced prisoners into slave labor, Hitler wasted valuable resources trying to kill them instead of putting them to work in support of the German effort to rule the world. We don’t like to think about such things, and would rather stand apart from Hitler, yet slavery persists.

For example, the United States legislature abolished slavery in 1865 with the 13^th Amendment to the Constitution, but today we still find masters in most of our major cities trafficking slaves in both labor and sex, with countless others willingly transacting for their services. In the 1960s, Martin Luther King, Jr. labored feverishly to stretch our civil liberties to include our national creed that “all men are created equal.” The polarity of master and slave is stubborn and not so easily removed from our midst within culture and society.

So, what is the problem? The Catholic interpretation of Scripture proposes a realist answer to the question, namely, that the sinful human body is the problem. We don’t like this answer today because the spirit of our times is about body positivity and self-image. As a result, we become heady and sophisticated, dissociating ourselves from the body, and proposing solutions through law which in the end are no solution at all. But still, the long-developed interpretation of Scripture by the Catholic Church persists in understanding the sinful human body to be the source of our polarity into masters and slaves. St. Bonaventure summarized this truth in his short and pithy way, saying:

…the soul through its union with the body contracts infirmity, ignorance, malice, and concupiscence from which the intellective, loving, and operative powers are infected and thus the whole soul is infected. (cf. In Hex. VII, #8)

Whence comes the infection? There are two possibilities. It could come from God, who at the moment of conception creates the soul ex nihilo for infusion into the body, or from the conjugal union of man and woman, who, fallen, generate a bodily likeness unto themselves. The Church locates the propagation of the infection not in the creative act of God who infuses the soul, but in the contribution of man and woman to life in generating an infirm body like unto themselves within the marital embrace. “The soul,” therefore, “through its union with the body” is wholly “infected” with “infirmity, ignorance, malice, and concupiscence.” Thus, the body is sinful, and since we all possess one, we are all guilty.

So, are civil liberties alone our only way out of the polarity of master and slave to finally approach the bright horizon of equality? They are a beginning, but laws only place restraint on the outer man or woman by the legislative force and power of the State. The Church, however, down through the centuries, has dug deeper to arrive at love as the remedy, since love exists only between equals.

It is not just any love, since the parity of love is not something we can simply grind out by force of law. No, the Church begins with the revelation of God in Scripture which teaches us that “God is love” (1 Jn. 4:8), who in becoming Incarnate united Himself with the universal polarity of our human condition by becoming a slave. Here, in the “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (Jn. 1:29), we find ourselves surrounded “with joyful shouts of deliverance” (Ps. 32:7).

In coming among us, however, Christ, the Son of the living God, did not deny that He was Master. Instead, He freely emptied Himself to become a slave, making a way for us out of the polarity of master and slave into the parity of life fully informed and transformed by His love. Jesus declared, “I no longer call you slaves…but friends” (cf. Jn. 15:15). After washing the feet of the apostles, He said:

You call me “teacher” and “master,” and rightly so, for indeed I am. If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another’s feet. I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do. Amen, amen, I say to you, no slave is greater than his master nor any messenger greater than the one who sent him. If you understand this, blessed are you if you do it. (Jn. 13:13-17)

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