The Slaves of the Churches: A History by Mary E. Sommar

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Slaves of the Churches: A History by Mary E. Sommar William Chester Jordan The Slaves of the Churches: A History. By Mary E. Sommar. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2020. Pp. [viii], 268. $38.95. ISBN 9780190073268.) This book addresses the way the Church treated the issue of slavery from the time of Jesus until the late medieval commencement of the Atlantic intercontinental slave trade, but it goes into detail only through the mid-thirteenth century, the period of the classical canon law. Indeed, the principal texts that the author marshals are canonistic, but for the earliest period, she looks at other writings of both the Church Fathers and subsequent leading clerical figures. The author’s characterization of her work as an “analysis” appears several times in the text, but I found it difficult to justify this description. For, to the extent that the book has value, it is in its referencing passages from letters, conciliar collections, etc. that in one way or another touch on churchmen’s ideas about slavery. More particularly, she indicates those parts of certain texts that address the naturalness or unnaturalness of slavery, the various processes of manumission, and the legal doctrine of the inalienability of church property and its relation to the slaves owned by individual churches and churchmen. It is useful to have all of these passages noted and summarized, but this does not constitute analysis (see especially, pp. 68–72). Imprecision is a characteristic feature of the author’s remarks. A favorite locution is “a lot of” (for example, pp. 59, 60, 99, 115, and 227), but other phrases and words, like “pretty much” (p. 102) and “often” (p. 116), weaken the prose. “Abolition” and variants of the term are also favorites (pp. 18–19, 28, 35, 56, 66, 99–100, 101, 153, etc.). For the author is on a quest to find abolitionism in the past. When she cannot find it, she laments the inhumanity of churchmen who owned slaves or who refused to manumit them or who manumitted only with conditions in line with the inalienability of church property. When she finds a normative statement that appears to be in favor of abolition, she refuses to believe it. Writing of Gregory of Nyssa’s Fourth Homily on Ecclesiastes, she acknowledges that his discourse “certainly does sound a lot like abolitionist thinking” (p. 99). However, she immediately adds, “he never actually called for a change in the economic practice of using slave labor.” Later (p. 101), she repeats that Gregory “was not an abolitionist. [He] lived in a world where the idea of abolishing slavery was not something that could have even been imagined.” If so, then why search for it and tediously remind one’s readers that X was not an abolitionist, Y was not an abolitionist, and on and on? Let us assume for the moment that the author’s clerical actors were genuinely unable to think abolitionist thoughts. It is nevertheless the case that, as Professor [End Page 779] Sommar documents, several of them admonished their flock to treat their slaves with kindness. Now, the normative moral principles underlying such admonitions do not mean that the slave owners to whom they were addressed followed the advice. Nor does it preclude the possibility that the churchmen were hypocrites and treated their slaves poorly. However, it is a far cry from conceding these possibilities and writing a statement, in this case with regard to the Carolingian period, that churches, as “the owners of vast agricultural estates that employed thousands of unfree laborers . . . behaved no differently toward their servile personnel than did the secular owners of similarly large establishments” (p. 244). The author marshals no proof to establish the accuracy of this statement, which is really an accusation. It is an accusation grounded in the belief that free-born Romans had “contempt” for slaves in the ancient world and that this negative attitude persisted among the Catholic clergy for more than a thousand years, that is, until more than a millennium after the decline of the Western Empire. “Contempt” is a strong term. What is the evidence? “A late Carolingian preacher,” the author informs her readers, “exhorted his...