Flogging a Son: The Emergence of the Pater Flagellans in Latin Christian Discourse

In the Latin literature of the late republic and early principate, the whip was a cultural sign of servitude. By the late fourth and early fifth centuries, however, the figure of the pater flagellans, the father who “whips” the son he loves (cf. Proverbs 3.12/Hebrews 12.6), has become commonplace in Latin Christian discourse. The paper traces the development of this representation of paternal discipline in Latin Christian literature from Tertullian to Augustine (section one), and then discusses the significance of the widespread and varied reference to the figure of the pater flagellans around the end of the fourth century (section two), considering developments in the ethos of Christianity in the fourth century, measuring the weight of disciplinary tendencies in late antiquity, and exploring the value of the son cum slave for the authority of the church.

In several recent studies, Richard Saller argues that in Roman society flogging as a form of domestic discipline was reserved for slaves. ¹ The whip was a cultural sign of servitude. As Saller puts it, “The servile spirit was one that had to be goaded by the lash; the servile back was one marked with scars from past whippings. Precisely because uerbera were fit for slaves and encouraged a servile mentality of grudging fear, such punishment was considered inappropriate and insulting for freeborn adult filiifamilias.” ² The son was reproved, threatened, and, as a last resort, disinherited, but rarely flogged.

Saller’s evidence is drawn from the scenarios of Roman comedy, the exempla of letters and treatises, and the opinions of jurists up to the second century c.e. By way of contrast to this material, Saller introduces later Christian views—chiefly Augustine’s—as indicative of a “change in thinking about corporal punishment of children.” ³ Augustine, according to Saller, considered it a father’s duty to apply the whip to a disobedient son: to deny the whip was cruel; to use it was an act of love and devotion.

It is not surprising that Augustine would be singled out as a foil to earlier attitudes. The motif of paternal discipline is prominent in his interpretation of human suffering and religious experience. He was especially fond of Proverbs 3.12/Hebrews 12.6: “Whom the Lord loves, he rebukes, and he scourges (flagellat) every son he receives.” ⁴ In fact, Augustine cites the passage fifty-two times, far more than any of his predecessors in the Latin Christian tradition. ⁵ Even more remarkable is the frequency of flagellum and flagellare in Augustine’s writings—close to 500 instances. ⁶ This rhetorical phenomenon caught the eye of scholars, notably Anne-Marie la Bonnardière and Suzanne Poque, long before the era of computerized searches. ⁷ Their studies reveal a discourse imbued with the penitential posture of the Psalms and Roman notions of paternal authority: sufferings endured by humankind in the course of temporal existence are construed as discipline from God who, like a father who beats his children precisely because he loves them, thereby prepares his heirs for eternal blessedness.

Suggestive as this evidence might seem, it requires further investigation. At what point in the development of Latin Christian discourse did this apparent shift in the representation of flogging occur? What occasioned the shift in representation, and what does the shift disclose about the ethos of the church in late antiquity? In this paper, I propose to explore these questions by examining the representation of “whipping” as a form of paternal discipline in Latin Christian writers from Tertullian to Augustine. There have been two points of entry to the evidence: the usage of flagellum, flagellare, uerber, uerberare, and related words in representations of the relationship between father and son (and, as we shall see, God and the Christian); ⁸ and the citation of biblical passages that include images of corporal punishment in paternal discipline. ⁹ To highlight changes in context and over time, I first consider each author in sequence (section I), and then examine the significance of shifts in representation (section II), though at times it...