PLEAS OF THE CHRISTIAN FATHERS.
It has been said that the only way to understand the Middle Ages is to
comprehend that the Roman Empire did not die down, or fade away; it
remained, or continued to be the centre of civilized government, until
comparatively recent times. In fact, nominally the Holy Roman Empire,
the direct descendant of the Roman Empire, did not pass away as an idea
until 1806, when the Emperor Joseph II. announced to the Germanic Diet
his refusal to carry any longer the title of Emperor of the Romans.[367]
Even when the Roman Empire was at its greatest point of power and
wealth, the actual founders of the Holy Roman Empire were at work in
Rome itself, in the persons of the Christian Fathers; for, after all,
it was the Church that was to rule the world once swayed by Roman
legions. The men who, as representatives of Christ, were later to tame
the barbarians, really laid the foundations for the future greatness of
Christian Rome, amid the very luxury and opulence of the pagan Rome
soon to pass away.
The struggles of these Christians among the polished and cruel Romans
was, in a way, a preparation for the struggle to come later with
the unpolished, but equally cruel, barbarians. In their conquest
of the Roman world, the Christian founders saved their religion;
in the conquest of the barbarian hordes, they saved civilization;
without Christianity the German and Celtic races, with their lustful,
revengeful, and passionate natures, either might have overwhelmed Roman
civilization entirely, bringing on a night of barbarism, or have been
themselves “corrupted and destroyed by the vices and sensuality which
surrounded them.”[368]
Amid all the differences of opinion and doctrine that we find among
the early founders of Christianity, there was one thing on which they
were unanimous, and that was the attitude toward children. It was a
ceaseless war they waged in behalf of children—those early and ofttimes
eloquent founders. From Barnabas, contemporary of the Apostles, and by
Luke even called one of them, to Ambrosius and Augustine, they did not
cease to denounce those who, no matter what their reasons, exposed or
killed infants.
[Illustration: “SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN TO COME UNTO ME”]
No distinction was made by the Fathers between infanticide and
exposure.[369] Both were murderous acts, particularly bitterly
condemned by the Christians because their enemies had charged them
with murdering infants at secret rites. The letter attributed to
Barnabas by Clement of Alexandria and Origen, and which in any case
goes back to the earliest days of the religion, severely condemned
infanticide. “Thou shalt not slay the child by procuring abortion, nor
again shalt thou destroy it after it is born.”[370] By such protests as
these, made with one cannot tell what frequency, the Christians took
their stand on the basic principles.
Justin, whose vigorous manner of addressing the Emperor is so
attractive, succumbed, at the age of seventy-four, to the calumnies of
the cynic Crescentius, and became a martyr; but his example and fervour
left an indelible mark upon his time.
“As for us,” he says, “we have been taught that to expose newly born
children is the part of wicked men; and this we have been taught lest
we should do any one an injury, and lest we should sin against God;
first, because we see that almost all so exposed (not only the girls,
but also the males) are brought up to prostitution.... Now we see
you rear children only for this shameful use; and for this pollution
a multitude of females and hermaphrodites, and those who commit
unmentionable iniquities are found in every nation. And you receive
the hire of these, and duty and taxes from them, whom you ought to
exterminate from your realm.”[371]
And again he says: “We fear to expose children, lest some of them
be not picked up, but die, and we become murderers. But whether we
marry, it is only that we may bring up children; or whether we decline
marriage, we live continently.”[372]
Athanagoras,[373] the Athenian philosopher, who presented to Marcus
Aurelius and to Commodus an apology for the Christians, in 166 A.D.,
asked the logical Romans to use their famous common sense in weighing
false charges made against Christians.
“What man of sound mind,” he said, “will affirm that we, who abhor
murder, are murderers; we who condemn as murder the use of drugs for
abortion, and declare that those who even expose a child are chargeable
with murder.”[374]
Tertullian, whose apology was written in the year 200, or 205, of our
era, was equally bold.
“Riders of the Roman Empire,” he began, “seated for the administration
of justice on your lofty tribunal”—and then made the charge direct:
“You first of all expose your children, that they may be taken up by
any compassionate passer-by, to whom they are quite unknown; or you
give them away to be adopted by those who will act better to them the
part of parents.”[375]
Later, in another address, this time to the pagan people, he returns to
the charges.
“Although you are forbidden by the laws to slay new-born infants, it so
happens that no laws are evaded with more impunity or greater safety,
with the deliberate knowledge of the public and the suffrages of this
entire age, ... You make away with them in a more cruel manner, because
you expose them to cold and hunger, and to wild beasts, or else you get
rid of them by the slower death of drowning [_sic_].”[376]
“Man is more cruel to his offspring than animals,” said the learned
Clement of Alexandria. “Orpheus tamed the tiger by his songs, but the
God of the Christians, in calling men to their true religion, did more,
since he tamed and softened the most ferocious of all animals—men
themselves.”[377]
No abler pleader for the new order of things was there than Minucius
Felix, a Roman lawyer of education, who, on his conversion to the new
faith, became one of the eloquent founders of Latin Christianity. A
disciple of Cicero, he has been called the “precursor of Lactantius in
the graces of style.”
“How I should like to meet him,” he exclaims, indignantly, “who says or
believes that we are initiated by the slaughter and blood of an infant
... no one can believe this except one who can dare do it. And I see
that you at one time exposed your begotten children to wild beasts
and to birds; and another, that you crush them when strangled with a
miserable kind of death ... and these things assuredly come down from
the teachings of your gods. For Saturn did not expose his children, but
devoured them. With reason were infants sacrificed to him by parents in
some part of Africa, caresses and kisses repressing their crying, that
a weeping victim might not be sacrificed. Moreover, among the Tauri of
Pontus, and to the Egyptian Busiris, it was a sacred rite to immolate
their guests, and for the Galli to slaughter to Mercury human, or
rather inhuman, sacrifices. The Roman sacrifices buried living a Greek
man and a Greek woman, a Gallic man and a Gallic woman; and to this
day, Jupiter Latiaris is worshipped by them with murder; and, what is
worthy of the son of Saturn, he is gorged with the blood of an evil and
criminal man.”[378]
To drive home the awful character of a crime that was so common we
have the vision of Paul, who sees the man and woman who have exposed
children, suffering in hell the terrible tortures of the damned.
“‘They [the parents] gave us for food to dogs and to be turned out to
swine. Some of us they threw into the river,’ exclaimed these children;
“and so now the guilty are condemned to eternal punishment while the
children are committed to the angels.”[379]
We have quoted already the eloquent Lactantius. Basil the Great
thundered against infanticide and the spectacle of free children being
sold by avaricious creditors of their fathers. The same Ambrosius, who,
although only a Christian Bishop, castigated the Emperor Theodosius for
the massacre at Thessalonica, brought his force and courage to play
against the law which permitted a debtor to satisfy his claim, at the
cost of the liberty of his son, or the debauchery of his daughter, as
the _fisc_ was then authorized to sell infants to pay unsatisfied taxes.
A new religion in one of the least important provinces of the Roman
Empire, Christianity, in three centuries, pushed its doctrines to the
very end of the vast Roman domain, and even made the conquest of the
imperial throne itself.
Its impassioned preachers and apostles vaunted the humanity of their
new faith; for cast-out infants and the despised slaves the new priests
fought such a battle of perseverance and martyrdom as the world had
never seen before.
In the name of their new God, Jesus, himself admittedly a poor Jew and
a carpenter, they took all the truth there was in the aristocratic
philosophy of the Romans and their emperors, and made it live
indeed—they applied it to the lowest, and the most humble—even to
children. “Nothing human is alien”—this was a verity in the lives of
the men who fought the first battles of Christianity.
Every human being had a soul—that was a vital point in their fight.
They asserted that children had souls, to which religious doctrine
probably more is due in the way of checking the practice of infanticide
than any other single idea. We have seen how Plutarch, the polished
philosopher, had gone as far as the pagan mind could under its
philosophy, in directing thought as to man’s responsibility for actions
toward the child, by collecting opinions of the philosophers as to when
an unborn child became a human being.
The Fathers won the battle in that they convinced the Roman world that
children had souls—but the economic battle was one not yet to be won by
preaching. But it was not by orations and preaching alone that they had
won as much as they had.
Constantine, in the year 315, as we have seen, had put forth the
proclamation:
“Let a law be at once promulgated in all the towns of Italy, to turn
parents from using a parricidal hand on their new-born children, and to
dispose their hearts to the best sentiments. Watch with care over this,
that, if a father brings his child, saying that he cannot support it,
someone should supply him without delay with food and clothing; for the
cares of the new-born suffer no delay, and we order that our revenue,
as well as our treasure, aid in this expense.”[380]
To this he added, in 321, including the provinces:
“We have learned that the inhabitants of provinces, suffering from
scarcity of food, sell and put in pledge their children. We command
then that those found in this situation, without any personal resource,
and being able only with great trouble to support their children, be
succoured by our treasury before they fall under the blows of poverty;
for it is repugnant to our morals that any one under our Empire should
be pushed by hunger to commit a crime.”[381]
Ten years later, Constantine had to modify the laws in relation to
children—so acute were the sufferings in the Empire—by permitting those
who “took up” children to have the right of property in them.[382]
“Whoever,” said Constantine in his latest law, “has taken in a new-born
boy or girl, exposed by the order and with the knowledge of its father
or master, outside of the house of the one or the other, has the power
to keep him as son or slave without fear that those who rejected him
can reclaim him.”
The conditions of the times, as Dugour points out, are well shown by
the frequency with which these conditions are referred to. Julius
Firmicus, an astrologer of the fourth century, devotes a chapter of
his work to revealing combinations of planets that will tell what will
be the fate of the child that is exposed. Under certain signs the
child will perish through lack of food; under others it will drown;
under still another it will be eaten by dogs, and another combination
indicated that it would find a saviour and a second father.
In 374, the Emperors Valentinian, Valens, and Gratian declared that the
exposure of all infants was punishable, and ordered that parents see
to it that their children were fed. The main question that seemed to
agitate both the Empire of the East and the Empire of the West was that
of the rights of the adoptive parent, as against those who owned the
land where the child had been abandoned.
“Let men look to it that they nourish their children. If they expose
them, they may be punished in conformity with the law. If other persons
take the children up they cannot be reclaimed; as people cannot take
again children they have wilfully permitted to perish.”
In 391, Valentinian, Theodosius, and Arcadius permitted, by other law,
the child sold by its father to become a free man after a short term of
servitude, without reimbursing a master.[383]
In 409, Honorius and Theodosius issued an edict in favour of Romans
sold to other Romans, limiting the period of slavery to five years.
Nevertheless, in 412, Honorius and Theodosius confirmed the law of
Constantine concerning the sale of infants purchased or taken up with
the knowledge of the bishop of the diocese.
An edict of the emperors maintained the rights of the adoptive parents.
The right of the latter to their property was also confirmed in cases
where the parent or master willingly and knowingly had allowed the
child to be exposed.
Another imperial edict ordered that no new-born could be taken from the
place where it had been found without the presence of witnesses. A form
was drawn up which was to be signed by the bishop.
In 438, these regulations were collected by Theodosius the Second under
the Code that bears his name.
In 451, Valentinian the Third declared that the _nutritor_, or person
who had taken up the child, should receive an indemnity, independent of
the years of service, and fixed the price to be paid him. The Emperor
also declared that those who had sold children to barbarians, or who
had purchased a free person for the purpose of transporting him across
seas, should be compelled to pay to the _fisc_, six ounces of gold.[384]
Following the preachings of the Fathers, and supplementing and
strengthening the laws of the Empire, the Church at various councils,
called always for some other purpose, took action and frequently
condemned the loose morals of the day.
Not orations, nor apologies and pleas alone, says Labourt, would have
brought about the new point of view among people so hard pressed and
so thoroughly imbued with the ideas of another civilization. At the
Council of Ancyra, the modern city of Angora, in the year 314, it
was decreed that the woman guilty of killing her offspring should be
punished by being forbidden to enter a church for the rest of her life,
a terrible punishment in those days.
At the Council of Elvira, the first one held in Spain, by some held to
have met before 250, but by Tillemont placed in the year 300, a decree
limited the period of retribution to ten years, of which two were to be
passed in weeping, at the end of which time the recreant mother could
receive the sacraments.
At a Council in 546, the period of penitence was reduced to seven
years. At the Council of Constantinople, in 588, or 592, the crime
was compared to homicide, and finally Sixtus Quintus and Gregory the
Fourteenth stated that the culprits should suffer capital punishment.
At the Council of Nicaea, in 325,—the famous council at which a
controversy between Bishop Arius and Bishop Athanasius was “settled,”
with the result that Arius was declared a heretic,—it was prescribed,
in Article Seventy of its conclusions, that in each village of the
Christian world there should be established an asylum, under the name
of the _Xenodocheion_, the object of which was to assist voyageurs,
the sick, and the poor. Without doubt, as Labourt suggests, these
places became asylums for abandoned children.
The question of the property right was one that the Church had to face
in the Council of Vaison, in 442. Frequently after charitable strangers
had taken children off the highways, educated them, and brought them
up, their parents or their owners would demand their return. It was a
vital question of the day: to whom did these children belong?
The Emperor Constantine had declared that those who received them had
a right to them and the Emperor Honorius had added the restriction
that the Church must know of the adoption. Many were the arguments and
the legal battles that ensued, during which time people were little
inclined to rescue the abandoned infants and many perished as victims
of the voracity of dogs, many as the victims of hunger and cold.[385]
These conditions were presented to the Council, which ordered the
following measures:
“Whoever takes up an abandoned child shall bring him to the Church
where that fact will be certified. The following Sunday the priest
will announce that a new-born child has been found and ten days will
be allowed to the real parents to claim their infant. When these
formalities have been complied with, if any one then claims a child or
in any way calumniates those who have received it, he will be punished
according to the Church laws against homicide.”[386]
Ten years later the act of the Council of Vaison was sanctioned at the
Council of Arles and again in 505, by the Council of Agde.
It has been said that this was comparatively little when one thinks
of this great union of bishops representing not only the interests of
religion but “the moral needs of the epoch.” On the other hand, any
criticism would be unjust that did not take into consideration the fact
that it was great progress in the face of great poverty and greater
barbarity.[387]
Church and State united in the movement for the protection of the child
in the laws of Justinian, who, raised to the throne in 527, published
in 529, and with considerable changes in 534, a collection of laws that
have immortalized his name, in which the great lawyer Tribonian remade
the three other codes, the Gregorian, Hermogenian, and the Theodosian.
Justinian proclaimed absolute liberty for foundling children, declaring
that they were not the property of either the parents who exposed them
or of those who received them.
One of these laws, promulgated in 553, punished severely those who
tried to hold as slaves, children who had been exposed. This law
stated expressly that all children left at churches or other places
were absolutely free. It also stated that the act of exposing a child
exceeded the cruelty of an ordinary murder, inasmuch as it struck at
the most feeble and the most pitiable.
The imperial edict of 553 invited the Archbishop of Thessalonica and
the prefect to give to the foundlings all the help possible and to
punish those who disobeyed the injunction with a fine of five livres of
gold. In addition, the Justinian Code contained a provision by which
a father whose poverty was extreme was allowed to sell his son or his
daughter at the moment of birth and to repurchase the infant later.
The Emperor also ordered that some organized endeavour be made to take
care of children for whom no other provision had been made. Unchanged
and little modified, with the exception of those amendments made by the
Emperor Leon, the philosopher, these laws and these conditions governed
the Eastern Empire from now on until its fall before the arms of the
Turks.