The Barbarian City of God

A History of Mankind (308)

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Early Christians were fundamentally opposed to slavery, even if they sometimes had slaves, in the same way that Romans were fundamentally opposed to human sacrifice, even if they sometimes sacrificed people at times of panic and emergencies.

The Romans understood that campaigning against their enemy Carthaginians for the abolition of human sacrifice was pointless and even counter-productive, and also knew that an eventual Roman win in the Punic Wars would lead to such an outcome in formerly Carthaginian lands — since Roman institutions and ideas were fundamentally antithetical to human sacrifice. Much the same can be said for early Christians (and their more hypocritical Stoic predecessors) and slavery.

The Church itself was mindful that even as moralistic a Greek philosopher as Aristotle justified slavery as natural, and Stoics accumulated slaves while quietly feeling bad about it. Christians had plenty of scriptural and cultural reasons to tolerate slavery as a regrettable but inevitably natural result of the Fall of Man and Original Sin: a position expressed by Gregory of Nazianzus, John Chrysostom and Ambrose. Some Christians – notably Basil of Caesarea – took the very Graeco-Roman position that slavery could even be beneficial for the slave, as a remedy for their own sins.

Before Augustine, radical Christian groups did have a straightforward anti-slavery stance, which contributed to their sidelining from the mainstream. That may have been the case with Marcionism and the Eustathians, who supposedly dissolved all social distinctions. The North African Donatist sect, named after a Berber bishop, had a clear revolutionary bent – for example, by freeing slaves and taking from the rich to feed the poor – and was very well known by the North African Augustine, an enemy of the Donatists.

In this painting (“Miracle of the Slave,” 1548), Tintoretto portrays Saint Mark, patron saint of Venice, performing a posthumous miracle of saving a slave from torture. Slavery remained a feature of Christian societies for centuries after the Roman era.