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, amid258 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.
“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 259christians 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
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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
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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 can262 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 eternal263 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. “no264thing 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 no265 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 a266 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 confirmed267 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.
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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 to269 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 have270 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 expressly271 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.
