Fr Tommasi examines Magnifica Humanitas, especially sections 174-176, and explains in detail what His Holiness neglected to say.
From One Peter Five
By Fr Romano Tommasi, SLD
In my article “A Magnanimous Note,” with gratitude, I outlined the portions of Magnifica Humanitas (= MH) that embraced rather than rebelled against the Universal Ordinary Magisterium and dogmatic teachings of the Catholic Church. I referred only in passing to the deeply flawed treatment of a generic category that we can call servitude. Traditionally, as a generic bucket, we can throw anything into “servitude” that legally or socially enforces conditions in which one person is obliged to render labor or service to another without enjoying ordinary freedom to withdraw that labor. This would include these examples: (i.) involuntary imprisonment for a crime with labor required against the prisoner’s will, (ii.) a voluntary contract of a colonist who sells his freedom for six years for passage, promising work to pay off his debt.
Slavery in the Old Testament
Now, there are indeed, and have been, slavery scholars before so-called twentieth-century ‘reparations’ became a politicized topic. The saints, too, especially Fathers of the Greek and Latin Churches sometimes inquired into the origins of servitude, the most brutal form of which I am calling “slavery.” Without the benefit of archaeology, mathematical statistics, and social sciences, the ancient Greco-Roman world held that it had already been demonstrated as a factual reality of humanity (ius gentium) that servitude and slavery existed in every nation. It was thought that the most ancient form was the mercy accorded to prisoners taken in battle: in subsistence economies the most expedient, even rational, treatment of an enemy was to kill him. Instead, servitude (until ransomed back by one’s countrymen) was merciful. Secondly, the Fathers knew the Greek version of Genesis contained one of the few other accounts of prehistory, the tradition of the Patriarchs. There we read:
Noe […] when he had learned what his younger son had done to him, He said: Cursed be Chanaan, a servant (οἰκέτης) of servants shall he be unto his brethren. And he said: Blessed be the Lord God of Sem, be Chanaan his servant. May God enlarge Japheth, and may he dwell in the tents of Sem, and Chanaan be his servant. (Genesis 9:24-27)
Scriptural experts on this passage have recently identified the crime of usurpation of Noah’s wife by his son Ham to take over the patriarchal dynasty. Therefore, the curse of Ham’s descendant Canaan to servitude was due to a family conspiracy to usurp authority over his brothers. Jewish commentary and the Fathers varied: It concerned some range of unnatural sexual acts. Nevertheless, the conspiracy against Noah led the tribal nation in the person of Noah to impose a sentence for the crime: the criminal or criminals became community property. One person or perhaps group of descendants was punished in lifelong service to the rest of the human race. Strictly interpreted, the proper authority condemned a criminal to slavery (οἰκέτης) to the surviving human race.
The narrative for the origin of human servitude was taken seriously by the Fathers, since they – unlike today’s training at the Pontifical Universities – held for the material inerrancy of Scripture by consensus. What is more, this reading could be reconciled with the most ancient legal texts of the Roman empire claiming that conflict and slavery of the defeated party was the origin of ownership of other human beings.
In the US Constitution prison and indentured servitude – as in the ancient Greco-Roman legal tradition – are designated servitude (“or slavery”). Today, Slavery is used as a vague concept in the Anglophone world of the twenty-first century. Our usage means roughly: “immorally owning and thereby abusing somebody.” So, I designate the heart of the matter “owning another as property,” by the word “slavery.” I designate all non-ownership or dubious ownership as servitude.
Today, if I contract a Saudi Arabian company for labor, and I find out that I have massive restrictions on my personal liberty, but I am not sold, I am paid, but I feel degraded, then it’s not technically “slavery.” But we think of it as an abuse of my legal rights in that country and in international law. Now, in the ancient world of Roman law (of the Bible and Christianity thereafter), the main servitudes were: (i.) prisoners taken in war forced to work until they were ransomed, (ii.) chattel slaves (people owned as property for commerce from birth), (iii.) people obliged and compelled by contracts or imperial obligation to forced labors. We call chattel the real or literal slavery today. This would include the new forms of sexual and other slaveries which permeate the globe at present.[1]
Now that I have simplified, I need to explain how MH is currently – as magisterium – a perplexing (not illuminating or binding) document in sections 174-176. After the primordial history of servitude was acknowledged by Christians to begin with “perfect and just” Noah, clearly “all forms of slavery (= Latin servitus)” cannot rationally be condemned, unless we abandon Scripture (it’s inspired and materially inerrant). Yet, a puzzle persists, how do we understand the “slaves” belonging to the patriarchs? Were they unjust? Pope Leo should have anticipated this grave question, but he did not. A Thomistic investigation would have tried to understand what kind of slaveries each instance constituted, then it may have noted whether any moral commentary was provided within Scripture or by Fathers thereupon. Thomistic study might note that chattel slavery is neither commended, nor conceded, but some obligations arising from natural law are not self-evident and require a disciplined thinker to formulate a series of arguments. Mental labor requires time and an environment to philosophize and (for the patriarchs) to meditate on the unnamed God of Abraham and his progressive but limited revelations through dreams, visions, and miracles.
More importantly, the post-patriarchal Mosaic covenant endorsed at least two kinds of explicit servitude. The first was Hebrew six-year terms of slavery (often for debts). This slavery might be voluntary or involuntary but it could only be temporary holding of coercive power over a believer, which was further limited by many humanitarian restrictions. The second, severer servitude was in the form of a legal principle legislated directly by Moses: ” As for the male and female slaves whom you may have, it is from the nations around you…” (Leviticus 25:44ff). The Books of Moses indeed have some humanitarian principles, but Moses clearly concedes (but does not require) dominion (in Roman terms) over human beings who are bought and sold. Without addressing or working out the problem of divine Revelation and slavery, Leo XIV (merely expanding vagaries and imprecise formulations of Vatican II) condemns “all forms of slavery” (emphasis mine). Even so, I do not in the least believe Leo XIV wishes to abolish prisons for criminals, but his unstudied and imprecise language cannot – in its current form – be reconciled with Scripture, the Fathers, and Schoolmen. He has gone beyond the ambiguous declaration of Vatican II, which was admittedly worsened by Pope John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor, and exceeded proper bounds (more on that later). Neither Vatican II nor Pope John Paul II condemned “all forms of servitude,” lest every nation on earth release each and every criminal from prison.
Slavery in the New Testament
Still, Old Testament slavery demands an answer before coming up with some catchy phrase that sounds bold and brave in a Tweet from the Vatican. For example, two main Scholastic avenues were available, but ignored: First is the Franciscan path more in keeping with the rhetoric and language since Pope Leo XIII’s emphasis on condemnation of modern chattel slavery in the name of human dignity founded in human liberty (of free will).[2] This mode of argument would hold, following Blessed Duns Scotus (d. 1308), that all forms of chattel slavery are intrinsically evil (as Pope John Paul II held). Human authorities have no power to disobey the natural law, once their conscience understands the precept. For His part, God – in His sundry plan – does not contradict His own goodness or liberty by special legislation (privilegium singulare) for exempt cases. The clearest example was the sacrifice of Isaac, but this category may include Mosaic slavery. Only upon a divine concession can humans dare to do as Abraham and Moses did, if and only if God declares it to satisfy the human will’s obligation to charity toward God above all. The lynchpin in this approach lies in St. Paul’s interpretation of the Old Testament:
Why then was the law? It was set because of transgressions, until the seed [Messiah] should come, to whom [Moses] he made the promise, being ordained by angels in the hand of a mediator (Galatians 3:19).[3]
The Mosaic law was identified with the servile and coercive figure of the pedagogue (Galatians 3:24),[4] but “When the perfect comes … that which is partial shall be done away with” (1 Corinthians 13:10). Here, the principle applies that (inter alia) prophecy (like Mosaic law) is not the perfect but looks to something complete in the future. As the Pauline line of reasoning goes:
For if that former [Mosaic law] had been faultless, there should not indeed a place have been sought for a second [law of the Gospel]. (Hebrews 8:7)
Only the law of charity taught by Christ is perfection. Mosaic law is per se temporary, a mere Band-Aid, by nature imperfect, punishing the Israelite sin of idolatry on Sinai. This law was from Moses until the child promised to Abraham released Israelites from bondage to sin. Notice, just as Chanaan was condemned to communal and penal servitude for a sin against Noah (and by extension against nature and the human family), so Israelites, by commission and omission, worshipped the Golden Calf. All were symbolically subjected to 613 servile precepts (many laws being in no way from natural law) as a punishment for idolatry. This legislation, as a stopgap measure, showed God intentionally legislating what was only to be eliminated, as Mosaic law was not imbued as a whole, nor in its many parts, by charity. Mosaic law being penal in nature, awaited the release of captives by the Incarnation and teaching of the Gospel. Teaching of charity and the means (baptism) to possess it eliminates slavery to sin and legislative penalties binding Jews.
Now, unlike MH, I have outlined one of several traditional interpretations of slavery in the Old Testament. I move to address what is unexpressed by MH nos. 174-176, causing Christians everywhere confusion, not clarity. What do Pope Leo XIV and Fernández do with the entire New Testament, where apostles live and work in a society already encumbered by chattel slavery?
To answer, due to economy of space, I state as safely as possible that secular studies and ancient sources agree that all catalogued societies in literature knew only economic systems where kinds of slavery were internal to them. Without special revelation, Christians had no alternative knowledge of never-before-seen economics. They could philosophize like all men, but this demands leisure and sufficient wealth to rest, reflect, and write. Yet, they did enjoy revealed ethical principles that pushed them farther than their admirable Stoic colleagues in Seneca, Musonius Rufus, and Epictetus within the Roman empire. The former innovatively argued that slaves and women were fully rational and therefore could merit and be virtuous like freeborn Romans. St. Paul took philosophical training, plausibly at the Academy of Athenadoros at Tarsus, and went farther.
In Romans 1-2, Paul taught Christians about the natural law both able to demonstrate God’s existence (and idolatry’s irrationality), as well as moral precepts against unnatural sins. Here we see the orientation of the Vatican’s new ethic (soft on homosexuality and adultery, both actions being contrary to nature),[5] to undermine Scripture not unlike the sloppy reflections of MH nos. 174-176. Like Stoics, in Romans 6:16-20, St. Paul presents his teaching “in a human manner” (viz., philosophically): chattel slavery becomes a metaphor of vice.
After affirming the precepts of the natural law, and undermining chattel slavery as vicious in itself, in 1 Corinthians 7:21, Paul gives a precept as an exemplum for all:”if you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity.” Paul’s strategy is not to anticipate economist Milton Friedman, but to use legal and non-violent means to get out of the slavery system: emancipation or what is technically manumission. As a freeborn Roman citizen, in 1 Corinthians 12:13, St. Paul is correctly understood by early Christians (to the scandal of masters on record) as legislating household equality between slaves and masters (anticipated to a degree by Sirach and other Jewish sources): “we were all baptized into one body— Jews or Greeks, slaves or free.” Elsewhere, St. Paul becomes more radical in his language: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female (Galation 3: 28). Finally, this household social equality, despite the legal strictures of the empire, is extended to non-Roman peoples: “Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ … in all” (Colossians 3: 11).
Consistent with this reevaluation of the slave-master relationship, since both are able to merit (like Stoics), to be justified (unique to Christians), and along with women to perform all the same moral and spiritual duties to God, St. Paul legislates for masters to no longer threaten torture and violence (Ephesians 6:9).Because the Christian household holds all equal under one Master with dominion, namely, God in heaven, none on earth enjoy a superior court of justice, all are human.Furthermore, St. Paul ordered in a very un-Roman fashion, masters to provide slaves “equality and justice,” (τὸ δίκαιον καὶ τὴν ἰσότητα; Colossians 4:1). This principle is remarkable: Paul employs a technical Greco-Roman phraseology, uniquely employed among near-contemporary secular writers, which underlines that peace within a society can only be obtainable by equality between parties and equal access to justice.[6] This is supplemented by the scandal caused among Romans that Christians indiscriminately kissed or greeted one another as equals. St. Paul, consequently, exhorted slaves not to use their newfound household liberty to upend hierarchy in the Roman households: “Those who have believing masters must not be disrespectful on the ground that they are brothers” (1 Timothy 6:2). Christian household codes, parallel to pagan codes witnessed by Pliny the Younger, led to new pastoral problems: Equality of dignity and justice for all led some Christian slaves to too much freedom of speech and excessive boldness resulting in failure to obey legitimate commands. Within this context St. Paul sends the escaped slave St. Onesimos back to his master, St. Philemon, to be reconciled “as a brother” (Philemon 1:17). This echoes ancient regulations in Job, who judged it ethical for slaves to criticize him so that he had a duty to provide them a process for their grievances within his own household (Job 31:13-14).
Still, let us not be sanguine, this is not abolitionism, but principles for universal manumission or emancipation. Masters, as a household rule and for the sake of virtue, should release their slaves and slaves should find any legitimate means – according to Paul – to get out of slavery. Violent revolution is not considered as a theoretical solution in the Bible.[7]
The Historical Trajectory toward Magnifica Humanitas
I am now, by the limits of space, forced to summarize the next millennium and a half into but a few paragraphs. While these principles are clear philologically and contextually in Scripture, Christians only began to have the political wherewithal to influence political society after the defeat of Licinius by Constantine (AD 324) and peace in the Roman empire. As mentioned, we see the new legal process of Church Emancipation in the Roman empire, where numbers of slaves are legally released by bishops. Some Fathers are notable for commending the practice as an ethical norm for their flocks. Humanitarian legislation for slaves, as already pointed out by Timothy Flander’s City of God vs. City of Man, increased in the Theodosian Code (AD 438). Summarily, external barbarian pressures from Constantine to Theodosius I (AD 378) had not yet become desperate, but tax burdens and administrative resources were heavily drifting toward barbarian defense. Sociologically, this can help explain the disappointingly slow progress in legal reforms under the conservatism that accompanies periods of threat and contraction. The disaster of Adrianople under Theodosios marked a period of barbarian victory that culminated in the loss of the Western Roman empire at its nadir in AD 476. During most of this time the Catholic Church too was in a defensive mode, for from AD 337 to 381 Arians represented an often dominant enemy province by province. A period of Church peace afterward lasted until only AD 428 at the outbreak of Nestorianism, followed by Monophysitism (AD 448-681). Nearly all theological and material resources went to overcoming a series of internal conflicts. Meanwhile, externally, Arian barbarians began dominating large swaths of Roman territory during these periods, sidelining Church influence and inhibiting rich theological development outside of immediate pastoral needs like apologetics against Arianism.
Barbarian incursions, among Latins and Byzantines, led to a Dark Age in production and preserving records, educational institutions, and securing resources to patronize theological science. Only the Carolingian Renaissance (after AD 800) guaranteed real security for advanced reflection, not apologetics against the newest heresy. This plausibly explains why the system of manumission only gradually shifted unstable political societies more towards alternative kinds of non-chattel labor. What is striking, given the propensity of today’s academy to find as much evidence for medieval slavery in Western Europe as possible, is that the question is still controverted.[8] Entire societies were uniquely in world history shifting toward innovative forms. The virtual destruction of Carolingian society by the so-called Vikings (Norsemen) retarded this progress. Summarily, without otium, a speculative ethics (versus emergency responses) seems most unlikely to flourish during constant political and religious instability, focused on defense.[9] Eventually, after Norse conversion, the first non-slave societies documented arose in Scandinavia and Italy, eventually culminating in free-soil abolitionism in France (AD 1315), which outlawed slavery absolutely. This coincided with, but might not be caused by, Franciscan arguments. Philosophically abolitionist, they were circulating at Paris but began in Oxford in AD 1302. What can be said is that the rise of the university gave otium to philosophers to once again speculate and no longer defend civilization and religion. It was auspiciously there and then that chattel slavery was academically marked for the chopping block.
In slavery studies today, I have noticed that a principle discovered and maintained in the study of liturgical and canonical manuscripts is not discussed by revisionist historians attempting to overturn the idea of Christian emancipationism. The copying of manuscripts or old law claiming that “slavery” exists needs to be verified by concrete examples. Legal culture is retrogradely conservative, so that copyists and scholars rarely voluntarily remove old laws and customs from collections, even if they have not witnessed or heard of such still in existence anywhere in their lifetimes. These and other considerations mean that there is still much to do in this area.
Magnifica Humanitas
We arrive at popes in the Renaissance strangely misquoted by MH: While one footnoted document accurately shows involvement by a pope with slave commerce, another is misquoted who shows the opposite. This first error is unsightly. Vatican II, after all western nations (not Muslim nations) had already outlawed chattel slavery for many decades, published the following, which began this semantic slide:
Whatever is hostile to life itself … whatever violates the integrity of the human person … whatever is offensive to human dignity, such as … arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery … trafficking in women and children; degrading conditions of work which treat laborers as mere instruments of profit, and not as free responsible persons: all these and the like are a disgrace… (Gaudium et Spes, 27)
The noble sentiments here are not problematic, the failure to specify “chattel slavery” is. We saw above why. Next, comes along John Paul II, normally very studied and erudite, who naturally was not a specialist on this issue. He further muddled this Vatican II list by prefacing it in Veritatis Splendor, no. 80, thus:
Reason attests … objects of the human act … are by … nature “incapable of being ordered” to God, because they radically contradict the good of the person made in his image … termed “intrinsically evil“… the Church teaches that “there exist acts which per se and in themselves, independently of circumstances, are always seriously wrong by reason of their object.
Next, John Paul sloppily attached the full list in Gaudium et Spes, 27, to his otherwise noble sentiments without specifying which items in this smorgasbord are such cases. A trained grammarian easily mistakes the pope as saying “arbitrary imprisonment” is intrinsically evil. Yet, the generic category “imprisonment” cannot be evil, lest all jails are always evil! Rather, the qualifying circumstances: “arbitrary,” makes a criminal confinement evil. This imprecision finds its culmination essentially in MH nos. 174-176, which ignores old Pope Leo XIII’s very subtle distinctions about slavery and dominion in the nineteenth century, so that Leo XIV condemns in the twenty-first century: “all forms of slavery.” Within philosophy, theology, and Roman law, Pope Leo has accidentally opened all the prison gates and cancelled all forms of voluntary contracts that imply coercive service. This, alas, is what happens when the Pope and DDF show no signs of understanding Roman jurisprudence in Latin, nor have the skills, nor the consultors to write a document that can be taken seriously in these passing remarks. What is needed is a much more in-depth treatment on the tradition and nuances of this issue.
[1] See Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (University of California Press, 2012).
[2] This Franciscan account corresponds more closely to the modern papal condemnation of chattel slavery, especially from Leo XIII onward, since it speaks readily in the language of natural liberty and human dignity rather than in the older Thomistic language of legitimate dominion. I adopt it here for this reason alone, without denying that Thomistic treatments remained legitimate Catholic positions, at least until the imprecise formulations of Veritatis Splendor, no. 80, and Magnifica Humanitas, nos. 174–176.
[3] Cf. Hebrews 7:18–19; 8:7–13; 10:1.
[4] Paul’s συγκλείω in Galatians 3:22–23 carries an especially ominous Septuagint resonance. In the Greek Scriptures the verb belongs conspicuously to the vocabulary of the closed womb: to “shut up” is to prevent generation and the birth of a child (Gen. 20:18; 1 Kingdoms 1:5–6). This resonance is striking in Galatians, where Paul’s entire argument turns upon seed, generation, sonship, inheritance, Sarah and Hagar. The Law “shuts up”; the promise generates the free son.
[5] One can worry that Pope Leo’s and Fernández’s inability to deal with slavery adequately is but a consequence of avoiding traditional natural law, lest they be forced to cite St. Paul (who condemns in the most explicit terms homosexual actions between males and females alike). St. Paul’s arguments and terms are completely comprehensible by anti-homosexual Roman Stoics within the Greco-Roman philosophical world.
[6] Cf. Plutarch, Agesilaus 28.
[7] Once it is explicitly reasoned and understood by conscience to be against natural law, it can be legitimately resisted by force.
[8] Because these guilds lack Scholastic rigor in the use of language, they do not notice their revisionism is ruined by a methodological lapsus: We know and agree Roman chattel slavery has a definition: dominion of one person by another and certain rights of traffic/alienation come with each case. Now, these rights in the Middle Ages are non-existent in many proposed cases, but the scholar who balks at unfairness of social differences gives into the temptation to conflate non-ownership of persons with ownership of persons. Truly, an embarrassing error.
[9] This condition is principally taken from Aristotle’s a posteriori inference about the conditions necessary for intellectual contemplation and speculation.
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