The Slaves of the Churches by Mary E. Sommar

Author:Mary E. Sommar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Canon Law

Visigothic Ecclesiastical Law

There were several councils held by the church in territory occupied by the Visigoths, including the 506 Council of Agde, over which Caesarius of Arles presided.132 Although Agde is geographically in Gaul, at that time the region was under Visigothic control, and the council proceedings show strong Visigothic influence. Canon 7 of this council, according to its heading in a later collection, was concerned with “Church property: how it is to be held by the bishops and how servi ecclesiae can be set free by a bishop.”133 In short, this canon said that church property could not be alienated by the bishop or other clergy except in cases of grave necessity, and then only with the approval of two or three neighboring bishops. This was in accord with Caesarius’s position as discussed earlier. The canon also stated that if any deserving servi ecclesiae were given their liberty by the bishop, they had to be paid for properly. After such a former church servus died, any property that he had received from the church at the time of his manumission, in excess of stated minimums, had to be returned to the church from which he had been freed.134 The inalienability of church property was reinforced by canon 48, which called for the bishop’s own property to be kept separate from the res ecclesiae, and canon 33, which stated explicitly that the bishop’s family was not to inherit anything that belonged to the church. A number of canons from Agde were concerned with clerical sexual misbehavior. Among the most interesting of these are canon 11, “Slave women or freedwomen are to be removed from the storerooms or from private duties and likewise from any accommodations where a clergyman is staying”; and canon 28, requiring that a monastery’s slave girls be kept well away from the monks.135 From canon 39, which addressed clerical marital relations, we learn that the concern was not merely a question of preventing illicit sexual relations, but also an issue of ritual purity. This canon stated that clergy should not have relations with their wives or even sing love songs, lest the sacred mysteries be “polluted [by contact with] indecent spectacles or words.”136

The Visigothic church in what is now Spain held a number of general councils, usually under at least the nominal sponsorship of the king, as well as quite a few synods of regional importance. There were also at least eight councils held before the conversion of the Visigoths from Arian to Roman Christianity, but the proceedings of these earliest councils do not yield much information for our purposes.137 But four of the major councils or synods of the Catholic Visigothic kingdom—III Toledo (589), I Seville (590), IV Toledo (633) and IX Toledo (655)—provided more than two dozen canons that detailed the special position of servi, ancillae, and liberti ecclesiae. Relevant to our topic, there were an additional dozen or so canons from the remaining synods as well as several passages in Isidore of Seville’s Regula monachorum.

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