Religion and the Rise of Capitalism
Although many historians have shown that Western commercial capitalism originated not in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as is commonly supposed, but in the eleventh and twelfth centuries -- in the heyday of the manorial mode of production and of feudal class relations -- nevertheless many of the same historians have continued to perpetuate the view that Christian teaching prior to the Reformation remained fundamentally opposed to the profit motive.
Thus the great French social and economic historian Henri Pirenne wrote that "in vigour and relative rapidity of its development [commercial capitalism in the twelfth century] may, without exaggeration, be compared with the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century"; yet in the same paragraph he remarked that "the attitude of the Church... towards commerce [was] not merely passive but actively hostile." 4On another page Pirenne quoted as characteristic of the later Middle Ages the statement: "The merchant is rarely or ever able to please God." 5_Ecclesiastical prohibitions against speculation and lending at interest (usury) and the doctrine of the just price have been cited by Pirenne and others to illustrate the alleged opposition of the church to the rise of capitalism.336-
One is thus presented with a striking paradox: the spiritus Capitalisticus (as Pirenne called it) is said to have originated at a time when the prevailing system of beliefs placed primary emphasis on the mystical and ascetic sides of life and on rewards and punishments in the hereafter. Moreover, the prevailing system of beliefs was backed up by the entire moral and legal authority of an all_powerful ecclesiastical hierarchy_and yet in fact commerce flourished.
Various explanations have been given which might resolve this paradox. First, it has been said that the church's insistence on an anticommercial moral philosophy was a reflection of its own economic position as a great feudal landowner and its own identification with a conservative agricultural civilization.
6_Second, it has been said (without always noticing the contradiction) that the church did not seriously try to put into practice its doctrine of the sinfulness of the profit motive but on the contrary introduced a whole range of exceptions or else simply winked at violations. This enabled the church to benefit from its own commercial activity, and it also justified many of the practices of the merchant class.These and similar explanations have left open the question of how it was possible to create an economic system whose fundamental premises contradicted the prevailing ideology, and how it was possible to maintain for over four hundred years the dominance of an ideology whose fundamental premises conflicted with the economic system. Still another way of putting the matter is to ask how it was possible for two conflicting economic systems -- feudalism and capitalism -- to coexist in a society whose leadership was dedicated to the perpetuation of a single, internally consistent system of beliefs.
These questions, however, arise from a view of the relation of Christian doctrine to the development of commercial capitalism which is based on a distortion not only of Roman Catholic thought in the period from the late eleventh to the fifteenth centuries but also of Protestant thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is wrongly supposed that Roman Catholic thought was fundamentally otherworldly and ascetic; in fact, in the late eleventh and the twelfth centuries Roman Catholic theology broke away from the predominantly otherworldly, ascetic ideal which had prevailed earlier and which still prevails in much of Eastern Orthodoxy. It is also wrongly implied that the "Protestant ethic" of Luther or Calvin was more worldly, more rationalistic, more individualistic, and therefore more compatible with capitalist enterprise than were Roman Catholic moral teachings. This misconception deserves a separate examination; it should be noted, however, that writers, like Max Weber and R.H.
Tawney, who have stressed the interconnection of capitalism and Protestantism, have also assumed that capitalism and feudalism were contradictory to each other, that-337- capitalism succeeded feudalism in time, and that capitalism in the West originated in the sixteenth century. _
If the opposite is true -- namely, that in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (and for some time thereafter)
capitalism and feudalism were essentially compatible with each other, and indeed utterly depended on each other -- then the way is opened to reexamine the economic morality taught by the Western Church from a different point of view. What may appear as hypocrisy to one who believes in the fundamental antagonism of feudal-agrarian and capitalist-commercial values may appear as a legitimate compromise to one who believes in their fundamental reconcilability.
The Western Church of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries -- in contrast to the Eastern Church, and also in contrast to the entire church both in the East and in the West, prior to the Papal Revolution -Âbelieved in the possibility of reconciling commercial activity with a Christian life, just as it believed in the possibility of reconciling agrarian activity with a Christian life. Its moral attitude toward wealthy merchants was not essentially different from its moral attitude toward wealthy landlords. It continued to teach the words of St. Paul, that "the love of money is the root of all evil," (1 Tim. 6: 10) and that "those who are rich in this world's goods" should be instructed "not to be proud and not to fix their hopes on so uncertain a thing as money," and further, that such rich persons should be told "to grow rich in noble actions, to be ready to give away and to share" (1 Tim. 6:17, 18). 8The monastic life, in which not only wealth but all the values of "this world" were renounced, continued to be considered closest to the kingdom of heaven. But except for a few voices, the Western Church of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries not only did not denounce money or riches as such, but indeed encouraged the pursuit of money or riches provided that such pursuit was carried on for certain ends and according to certain principles.
The secular activities of those engaged in commercial enterprise were to be organized in ways that would redeem them from the sin of avarice. The merchants were to form guilds that would have religious functions and would maintain standards of morality in commercial transactions. This was consistent with the church's new emphasis on incarnation, and on the embodiment of the spiritual in the secular. Thus the church-state set an example for the city-state, and church law set an example for city law and for commercial law. Legitimate trade based on good faith was distinguished from illegitimate trade based on avarice, and trade based on the satisfaction of legitimate needs was distinguished from trade based on mere selfinterest or on fraud; legitimate interest charges were distinguished from usury; the just price was distinguished from the unjust price. 9Pirenne rightly pointed to the problem of the "deracination" of the new city dwellers of the twelfth century. 10 They had left the highly struc- -338 tured, deeply rooted life of the village and the manor to enter the looser and more superficial relations of manufacture and commerce. Pirenne ignored, however, the steps that were taken to meet that problem through the formation of close_knit artisan and merchant guilds and the establishment of a relatively tight moral and legal framework for urban society generally.
From the point of view of the Christian social theory which prevailed in the formative period of Western commercial institutions, the economic activities of merchants, like other secular activities, were no longer to be considered as necessarily "a danger to salvation"; on the contrary, they were considered to be a path to salvation, if carried on according to the principles laid down by the church. These principles were spelled out in the canon law. From the church's point of view, the law developed by the merchants to regulate their own interrelationships, the lex mercatoria, was supposed to reflect, not contradict, the canon law. The merchants did not always agree with that. They did not disagree, however, that the salvation of their souls depended on the conformity of their practices to a system of law based on the will of God as manifested in reason and conscience.
Thus the social and economic activity of merchants was not left outside the reach of moral issues. A social and economic morality was developed which purported to guide the souls of merchants toward salvation. And that morality was embodied in law. Law was a bridge between mercantile activity and the salvation of the soul.