Master and Servant

In J. M. Barrie’s play The Admirable Crichton, an aristocratic English family is marooned by shipwreck.  Crichton, its able and intelligent butler, to serve and preserve his vain and helpless employers, finds it necessary to become their absolute master. Here one sees the servant, who has become competent through the labors of servitude, becoming—in a state Barrie presents as more natural than that of civilized but artificial English society--master of the master who has been made helpless and incompetent through the conventions of a life in which he has become dependent upon his servants. One sees the same theme in Wodehouse’s Bertie and Jeeves stories. Hegel, though in a different context—an exposition of the slave’s advantage in the advance toward universal self-consciousness--observes,

Since the slave works for the master and therefore not in the exclusive interest of his own individuality, his desire is expanded into being not only the desire of this particular individual but also the desire of another. Accordingly, the slave rises above the selfish individuality of his natural will, and his worth to that extent exceeds that of his master who, imprisoned in his egotism, beholds in the slave only his immediate will and is only formally recognized by [as?] an unfree consciousness. This subjugation of the slave’s egotism forms the beginning of true human freedom. [G. F. W. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, trans. W. Wallace. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971, Zusatz, p. 175]

The same idea, or at least adumbrations of it, may be found  in Plato, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Confucius, and the Old Testament Proverbs.  One of the principal objectives of St. Paul’s epistle to the slaveholder Philemon was clearly to free him from the master’s unfree consciousness and establish in him the servitude to Christ by which only he could become free himself, and thus a true master.

The Lord gave the authoritative teaching on how his disciples were to imitate him in these matters: They called him Lord and Teacher, and so he is, but this is established in the servanthood of the one who came not be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. The servanthood is real servanthood, not undertaken in false humility as though the serving master was doing a saturnalian imitation of a slave, but quietly and as a true servant, to the giving up of his life.

The mastery is true mastery, to be recognized in justice, and bowed to, by those who are taught and served, the greater the service the higher the mastery, the more perfect the teacher’s authority. There is no middle ground between service and mastery, any more than there is a third sex or a confusion of the divine and human natures. Humility is not in the master pretending to be a servant, but the master serving. Authority is not vested in the servant who has, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, put on a master’s robes, but in the master servant.