Those who accumulate possessions without end and without measure, those who are constantly adding new fields and new houses to their heritage; those who hoard huge quantities of wheat in order to sell at what to them is the opportune moment; those who lend at interest to poor and rich alike; think they are doing nothing against reason, against equity, and finally against divine law, because, as they imagine, they do no harm to anyone and in deed benefit those who would otherwise fall into great necessity. ... [Yet] if no one acquired or possessed more than he needed for his maintenance and that of his family, there would be no destitute in the world at all. It is thus this urge to acquire more and more which brings so many poor people to penury. Can this immense greed for acquisition be innocent, or only slightly criminal?
-Father Thomassin, Traité De Négoce De L’Usure, 1697
Is there an immediate conflict between a capitalist society, and a moral society?
How about between a capitalist society and a Christian society? How about between being a capitalist and being a Christian?
The historical answer to all of these questions is — more or less — yes.
We’ll continue our series How To Think About Capitalism today by exploring the answers the Christian church has historically given to these questions.
As I mentioned last week, for these posts I am relying in great part on the work of Dr. Jerry Muller, and in particular his book: The Mind and The Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought.
To the interested reader, I highly recommend Dr. Muller’s work — it is a wonderful exploration of Western intellectual thought regarding capitalism.
How Did Christianity View Capitalism In The West?
Short answer? Not well.
I have always found this question to be of particular interest to American Christians, for obvious reasons.
The immediate impression of Christian thought — not only in the scriptures, but also in Christian intellectual literature — is one of loving poverty and hating riches.
For an American who desires to live in accordance with biblical principles and the teachings of the historical Church, this impression certainly causes a kind of uneasiness.
Even the poorest American, in the context of human history, sits at the summit of wealth, abundance, luxury, and personal prosperity.
Over time, of course, the various delineations of Christianity have adopted stances to explain away this tension — such that it is now common for Christians to have a positive view of wealth.
Yet the fact remains, for the vast majority of its history the Christian religion was unambiguously hostile to ideas which would become central to a functioning capitalist society.
The debates regarding capitalism that began in the late-18th to early-19th century were influenced, of course, by Christianity’s view on these ideas.
Our first step in learning how to think about capitalism, therefore, is to gain an appreciation for the history of Christian thought on commerce and money-making.
To do that, we’ll examine four areas of Christian intellectual tradition— Scriptures, Early Church Fathers and Canons, Medieval Scholasticism, and Protestantism.
Scriptures
To start, the biblical record is famously hostile to money-making.
The Old Testament is perhaps a little more favorable, but the New Testament writings are downright condemnatory.
The Gospels were quite insistent that riches served as a dangerous obstacle to one’s salvation:
“Do not lay up treasures for yourselves on earth, for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,”
Jesus proclaimed in the sermon on the mount. And just a moment later —
“You cannot serve both God and mammon.” (Matthew 6:19-24)
And, of course, the most famous anti-rich statement of Jesus —
“It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” (Mark 10:25)
But why stop at the Gospels? Take Paul’s first letter to Timothy, for example —
“The love of money is the root of all kinds of evils.”*
*Side note — As a student of theology and philosophy, I prefer the translation “of all kinds of evils” because I believe it is less likely to lead to confusion and is clearly faithful to what Paul was actually teaching.
As a student and a snob of the Greek language, however, I must admit that the verse is better translated as “the root of all evils.” That translation is more faithful to the text.
The modern Christian is often trained to think that these verses are merely suggesting that the love of wealth is problematic, rather than riches per se.
That idea, however, is undercut not only by the historical understanding of the Church, but also by other scriptures which seem to positively praise the life of the poor.
For example, Luke 6:20-21 —
“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.”
So, not only are riches condemned, but Scripture also indicates that it is desirable to be poor.
Now — if you’re religious — you may feel that there are reasonable interpretations of these passages which afford the Christian some freedom in the pursuit of wealth.
While you may be right, those interpretations are the result of modern conversations about scripture — conversations which developed out of the historical understanding of the Church.
That historical understanding of scripture, I’m afraid, is quite plain — don’t desire to be wealthy, and certainly don’t be a merchant.
Early Church Fathers and the Canons
Let’s survey this so-called “historical understanding.”
Taking another example from scripture, we can see how the Christians used to think about these passages —
“Jesus entered the temple of God and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the moneychangers… He said to them ‘It is written “My house shall be called a house of prayers”; but you make it a den of robbers.’” (Matthew 21:12-13)
To the modern reader, it isn’t obvious that Jesus is condemning the merchants for being merchants per se, but rather for selling in the temple.
And while that may be correct, it isn’t how the Christian Church understood this passage for the first millennium of its existence.
The early Church saw this verse as demonizing trade and money-making, going so far as to declare the profession of merchants “scarcely agreeable to God” in the collection of canon law known as Ejicens Dominus.
In a later collection compiled by Gratian, trade and profit-seeking are declared absolutely sinful—
“The man who buys in order that he may gain by selling it again unchanged as he bought it, that man is of the buyers and sellers who are cast forth from God’s temple.”
So here we see that the early Church saw Jesus’ declaration of the merchants as “robbers,” quite literally.
In this way, many of the church fathers deployed reasoning similar to the modern-day college educated moron, better known by the title — democratic socialist.
Let’s see why.
Zero-Sum Thinking
Much of the hostility of the fathers seems to come from the Zero-Sum Fallacy.
If you don’t know, the zero-sum fallacy is an informal fallacy in economics that states — In order for one person to become better-off, someone else has to be made worse-off.
In other words, it is the belief in a “fixed pie.” For someone to take a bigger piece of the pie means someone else must take a smaller piece.
Many people erroneously believe — to this day — that capitalism works on the premise of exploiting others in order to make your piece-of-the-pie larger at their expense.
In other words, they believe capitalist markets are a zero-sum game.
In truth, capitalist markets operate on a premise of mutually beneficial exchange, where all parties are made better-off.
There is roughly two-and-a-half centuries of technological and financial progress that seems to suggest mutually beneficial exchange is not only real, but working smashingly well.
Yet the fallacy persists on — continually perpetuated in the halls of the overly-priced and hideously boring gender studies departments.
In the minds of the early church fathers, this fallacy was basically true —if you were rich, it was because you gained at the expense of the poor.
St. Jerome, for instance, captured the idea well by agreeing with the scriptural description of wealth as —
“unjust riches’ for they have no other source than the injustice of men, and no one can possess them except by the loss and ruin of others.”
St. Augustine also provided a famous formula for the nature of wealth —
“If one does not lose, the other does not gain.”
To be fair, zero-sum thinking was probably much more reasonable in the ancient world, including in the early course of church history.
In ancient Palestine — the birthplace of the Christian Church — the most common examples of wealthy men did in fact make their wealth by exploiting others.
The most readily available examples of very wealthy people were tax collectors and Roman magistrates — all of whom could only get richer if someone else got poorer.
So it’s not totally ridiculous to begin associating wealth with injustice in a pre-capitalist society.
Sadly, the same can not be said of college students on today’s university campuses.
As time went on, the Church theologians changed their tune towards commerce, as soon as they began to notice that it was possible to be honest about wealth generation.
Scholastics
Starting in the 12th century, a burgeoning medieval economy began developing in Western Europe.
Over the period of 1100 AD to 1300 AD, agricultural production boomed, which allowed more people to eat the produce of others rather than having to make all their own food.
This in turn allowed more people to move to cities, which became a prominent aspect of European life.
Merchants would travel to these cities in order to sell the goods they had acquired through their travels — goods such as food and clothing.
The Church began to see that these merchants were providing a needed service for people, and deserved to be paid for it.
But how much profit was enough for the merchants?
The medieval Scholastics — theologians focused on combining Aristotle’s philosophy with Christian theology — began to ask how much money a merchant should charge for his services.
The answer became known as The “Just Price” Theory, and it is the ideological beginnings of the market price.
The Just Price was originally conceived as that price by which the merchant can cover all of his costs, and make enough to provide for his family — not terribly unlike today’s idea of a market price.
Thomas Aquinas — the greatest of the scholastics — wrote a great deal on the “just price.”
His conclusions about commerce and trade were far more favorable than earlier thought.
He believed, for instance, that private property was an important feature of a functioning society, and like Aristotle he argued that the family was the basic social and economic unit.
Just Price Theory, however, is not quite as rosy towards commerce and trade as we may have liked.
For instance, Aquinas and the scholastics believed that the family structure gave rise to a natural order or hierarchy to society.
This hierarchy, for Aquinas, needed to be preserved at all costs.
It was ordained by God, and provided a much needed order to human society. To upset this order was considered taboo.
So though a merchant could charge for a profit, if he had a desire to accumulate wealth “beyond his station,” he was considered covetous.
One was not to aspire to climb the social hierarchy via the gain of riches — instead one should accept his lot in life and make only enough to sustain his family.
Trade for profit was seen as avarice by the Catholic Church, because like Aristotle, Aquinas argued that
“trade, insofar as it aims at making profits, is most reprehensible, since the desire for gain knows no bounds but reaches into the infinite.”
(We will examine Aristotle’s argument in greater detail next week when we look at the tradition of civic republicanism)
Protestants
Lest some of you think —
“Well, that’s the Catholic Church for you. Thankfully because of the Protestants, capitalism was able to emerge as a force for peace and prosperity.”
— I have some bad news for you.
The Protestant churches were no less suspicious of trade-for-profit and commerce — the belief in the contrary is often the result of the myth of the “protestant work ethic” fabricated by Max Weber.
As Dr. Muller points out, even in the most commercial societies of the time —
“Religious polemics against wealth remained a staple of sermonizing among Dutch Calvinists and English Puritans.”
Luther stigmatized money-lenders in many of his works, John Calvin used price controls on money-lending, and the Dutch Reformed Church forbade anyone who lent with interest from communion.
In America, the famous Cotton Mather lamented —
“Religion begot prosperity, and the daughter devoured the mother.”
John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, once said —
“Wherever riches have increased, the essence of religion has decreased in the same proportion. Therefore I do not see how it is possible, in the nature of things, for any revival of true religion to continue long. For religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches. But as riches increase, so will pride, anger, and love of the world in all its branches.”
American Protestantism, remarkably, has a long history of anti-capitalist rhetoric — bedfellows to their Catholic counterparts in Western Europe.
Conclusion: Usury and Implications for Today’s Debate
The scholastic and protestant thinking on commerce — combined with the traditions of civic republicanism — continued to shape cultural thought on commerce until the late 17th century.
In particular, the most loathed aspect of capitalism was usury — lending with an interest rate.
It was the Church's forbiddance of lending with interest that resulted in this profession’s association with the Jews — a fascinating history I will have to cover another time.
The effect of Christian thought on the development of capital markets impacted the debate to come in the 18th and 19th centuries — particularly for the notions of Just Price and the moral dimension of culture.
Should one pursue wealth at all costs, or is there a spiritual and social price to seeking nothing but profit?
Does society as a whole lose something ethereal yet essential when it becomes less concerned with the moral development of its citizens and more concerned with generating wealth?
The debates that began in the 18th century — and continue today — were informed largely by the Christian intellectual tradition's answers to these questions.
Many people today — religious or otherwise — feel that unhinged capital markets ought to be restrained by some guiding force.
Many argue that “capitalism without a soul” is a dangerous thing, and it would be better for us to restrain the markets in certain ways.
The Christian intellectual tradition can provide much needed context to these kinds of arguments, for and against.
However…
Perhaps you couldn’t give two cahoots about what the Christian church has to say on anything (a very bad philosophy indeed).
Perhaps you feel this is just another example of how religious thinking can hamper our scientific and technological progress.
“If only we had perfectly secular societies and governments,” you may wonder to yourself “then we could have had capitalism and wealth so much earlier.”
Well, next week we’ll test that theory against the history of secular civic republican societies, and see whether the Church was unique in its inimical outlook on commerce.
Stay tuned, and as always, thanks for reading!
Further Reading
The Mind and The Market: Capitalism In Western Intellectual Thought by Dr, Jerry Muller
Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas
Selected Sermons of St. Augustine edited by Daniel Doyle
Religious Thought and Economic Society by Jacob Viner
The Medieval Theories of the Just Price: Romanists, Canonists, and Theologians in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries by John W. Baldwin
What are your thoughts on black protestantism? In other words, the Cadillac, gold, and "blessed mentally" that demands an outward display of showing off riches they claim come from Jesus?