Polis and Oikos

Milbank often makes this point, but it’s huge: “Likewise the household, the site of productive provision, was not an arena of ‘politics’ and dialectical disputation, but of unquestioned paternal control. The Christian gothic ‘merging’ of oikos and polis , which as Ruskin in particular grasped, opened the question of virtue exercised within the material sphere of work.”

For ancients, the sphere of virtue was political/military, and thus it was male and detached from labor. Slaves worked and made things; virtuous aristocrats argued in the forum or fought battles. By merging household and city, Christianity made it possible for women and children to display virtue, and for men to be virtuous in “menial” labor.