Matthew Elia: “Augustine’s Cross and Slavery: Toward a Fugitive Theory of Resignification”

Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana, Rowan Williams notes, contends that “we live in a world of restless fluidities in meaning,” where signs and symbols “refuse to stay still.” Interpretive anarchy lurks, Williams continues, but this is held in check by the cross of Jesus, which provides Augustine the final symbol, the only stable point amidst an endless play of signs. But neither Augustine nor Williams addresses what scholarship of Roman antiquity indicates: the cross did not become symbolic with Jesus. It was already charged with profound signifying power. A brutal parable of the Roman social imaginary, the cross showed what happened to bodies which threaten imperial order—especially enslaved bodies found fugitive, disobedient, or rebellious.This paper develops a constructive reworking of Augustine’s theory of signification by suggesting Jesus faced a question neither Augustine nor Williams raises: What do you do with a symbol like the Roman cross which—fluidity notwithstanding—has been designed precisely to hold you violently in place? To capture and pin down the meaning of your life, to stabilize it for the immense story-telling needs of empire? A reconstructed Augustinian theory of signs would revisit Jesus’s words of institution as interruption of imperial signifying work, as insurgent symbolic practice: the cross that once signified the realignment of bad slaves with good order has been stolen and bent, opened up and resignified toward a meal of communion, toward a Passover sociality which enacts the Exodus it echoes—the cross as divine sanction of fugitive flight.