THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY I 305
The Church’s Opposition to Slavery, the Stage, and the Arena
20.13. The Church’s Opposition to Slavery, the Stage, and the Arena
The effect of the Church upon the Empire may be summed up in the word "freedom.*' Obedience to authority was indeed required in every department of public and private life, provided that it did not conflict with religious duty. But the old despotic attributes were gradually removed, the Roman patria potestas suffered notable relaxation, and children were regarded no longer as a peculium but as "a sacred charge upon which great care must be bestowed." In a word, authority was seen to be a form of service, according to God's will, and such service was freedom. This great principle found expression in many ways, and first in respect of literal bondage. The better feeling of the age was certainly already in favour of kindness towards the slave.
Stoicism, like Christianity, accepted slavery as a necessary institution, but no one ever more clearly discerned its baneful results than Seneca. And Seneca was still listened to. It is in his words that Praetextatus in Macrobius' Saturnalia pleads the slave's common humanity, faithfulness, and goodness, against the old feeling of contempt of which there were still traces in Christian and pagan writers. It was, however, not from Seneca but from Christ and St Paul that the fathers took their constant theme of the essential equality of men, before which slavery cannot stand. Not only do they establish the primitive unity and dignity of man, but, seeing in slavery a result of the Fall, they find in the sacrifice of Christ a road to freedom that was closed to Stoicism.
They offered a more effective consolation than the philosophers, for they pointed the slave upward by recognising his right to kneel beside his master in the Lord's Supper. Close upon the Church's victory follows legislation more favourable to the slave than any that had gone before.
Constantine did not attempt sudden or wholesale emancipation, which would have been unwise and impossible. Nor is there any sign that he recognised the slave's moral, intellectual, or religious needs. But he sought to lessen his hardships by measures which with all their inequalities are unique in the statute book of Rome. He tried to prevent the exposing of children, though he could not stop the enslavement of foundlings; he forbade cruelty towards slaves in terms which are themselves an indictment of existing practice; he forbade the breaking up of servile families; he declared emancipation to be most desirable; he transferred the process of manumission from pagan to Christian places of worship in a way and with words that testify to his view of it as a work of love belonging properly to the Church. But the Church was not content to influence the lawgiver and preach to master and slave the brotherhood of man and the duties of forbearance and patience. She struck at all the bad conditions that encouraged slavery.
The stage and the arena had always been the objects of her hate as hotbeds of immorality and nurseries of unbelief. Attendance there was forbidden to Christians as an act of apostasy. Julian caught the feeling and forbade his priests to enter theatres or taverns. Yet Libanius, Julian's friend and mentor, defends not only comedy and tragedy but even the dance, exalting it above sculpture as a school of beauty and a lawful recreation. But dancing, as Chrysostom points out, was inseparable from indecency and, far from giving the mind repose, only excites it to base passions. The ban of the Church accordingly was proclaimed against the ministers of these arts upon the public stage; it followed them into private houses when they went to enliven wedding or banquet, forbidding them baptism so long as they remained players.
This apparent harshness, which can be matched from civil legislation, was in reality a kindness. The actor's state was at this time incompatible with purity, and the Church sought to deliver a class enslaved to vice. A notable victory was won when it was ruled that an actress who asked for and received the last sacraments should not, if she recovered, be dragged back to her hateful calling. The only way of escape from it in any case lay in the acceptance of Christianity. As the theatre gratified low tastes, so the arena stimulated tigerish instincts. Both Pliny and Cicero apologised for it as being the proper playground of a warrior race; it certainly held the Roman imagination. The story of Alypius (a friend of Augustine) is well known, whom one reluctant look during a gladiatorial show enslaved completely to the lust for blood.
Attempts to suppress the shows were made, doubtless under Christian influence. They met with little response, except in the East, where the better spirits (like Libanius) repudiated them as a Roman barbarity, unworthy of a Greek. But the action of Constantine in forbidding soldiers to take part in gladiatorial shows, and of Valentinian in exempting Christians from suffering punishment in the arena, prove that earlier regulations were a dead letter. The show which Alypius attended was at Rome in A.D. 385. Symmachus as urban praefect speaks with pride of the games he gave, and when the Saxon captives with whom he had hoped to make a Roman holiday committed suicide in prison he had to turn to Socrates and his example for consolation. The sums spent on these games is an index to the wealth of noble Romans.
The same Symmachus spent £80,000 on the occasion of his son's praetorship; a festival given in the reign of Honorius lasted a week and cost £100,000. Ammianus Marcellinus and Jerome paint the same picture, and even when their charges have been discounted by the more sober pages of Macrobius, it is still clear that the dying Roman civilisation was marked by general luxury and self-indulgence. The Church could not stop this waste; sumptuary laws lay outside her competence; but leaders practised and encouraged simplicity and frugality and reproved the tendency towards ecclesiastical display. Jerome meets the argument that lavish hospitality would strengthen the hand of clerical intercessors by answering that judges will honour holiness above wealth, and simple clergy more than luxurious ones. “Golden mediocrity” doubtless had its devotees. There were many Christian men of the world to whom monasticism was a riddle, as it was to Ausonius, whose prayer was, "give me neither poverty nor riches." But better than moderation was renunciation of the world, and the ascetic element of early Christianity, reinforced by the example of all exponents of high thought, led many to turn their faces from the luxury around them and flee to the desert.
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