Abstract
A cold day and a fireless grate provide perhaps an instructive setting for some reflexions on Mr R. H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism; for the withdrawal of the normal comforts of modern civilization, if it makes the hand move falteringly, at least gives the mind an added motive for trying to understand the causes of this condition. The book is stiff reading, which must be our excuse for some delay in reviewing it: you cannot get the gist of it quickly, nor master its main theme without careful attention to its details. In form it is a history – the history of the attempts and the lack of attempts to apply Christianity, in thought and deed, to the economic life of Christendom from the Middle Ages onwards. At the same time it is also a philosophy, at once political and religious; and it is this combination of philosophy with history which makes the book both profound and difficult. We know of no other study of the subject which is either so synoptic or so thorough; and for that reason alone it desires a permanent place in every thoughtful man’s library. Even though it be not clear – as to the present writer it is not – how exactly Mr Tawney would have us solve the problem which he presents, we shall certainly thank him for having made it so real.
Briefly put, the thesis is something of this kind. In the medieval Church-State none of the characteristic activities of men were regarded as outside the purview and control of the Christian moral law. In those days, as in later ones, the motive of greed which consorts so easily with capitalism was frequently very potent; great financiers might die good Catholics; and the Papal Court itself was no stranger to the spirit of acquisition. Nevertheless, there was still no accepted divorce between economics and ethics. Avarice was still a sin; and theologians, confessors, and preachers could invoke the authoritative moral law and public opinion of Christendom to put it down. Nor was any change of principle brought about by the Reformation. ‘Gold,’ wrote Columbus, ‘constitutes treasure, and he who possesses it has all he needs in this world, as also the means of rescuing souls from Purgatory, and restoring them to the enjoyment of Paradise.’ The Reformers would have reserved their sharpest darts, perhaps, for the second part of this saying; but they would have been quite unsparing also in their denunciation of the first. Not Latimer, nor Luther, nor Calvin would have tolerated it for a moment; and Calvin and his minions at Geneva liked to drive home their invectives with penalties. That is one of the quite plain lessons of Mr Tawney’s book – that, wherever the dividing line between medieval and modern comes in the social ethics of Christendom, it does not come at the Reformation.
Not at least in the fact of the Reformation itself: for on this point there was a continuity of Christian teaching. But there is a sense in which the forces which helped to effect the Reformation were also decisive in their influence on social ethics. Two such were of predominant importance – the discovery of the New World, which made capital for exploration a necessity, and the rise of autonomous national States. It might fairly be said indeed that, while the Papists and the Protestants were locked in mortal combat, it was really Machiavelli who was carrying off the spoils. The new thing which emerges from that confused age, and which was to strut unabashed before men in the eighteenth century, was the doctrine of the economic man. That creed was ‘that the individual is absolute master of his own, and, within the limits set by positive law, may exploit it with a single eye to pecuniary advantage, unrestrained by any obligation to postpone his own profit to the well-being of his neighbours, or to give account of his actions to a higher authority’. And it coincides with similar claims to absoluteness made in other studies besides the economic – in art, science, politics, and private conduct. What society has witnessed since the Reformation is the progressive emancipation from ecclesiastical control, if not from Christian sanctions altogether, of functional activities which at one time recognized the authority of the Church. It is reasonable to suppose that, in the reversal of this process likewise, the various activities will move more or less together; and already in science there are marked indications of a desire for a new synthesis. The recovery of a Christian social ethic, therefore, is likely to synchronize with – and can hardly precede – a general return of society, too long secularized, to the recognition of spiritual ends. The old Greek philosopher, Empedocles, thought of history as an alternation between two opposite eras of Strife and of Friendship. Mr Tawney speaks of ‘co-operation’ rather than of ‘friendship’; but the meaning is the same.
The essential problem, then, is a spiritual one – the clear presentation of ‘the ends to which effort should be applied, and the criteria by which its success is to be judged’. Perhaps we might say that what we need is a new Augustine, and a new City of God. Meanwhile, the theologian and the preacher can do much to prepare the way for him, when he comes. It is scarcely deniable that Anglican preaching has been gravely defective in recent years in the power of setting before men a vision of the ends of life vivid and penetrating enough to act as a compelling motive upon their action. The rich and profound treatment of ethical issues which characterized Aquinas or Jeremy Taylor needs again to be resumed; and we must insist that psychology, useful as it is, is no surrogate for theology in this field. As Bishop Berkeley, whom Mr Tawney quotes, well said: ‘Whatever the world thinks, he who hath not much meditated upon God, the human mind and the summum bonum, may possibly make a thriving earthworm, but will most indubitably make a sorry patriot and a sorry statesman’ …
We cannot conclude our review of Mr Tawney’s book without alluding to the large number of apt aphorisms which sparkle in its pages. ‘After nearly four centuries, Luther’s apprehensions of a too hasty establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven appear somewhat exaggerated’ (p. 94). ‘Sceptical as to the existence of unicorns and salamanders, the age of Machiavelli and Henry VIII found food for its credulity in the worship of that rare monster the God-fearing Prince’ (p. 102). ‘The certainties of one age are the problems of the next’ (p. 28). Such are a few specimens of Mr Tawney’s pregnant pen: they are to be found on almost every page, and do much to add to the reader’s pleasure.
Editor
Originally published in Theology 13 (77): 241–5 <https://doi.org/10.1177/0040571X2601307701>.