of Pope Nicolas I. is his protection of injured innocence in the person of the divorced wife of King
Lothair of Lorraine.^335
§ 77. Slavery.
See the Lit. in vol. I. § 48 (p. 444), and in vol. II. § 97 (p. 347). Comp. also Balmes (R.C.):
Protestantism and Catholicism compared in their effects on the Civilization of Europe. Transl.
from the spanish. Baltimore 1851, Chs. xv.-xix. Brace: Gesta Christi, Ch. xxi.
History is a slow but steady progress of emancipation from the chains which sin has forged.
The institution of slavery was universal in Europe during the middle ages among barbarians as well
as among civilized nations. It was kept up by natural increase, by war, and by the slave-trade which
was carried on in Europe more or less till the fifteenth century, and in America till the eighteenth.
Not a few freemen sold themselves into slavery for debt, or from poverty. The slaves were completely
under the power of their masters, and had no claim beyond the satisfaction of their physical wants.
They could not bear witness in courts of justice. They could be bought and sold with their children
like other property. The marriage tie was disregarded, and marriages between freemen and slaves
were null and void. In the course of time slavery was moderated into serfdom, which was attached
to the soil. Small farmers often preferred that condition to freedom, as it secured them the protection
of a powerful nobleman against robbers and invaders. The condition of the serfs, however, during
the middle ages was little better than that of slaves, and gave rise to occasional outbursts in the
Peasant Wars, which occurred mostly in connection with the free preaching of the Gospel (as by
Wiclif and the Lollards in England, and by Luther in Germany), but which were suppressed by
force, and in their immediate effects increased the burdens of the dependent classes. The same
struggle between capital and labor is still going on in different forms.
The mediaeval church inherited the patristic views of slavery. She regarded it as a necessary
evil, as a legal right based on moral wrong, as a consequence of sin and a just punishment for it.
She put it in the same category with war, violence, pestilence, famine, and other evils. St. Augustin,
the greatest theological authority of the Latin church, treats slavery as disturbance of the normal
condition and relation. God did not, he says, establish the dominion of man over man, but only
over the brute. He derives the word servus, as usual, from servare (to save the life of captives of
war doomed to death), but cannot find it in the Bible till the time of the righteous Noah, who gave
it as a punishment to his guilty son Ham; whence it follows that the word came "from sin, not from
nature." He also holds that the institution will finally be abolished when all iniquity shall disappear,
and God shall be all in all.^336
(^335) See § 61, p. 275 sq.
(^336) De Civit. Dei, 1. XIX. c. 15. "Nomen [servus] culpa meruit, non natura ... Prima servitutis causa peccatum est, ut
homo homini conditionis vinculo subderetur quod non fuit nisi Deo judicante, apud quem non est iniquitas." He thinks it will
continue with the duties prescribed by the apostles, donec transeat iniquitas, et evacuetur omnis principatus, et potestas humana,
et sit Deus omnia in omnibus.." Chrysostom taught substantially the same views, and derived from the sin of Adam a threefold
servitude and a threefold tyranny, that of the husband over the wife, the master over the slave, and the state over the subjects.
Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the schoolmen, " did not see in slavery either difference of race or imaginary inferiority or
means of government, but only a scourge inflicted on humanity by the sins of the first man" (Balmes, p. 112). But none of these
great men seems to have had an idea that slavery would ever disappear from the earth except with sin itself. Cessante causa,
cessat effectus. See vol. III. 115-121.