SLAVERY

SLAVERY. As a legal institution slavery was inherited from Roman law by the Empire of Constantine and his successors, and it persisted until the last few centuries of the Byzantine era (q.v.) when, by the 13th c., it had largely died out. Church Fathers such as Joh n Chrysostom and Gregory Nazianzus condemned the practice, and later monastic authorities, e.g., Theodore of Studion (qq.v.), forbade monasteries from holding slaves (though many, in fact, continued to do so). Nonetheless, the language of slavery-whether descriptive of the Christian as “slave of God” (doulos tou Theou) or of the sinner’s slavery (douleia) to the passions-remains in force to the present.