Such a human spirit, indeed, may be held to have shown itself in the movement set up in Florence by Girolamo Savonarola near the end of the fifteenth century. Savonarola was moved by a high concern for individual conduct; and his gospel was substantially that of an Ebionite Christian, wroth with all luxury as well as with all levity of life. Thus he wielded a great influence, setting up in the splendid Florence of the later Renaissance a forecast of the iron-bound Geneva of Calvin. It is no final impeachment of him to say that, having gone so far, he failed and fell; but it is clear that he could not have been a durable civilizing force. His influence was that of a fanatic, operating by contagion of excitement and superstitious fear, not that of an enlightener or a statesmanlike guide. To him amenity and luxury, art and vice, selfishness and skepticism, were alike anathema; and he set up in Florence a kind of pietistic reign of terror, driving impressionable believers to give up their pictures to the fire for peace’ sake, and even letting others be forced to it by fear. On the great political need of the Italian cities, a fraternal federation, he had no light whatever; and we find him encouraging his fellow citizens in their fatal passion for dominating Pisa instead of making of her an ally and a friend. Lacking light, he finally lacked force; and when he fell, he fell utterly, leaving no enduring ideal or discipline to his countrymen.
Thus on every side and at every point in the history of the ages of faith the ostensibly best religious influences are found failing to heal society, failing to check the forces of oppression and dissolution and strife. If we would trace the forces which really affected social structure and raised masses of men some way in the scale of manhood, we must turn to the clash of interests and classes, the play of secular knowledge, the undertakings of laymen on normal lines of aspiration and on secular views of right.
§ 3. Christianity and Feudalism
We have seen, in studying the expansion of the Church, how it grew by lending itself to the interests of kings and chiefs as against subjects. On the same grounds, it made for empires as against self-governing States. But inasmuch as the papacy ere long fell out with the emperors of the new line it had itself consecrated, it also contributed to the break-up of feudalism, in the widest sense of the term; and it is possible to claim for the Church, further, a restraining influence on the oppressive action of feudalism, early and late, in various directions. Under this head would fall to be judged, in particular, its action on slavery.
As the institution of slavery was taken over by the Christian emperors from the pagan without any hint of disapproval, it is clear, to begin with, that the Church had in its days of struggle made no sign of such condemnation. Nor was there anything in its sacred books to suggest a repudiation of slavery; on the contrary, Jesus is made to accept it as a matter of course ([Luke xvii, 7–10]; Gr.); and Paul, in a passage which has been garbled in the English translation, expressly urges that a Christian slave should remain so even if he have a chance to become free ([1 Cor. vii, 20, 21]). He and some of the Fathers certainly urge that slaves should be kindly treated; but many pagans had done as much, and Seneca on that theme had outgone them all. Laws for the protection of slaves, too, had been enacted by many emperors long before Constantine. The only ground, then, on which Christianity could be credited with setting up by religious appeal an aversion to slavery would be a visible increase in manumissions after the time of Constantine. No such increase, however, took place.
A misconception on the subject has arisen by way of a hasty inference from the fact that in the Christian period all manumissions were religious acts, performed through the Church. This was no result of any Christian doctrine, being in fact a deliberate imitation of pagan practice. Before Constantine, as we have seen, the act of manumission was a religious one, performed as such in the pagan temples; and when Constantine adroitly transferred the function from those temples to the churches, he probably put a check on the process of liberation, since pagans would long be reluctant to go to the churches for any purpose. For centuries manumission had been a common act, the number of freedmen in Rome being notoriously great at all times, from the day of Cicero onwards. It was almost a matter of course for a Roman master to free a multitude of his slaves on his deathbed or by his will, till Augustus enacted that no one should emancipate more than a hundred at once. A diligent slave, in fact, could usually count on getting his freedom by five or six years of service; and many were allowed to buy it out of their savings, or out of earnings they were permitted to make.
So far were the earlier Christian emperors, with one exception, from seeking to raise the status of slaves, that they re-enacted the rule excluding them from the purview of the law against adultery, “because of the vileness of their condition.” The exception was the law of Constantine forbidding the separation of slaves from their families—a humane veto disregarded by Christian slave-owners in modern times. But Constantine, on the other hand, enacted that if a freewoman should cohabit with a slave, she should be executed, and he burned alive; and the laws against fugitive slaves were made more cruel. Gratian even enacted that any slave who dared to accuse his master of any crime, unless it were high treason, should be burned alive, without any inquiry into the charge. For the rest, the Fathers justified slavery on the score of the curse passed on Ham; and the theses of the Stoics as to the natural equality of men had from them no countenance.
Only in the reign of Justinian did the law begin expressly to encourage manumission, to recognize freedmen as full citizens, and to raise the slave status; and several circumstances are to be noted as giving a lead to such a course. Justinian had pursued a policy of great outlays where his immediate predecessors had been frugal, and to sustain it he had to impose much fresh taxation on the land. For fiscal purposes, it had long been recognized, the government did well to limit the power of proprietors to dispose of their slaves; and it is probable that the humane law of Constantine really had this end in view. By raising slaves to the status of half-free peasants, the State increased the number of its taxpayers. “The labourer of the soil then became an object of great interest to the treasury, and obtained almost as important a position in the eyes of the fisc as the landed proprietor himself.” In the process the small freeman was put in a worse position than before; but the slave was at the same time bettered—the hereditary slave, that is, for captives were enslaved or bought throughout the history of the Byzantine empire.
The legal change was thus made from economic motives; but one moral gain did indirectly accrue from the existence of the Church as such. Under Justinian the empire was re-expanded after having been for a time curtailed; and this would under paganism have meant a large addition to the number of slaves. The recovered lands, however, were peopled by Christians; and all bishops were bound in their own interest to resist the enslavement and deportation of their flocks; so that Christianity at this point was favourable to freedom exactly as was Islam, which forbade Moslems to enslave Moslems. And the indirect benefit did not end there. The Church, like the fisc, had a good deal to gain pecuniarily from the freeing of slaves; and, especially in the West, though it supported slave-laws, it encouraged masters to manumit for the sake of their souls’ welfare in the next world. That the motive here again was political and not doctrinal is clear from the two facts—(1) that even when making serfs priests for its own service the Church often did not legally free them, thus keeping them more fully subject to discipline; and (2) that while urging laymen to free the slaves or serfs on their lands Churchmen were the last to free those on their own, on the score that no individuals in orders had the right to alienate the property of the order as such. Other economic causes, of course, effectually concurred to further the freeing of slaves and serfs, else the institution would not have decayed as it did in the Middle Ages. It is noteworthy, too, that while the Jews were the great slave dealers for Europe in the Dark Ages, thus dangerously deepening their own unpopularity and moving the Church to thwart the traffic on Christian grounds, Christians everywhere were long eager to buy and sell barbarians such as the Slavs (from whose name came the very term “slave” in the modern languages); while the Christian Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Normans for centuries maintained a trade in kidnapped Anglo-Saxon or British children and young women, selling them to Ireland after they were no longer saleable on the continent. A similar traffic went on among the Bohemians, before the eyes of St. Adalbert. What the Church did, broadly speaking, was to restrain the enslavement of Christians by their fellows; and to raise funds to redeem Christian captives from the Saracens. To a certain extent the motive was religious: otherwise it was self-regarding.