AN ANCIENT INSTITUTION
On Slavery and Statues
Š Tony Webster
Dr Stuart Blackie KCHS
The felled statue of Christopher Columbus outside the Minnesota State Capitol, in St Paul, Minnesota
Slavery has a long history. It has been practised widely throughout the world. In the ancient world, slavery was simply a fact of life and there was no concept of human rights or of sanctity of life. Anyone could be enslaved at any time. Many were born into it but you could be considered as booty by an incoming victorious army and enslaved. Or, if your family was destitute, you or your children could be sold into slavery. Enslavement meant that you became the private property of the owners. Everyone who was anyone had slaves. It is self-evident, from personal experience as well as throughout most of human history, that the strong dominate the weak. I suspect that in ancient Greece and Rome every farmer probably had a few slaves, male or female, to help with work in the fields and at home. The wealthy bought many slaves to serve their business interests and were in the market to bid for highly skilled artisans, be they builders, stonemasons, silversmiths or just administrators, land workers or miners as required. Intellectual slaves could be bought to educate your children. In Roman times, slaves who served their masters well and were freed did not hesitate to buy slaves themselves. Few people then thought twice about it. To us, however, all this is now selfevidently abhorrent. 8
However, in the prevailing culture of the time, Christianity achieved the well-nigh impossible. Christian understanding and doctrine elevated the individual soul, rendering all equal before God. The slave and his master, the commoner and nobleman alike are each precious in the eyes of God. Christianity insisted that, in the presence of the Almighty, even the king was only one among many. Indeed, because he had power to change things, he may have even greater need to call upon his mercy. This was partly accomplished through the Christian insistence that salvation was a gift from God earned by the sacrifice on Calvary. This doctrine prevented kings, aristocrats and the wealthy from lording it morally over the rest. Christianity also made the surprising and explicit claim that even the lowliest person had genuine rights and championed the even more incomprehensible idea that the act of human ownership degraded the slaveowner more than the slave. The concept that each and every soul is valuable established itself against impossible odds as the fundamental presupposition of Western law and society. Even in retrospect, it is amazing that, under the Christian revelation, ownership and absolute domination of another person came to be Oremus
JANUARY 2021
