The net result of all Christian teaching together was to prolong the existence of the institution of slavery for two centuries, perhaps for three. The doctrine of the sinfulness of interest however, worked toward emancipation and forced slavery in its later end to become almost wholly agricultural, i.e., to yield income as rent. Slaves cannot be employed in commerce or industry in sufficient numbers to be profitable where the institution of interest is banned as it was in the 'dark ages.' The Christian concept of interest undermined ancient civilization by abrogating, slowly but surely, the institution of property by which such gangs of 'manufacturing slaves' as made the fortune of Crassus, could alone be made profitable. It is an historical curiosity that it accomplished this result without any attack on the institution of slavery itself.
As soon as Christian doctrines became widespread enough to produce important social results we find Christian slave owners manumitting their slaves in considerable numbers. It is no derogation to the influence of the doctrine of human brotherhood or to the humanity of the Christian slave owners to mention the fact that the doctrine of the sinfulness of interest, by tending to make slavery unprofitable, aided in the process of bringing to light the real content of the doctrine of human brotherhood, and of making the humane practice of manumission easier by the removal of certain economic impediments.
In order to understand properly the working of the prohibition of interest and its relation to manumission, it is necessary to carry the analysis one step farther to its ultimate physical basis, which was the conditioning factor of actual practice and eventually of theory also. The exhaustion of the soil of western Europe which was the result of ancient methods of agriculture, together with the rising standard of living and the competition of other more fertile agricultural regions like Egypt and North Africa resulted in the substitution of the latifundi for small landholdings.[27] As the pressure continued the latifundi in turn became economically unprofitable under forced labor (slavery) and large tracts of land were abandoned. In order to put this land under agriculture again the charge upon it had to be reduced by the substitution of (relatively) free associated labor, villeinage or serfdom. But this change cut off the economic margin upon which the structure of ancient civilization was built and is the ultimate economic reason assignable for the fall of Rome. Of course the collapse of the empire could, theoretically, have been avoided had the Romans of the first three centuries A.D. been content to live the toilsome and frugal life of the Romans of the early republic. But this was an utter impossibility in practice. This slowly working and hardly understood decline in the relative and actual ability of ancient agriculture to sustain the weight imposed upon it, enables us to see why the sinfulness of interest could be steadily indoctrined even though steadily evaded, by Christians from the beginning, while manumission was not taught at all in the beginning and only worked up to the dignity of a pious action relatively late.[28] It also explains why manumission of household and personal slaves preceded that of agricultural slaves. Of course there is nothing peculiarly Christian about this later phenomenon and the operation of other causes is discernable, but it is important for our purpose to observe that Christian practice, and Christian theory in property matters in the long run, followed the broad lines of the underlying economic evolution.[29] The application of this to the origin of Christian monasticism and to the revival of communistic theories by the later Church fathers lies at the very outside limit of our study but will be briefly touched on after we have considered the final overthrow of the communistic property concept as they appear in the earlier fathers up to and including Tertullian.
Clement of Alexandria 153-217 A.D. has the distinction of being the first Christian theological writer who clearly expounds the concept of private property which has held sway without substantial change in the Church until the present time. This statement does not apply to the doctrine of receiving interest on money. In respect to this doctrine Clement is in perfect accord with all other early Christians both before and after himself. Indeed he specifically states that the Mosaic prohibition against taking interest from one's brother extends in the case of a Christian to all mankind. But in regard to all other property institutions Clement's attitude is essentially that of any modern Christian of generous disposition.
In all that Clement has to say about property, and the 'bulk' of his 'property passages' is as great as that of all previous Christian writers together, he speaks like a man on the defensive. Indeed there has come down to us no other Christian writing earlier than his time which presents his view, with the dubious exception of some passages in Hermas. The fact seems to be that while Clement is undoubtedly presenting an apologetic for the existing practice in the Church of his day, that practice was felt to be more or less open to attack in the light of certain scripture passages. Communism as an existential reality was gone by the time of Clement—whatever may have been the extent—probably a limited one—to which it had existed in the earlier ages. But while communism as a fact was dead, communism as an idea or ideal of Christian economy was not dead. Indeed Clement's views about the morality of wealth were so different from those of previous writers that a great modern economist[30] in treating of this subject ventures the opinion, though doubtfully, that the reason why Clement, alone among the great early theologians, was never canonized by the Church was that he ran counter to popular belief on this subject. This opinion is probably erroneous. Clement's theological opinions have a semi-Gnostic tinge quite sufficient to explain the absence of his name from the calendar of saints.
Clement justifies the institution of private property. He justifies, on the highest ethical and philosophical principles, the possession by Christians of even the most enormous wealth. His apologetic is not an original one. He borrows it bodily from Plato. Indeed he quotes Plato verbatim, invocation to Pan and the other heathen gods included.[31] The originality lies in applying this Platonic doctrine to the exposition of Christian scripture. Clement's method is strictly that of Biblical exegesis. In the well known sermon or essay on: "Who is the Rich Man that shall be saved" he takes up practically all of the scriptural passages which seem opposed to the institutions of private property and explains them in so modern a spirit that the whole sermon might be delivered today in any ordinary Church and would be readily accepted as sound and reliable doctrine. His thesis is that wealth or poverty are matters in themselves indifferent. That riches are not to be bodily gotten rid of, but are to be wisely conserved and treated as a stewardship intrusted to the owner by God. That charity to the poor should be in proportion to one's wealth and that a right use of wealth will secure salvation to the upright Christian even though he possesses great riches all his life and leaves them to his heirs. The wealth that is dangerous to the soul is not physical possessions, but spiritual qualities of greed and avarice.
His views can be best expressed by himself. We give two characteristic passages from the sermon above referred to.[32] "Rich men that shall with difficulty enter into the kingdom, is to be apprehended in a scholarly way, not awkwardly, or rustically, or carnally. For if the expression is used thus, salvation does not depend upon external things, whether they be many or few, small or great, or illustrious or obscure or esteemed or disesteemed; but on the virtue of the soul, on faith and hope and love and brotherliness, and knowledge, and meekness and humility and truth the reward of which is salvation." "Sell thy possessions. What is this? He does not, as some off hand conceive, bid him throw away the substance he possesses and abandon his property; but he bids him banish from his soul his notions about wealth, his excitement and morbid feeling about it, the anxieties, which are the thorns of existence which choke the seed of life. And what peculiar thing is it that the new creature, the Son of God intimates and teaches? It is not the outward act which others have done, but something else indicated by it, greater, more godlike, more perfect, the stripping off of the passions from the soul itself and from the disposition, and the cutting up by the roots and casting out of what is alien to the mind." "One, after ridding himself of the burden of wealth, may none the less have still the lust and desire for money innate and living; and may have abandoned the use of it, but being at once destitute of and desiring what he spent may doubly grieve both on account of the absence of attendance and the presence of regret."[33]
We have now come to the beginning of what is in many respects the most interesting period in the history of property concepts. It is a period in which everything is upside down and wrong end to. In that strange age we find a famous archbishop, one of the world's noblest orators, a man of the most spotless integrity and the most saintly life, publicly preaching in the foremost pulpit of Christendom doctrines of property, the implications of which, the most hardened criminal would scarcely venture to breathe to a gang of thieves.[34] We find the most learned scholar of the century, in the weightiest expositions of Christian Scripture, penning the most powerful apologetic of anarchy that is to be found in the literature of the world.[35] We find one of the greatest of the popes, a man whose genius as a statesman will go down to the latest ages of history, setting forth in a manual for the instruction of Christian bishops, property concepts more radical than those of the fiercest Jacobins in the bloodiest period of the Terror.[36]
Stranger still, these incredible performances are the strongest proofs of the wisdom and piety of the men responsible for them. These men are today honored as the saviors of civilized religion and their images in bronze and marble and painted glass adorn the proudest temples of the most conservative denominations of Christians. The strange history of these famous men: Athanasius, the two Gregories, Basil and Chrysostom in the East; Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome and Gregory in the West, lies outside the limits of our study. But the explanation of their desperate and uncompromising communism can be given in a word. It was the communism of crisis: the communism of shipwrecked sailors forced to trust their lives to a frail lifeboat with an insufficient supply of provisions. These great Christian scholars, enriched by all the accumulated culture of their civilization, saw that culture falling into ruin all around them; they felt the foundations of that civilization trembling beneath their feet. To vary the figure, they beheld the rising tide of ignorance and barbarism rapidly engulfing the world and with desperate haste they set to work rebuilding and strengthening the ark of the Church that in it, religion, and so much of civilization as possible, might be saved till the flood subsided. Their task, perhaps the most important and most urgent, that men have ever had to perform, was of such a nature that they cared not what they wrecked in order to accomplish it. They ripped up the floor of the bridal chamber for timber and took the doors of the bank-safe for iron.
These rhetorical figures are violent; but they are less violent than the reality they are intended to express. Monasticism was the last desperate hope of civilized Christianity and these men knew it. To establish monasticism they degraded the sanctity of marriage and denounced the sacredness of property. They conferred the most sacred honors upon the lowliest drudgery;[37] they turned princes into plowmen and nobles into breakers of the soil. Some historians, judging them by the different standards of a later age, have pronounced them fanatics led astray by vulgar superstition. But judged by the needs of their own age, judged by the inestimable services rendered to the world by the monastic system they instituted, they are entitled to a place far up in the list of the wisest and the ablest of the human kind.