[Footnote 1: I. ii. 94, 5, ad. 3.]
Ægidius Romanus closely follows the teaching of his master on the subject of slavery. 'What does Ægidius do? He unites Aristotle and St. Augustine against human liberty. He declares with the latter that man has lost the right of belonging to himself, since he has fallen from the primitive order established by God Himself in nature. He admits with Aristotle the existence of two races of men, the one designed for liberty, the other for servitude…. This is not all—to this servitude which he calls natural, the author joins another, purely legal, but which does not seem to him less just, namely, that which is founded on the right of war, and which obliges the conquered to become the slaves of the conquerors—to give up their liberty in exchange for their lives. Our author admits it is just in itself, because in his opinion it is useful to the defence of one's country; it excites warriors to courage by placing before their eyes the terrible consequences of cowardice.'[1] The teachings of St. Thomas and Ægidius were accepted by all the later scholastics.[2] Biel, whose opinion is always very valuable as being that of the last of a long line, says that there are three kinds of slaves—slaves of God, of sin, and of man. The first kind of slavery is wholly good, the second wholly bad, while the third, though not instituted by, is approved by the jus gentium. He proceeds to state the four ways in which a man may become enslaved: namely, ex necessitate, or by being born of a slave mother; ex bello, by being captured in war; ex delicto, or by sentence of the law in the case of certain crimes committed by freedmen; and ex propria voluntate, or by the sale of a man of himself into slavery.[3]
[Footnote 1: Franck, op. cit., p. 90.]
[Footnote 2: Franck, op. cit., p. 91.]
[Footnote 3: Biel, Inventarium seu Repertorium generale super qualuor libros Sententiarum, iv. xv. I; and see Carletus, Summa Angelica, q. ccxii.]
It must not be forgotten that we are dealing purely with theory. In fact the Church did an inestimable amount of good to the servile classes, and, at the time that Aquinas wrote, thanks to the operation of Christianity in this respect, the old Roman slavery had completely disappeared. The nearest approach to ancient slavery in the Middle Ages was serfdom, which was simply a step in the transition from slavery to free labour.[1] Moreover, the rights of the master over the slave were strictly confined to the disposal of his services; the ancient absolute right over his body had completely disappeared. 'In those things,' says St. Thomas, 'which appertain to the disposition of human acts and things, the subject is bound to obey his superior according to the reason of the superiority; thus a soldier must obey his officer in those things which appertain to war; a slave his master in those things which appertain to the carrying out of his servile works.'[2] 'Slavery does not abolish the natural equality of man,' says a writer who is quoted by the Catholic Encyclopædia as correctly stating the Catholic doctrine on the subject prior to the eighteenth century, 'hence by slavery one man is understood to become subject to the dominion of another to the extent that the master has a perfect right to the services which one man may justly perform for another.'[3] Biel, who lays down the justice of slavery so unambiguously, is no less clear in his statement of the limitations of the right. 'The body of the slave is not simply in the power of the master as the body of an ox is; nor can the master kill or mutilate the slave, nor abuse him contrary to the law of God. The temporal gains derived from the labour of the slave belong to the master; but the master is bound to provide the slave with the necessaries of life.'[4] Rambaud very properly points out that the reason that the scholastic writers did not fulminate in as strong and as frequent language against the tyranny of masters, was not that they felt less strongly on the subject, but that the abuses of the ancient slave system had almost entirely disappeared under the influence of Christian teaching.[5]
[Footnote 1: Wallon, op. cit., vol. iii. p. 93; Brants, op. cit., p. 87.]
[Footnote 2: II. ii. 104, 5.]
[Footnote 3: Gerdil., Comp. Inst. Civ. I., vii.]
[Footnote 4: Biel, op. cit., iv. xv. 5.]