UC Santa Barbara

What exactly is addiction? Lawmakers, psychiatrists, and addicts themselves have contested the definition of addiction for centuries, and they consistently arrive at a fork in the road: Is addiction a willful crime or a congenital disease? Some argue that addictive behaviors are an individual's free choice, and thus they have justified punishing addicts for their bad decisions (think the Reagans' "Just Say No" campaign). Others insist that addiction is not a willful crime to be punished, but a medical condition to be treated (think Alcoholics Anonymous' 12-step program). Despite these many inquiries and debates, one significant aspect of the concept of addiction remains unexamined—its deep theological history. These familiar debates about the nature of addiction—whether inherited disease, willful crime, or paradoxically both—raged for over a millennium in Latin theology before the term ever appeared in American psychiatric manuals. My dissertation, "Christianity's Addiction: Voluntary Enslavement and the Paradox of the Will," studies the empirical origin and discursive history of the persistent concept of addiction, whose peregrinations from ancient Roman pecuniary law, through the history of Latin theology, to contemporary psychiatry have created substantive linkages among ostensibly disparate discourses. I show how theologians writing in Latin between the second and seventeenth centuries constructed Christian doctrines of sin and salvation upon the metaphorical premise that we are all addicts—a term they borrowed from ancient Roman law, denoting debt-slaves. My dissertation (1) uncovers how the concept of addiction came to pervade Latin Christianity as a controlling metaphor for the human condition; (2) phenomenologically re-describes the experiences of addiction autobiographically recounted by theologians such as Augustine, Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Abelard, Martin Luther, and John Calvin; and (3) demonstrates the role this legal metaphor and its economic logic played in the historical development of the idea of the "free will" within Western theology.