Religion and the Rise of Capitalism

I

The Social Organism

We are asking these questions today. Men were asking the same questions, though in different language, throughout the sixteenth century. It is a commonplace that modern economic history begins with a series of revolutionary changes in the direction and organization of commerce, in finance, in prices, and in agriculture. To the new economic situation men brought a body of doctrine, law and tradition, hammered out during the preceding three centuries. Since the new forces were bewildering, and often shocking, to conservative consciences, moralists and religious teachers met them at first by a reaffirmation of the traditional doctrines, by which, it seemed, their excesses might be restrained and their abuses corrected. As the changed environment became, not a novelty, but an established fact, these doctrines had to be modified. As the effects of the Reformation developed, different churches produced characteristic differences of social opinion.

But these were later developments, which only gradually became apparent. The new economic world was not accepted without a struggle. Apart from a few extremists, the first generation of reformers were rarely innovators in matters of social theory, and quoted Fathers and church councils, decretals and canon lawyers, in complete unconsciousness that innovations in doctrine and church government involved any breach with what they had learned to regard as the moral tradition of Christendom. Hence the sixteenth century sees a collision, not only between different schools of religious thought, but between the changed economic environment and the accepted theory of society. To understand it, one must place oneself at the point from which it started. One must examine, however summarily, the historical background.

That background consisted of the body of social theory, stated and implicit, which was the legacy of the Middle Ages. The formal teaching was derived from the Bible, the works of the Fathers and Schoolmen, the canon law and its commentators, and had been popularized in sermons and religious manuals. The informal assumptions were those implicit in law, custom, and social institutions. Both were complex, and to speak of them as a unity is to sacrifice truth to convenience. It may be that the political historian is justified when he covers with a single phrase the five centuries or more to which tradition has assigned the title of the Middle Ages. For the student of economic conditions that suggestion of homogeneity is the first illusion to be discarded.

The medieval economic world was marked, it is true, by certain common characteristics. They sprang from the fact that on the west it was a closed system, that on the north it had so much elbow-room as was given by the Baltic and the rivers emptying themselves into it, and that on the east, where it was open, the apertures were concentrated along a comparatively short coastline from Alexandria to the Black Sea, so that they were easily commanded by any naval power dominating the eastern Mediterranean, and easily cut by any military power which could squat across the trade routes before they reached the sea. While, however, these broad facts determined that the two main currents of trade should run from east to west and north to south, and that the most progressive economic life of the age should cluster in the regions from which these currents started and where they met, within this general economic framework there was the greatest variety of condition and development. The contours of economic civilization ran on different lines from those of subsequent centuries, but the contrast between mountain and valley was not less clearly marked. If the sites on which a complex economic structure rose were far removed from those of later generations, it flourished none the less where conditions favored its growth. In spite of the ubiquity of manor and gild, there was as much difference between the life of a center of capitalist industry, like fifteenth-century Flanders, or a center of capitalist finance, like fifteenth-century Florence, and a pastoral society exporting raw materials and a little food, like medieval England, as there is between modern Lancashire or London and modern Denmark. To draw from English conditions a picture of a whole world stagnating in economic squalor, or basking in economic innocence, is as absurd as to reconstruct the economic life of Europe in the twentieth century from a study of the Shetland Islands or the Ukraine. The elements in the social theory of the Middle Ages were equally various, and equally changing. Even if the student confines himself to the body of doctrine which is definitely associated with religion, and takes as typical of it the Summae of the Schoolmen, he finds it in constant process of development. The economic teaching of St. Antonino in the fifteenth century, for example, was far more complex and realistic than that of St. Thomas in the thirteenth, and down to the very end of the Middle Ages the best-established and most characteristic parts of the system—for example, the theory of prices and of usury—so far from being stationary, were steadily modified and elaborated.

There are, perhaps, four main attitudes which religious opinion may adopt toward the world of social institutions and economic relations. It may stand on one side in ascetic aloofness and regard them as in their very nature the sphere of unrighteousness, from which men may escape—from which, if they consider their souls, they will escape—but which they can conquer only by flight. It may take them for granted and ignore them, as matters of indifference belonging to a world with which religion has no concern; in all ages the prudence of looking problems boldly in the face and passing on has seemed too self-evident to require justification. It may throw itself into an agitation for some particular reform, for the removal of some crying scandal, for the promotion of some final revolution, which will inaugurate the reign of righteousness on earth. It may at once accept and criticize, tolerate and amend, welcome the gross world of human appetites, as the squalid scaffolding from amid which the life of the spirit must rise, and insist that this also is the material of the Kingdom of God. To such a temper, all activities divorced from religion are brutal or dead, but none are too mean to be beneath or too great to be above it, since all, in their different degrees, are touched with the spirit which permeates the whole. It finds its most sublime expression in the words of Piccarda: “Paradise is everywhere, though the grace of the highest good is not shed everywhere in the same degree.”

Each of these attitudes meets us today. Each meets us in the thought of the Middle Ages, as differences of period and place and economic environment and personal temperament evoke it. In the early Middle Ages the ascetic temper predominates. Lanfranc, for example, who sees nothing in economic life but the struggle of wolves over carrion, thinks that men of business can hardly be saved, for they live by cheating and profiteering.10 It is monasticism, with its repudiation of the prizes and temptations of the secular world, which is par excellence the life of religion. As one phase of it succumbed to ease and affluence, another rose to restore the primitive austerity, and the return to evangelical poverty, preached by St. Francis but abandoned by many of his followers, was the note of the majority of movements for reform. As for indifferentism—what else, for all its communistic phrases, is Wyclif’s teaching, that the “just man is already lord of all” and that “in this world God must serve the devil,” but an anticipation of the doctrine of celestial happiness as the compensation for earthly misery, to which Hobbes gave a cynical immortality when he wrote that the persecuted, instead of rebelling, “must expect their reward in Heaven,” and which Mr. and Mrs. Hammond have revealed as an opiate dulling both the pain and the agitation of the Industrial Revolution? If obscure sects like the Poor Men of Lyons are too unorthodox to be cited, the Friars are not, and it was not only Langland and that gentlemanly journalist, Froissart, who accused them—the phrase has a long history—of stirring up class hatred.

To select from so immense a sea of ideas about society and religion only the specimens that fit the meshes of one’s own small net, and to label them “medieval thought,” is to beg all questions. Ideas have a pedigree which, if realized, would often embarrass their exponents. The day has long since passed when it could be suggested that only one-half of modern Christianity has its root in medieval religion. There is a medieval Puritanism and rationalism as well as a medieval Catholicism. In the field of ecclesiastical theory, as Mr. Manning has pointed out in his excellent book,11 Gregory VII and Boniface VIII have their true successors in Calvin and Knox. What is true of religion and political thought is equally true of economic and social doctrines. The social theories of Luther and Latimer, of Bucer and Bullinger, of sixteenth-century Anabaptists and seventeenth-century Levellers, of Puritans like Baxter, Anglicans like Laud, Baptists like Bunyan, Quakers like Bellers, are all the children of medieval parents. Like the Church today in regions which have not yet emerged from savagery, the Church of the earlier Middle Ages had been engaged in an immense missionary effort, in which, as it struggled with the surrounding barbarism, the work of conversion and of social construction had been almost indistinguishable. By the very nature of its task, as much as by the intention of its rulers, it had become the greatest of political institutions. For good or evil it aspired to be, not a sect, but a civilization, and, when its unity was shattered at the Reformation, the different Churches which emerged from it endeavored, according to their different opportunities, to perpetuate the same tradition. Asceticism or renunciation, quietism or indifferentism, the zeal which does well to be angry, the temper which seeks a synthesis of the external order and the religion of the spirit—all alike, in one form or another, are represented in the religious thought and practice of the Middle Ages.

All are represented in it, but not all are equally representative of it. Of the four attitudes suggested above, it is the last which is most characteristic. The first fundamental assumption which is taken over by the sixteenth century is that the ultimate standard of human institutions and activities is religion. The architectonics of the system had been worked out in the Summae of the Schoolmen. In sharp contrast to the modern temper, which takes the destination for granted, and is thrilled by the hum of the engine, medieval religious thought strains every interest and activity, by however arbitrary a compression, into the service of a single idea. The lines of its scheme run up and down, and, since purpose is universal and all-embracing, there is, at least in theory, no room for eccentric bodies which move in their own private orbit. That purpose is set by the divine plan of the universe. “The perfect happiness of man cannot be other than the vision of the divine essence.”12

Hence all activities fall within a single system, because all, though with different degrees of immediateness, are related to a single end, and derive their significance from it. The Church in its wider sense is the Christian Commonwealth, within which that end is to be realized; in its narrower sense it is the hierarchy divinely commissioned for its interpretation; in both it embraces the whole of life, and its authority is final. Though practice is perpetually at variance with theory, there is no absolute division between the inner and personal life, which is “the sphere of religion,” and the practical interests, the external order, the impersonal mechanism, to which, if some modern teachers may be trusted, religion is irrelevant.

There is no absolute division, but there is a division of quality. There are—to use a modern phrase—degrees of reality. The distinctive feature of medieval thought is that contrasts which later were to be presented as irreconcilable antitheses appear in it as differences within a larger unity, and that the world of social organization, originating in physical necessities, passes by insensible gradations into that of the spirit. Man shares with other animals the necessity of maintaining and perpetuating his species; in addition, as a natural creature, he has what is peculiar to himself, an inclination to the life of the intellect and of society—“to know the truth about God and to live in communities.”13 These activities, which form his life according to the law of nature, may be regarded, and sometimes are regarded, as indifferent or hostile to the life of the spirit. But the characteristic thought is different. It is that of a synthesis.

The contrast between nature and grace, between human appetites and interests and religion, is not absolute, but relative. It is a contrast of matter and the spirit informing it, of stages in a process, of preparation and fruition. Grace works on the unregenerate nature of man, not to destroy it, but to transform it. And what is true of the individual is true of society. An attempt is made to give it a new significance by relating it to the purpose of human life as known by revelation. In the words of a famous (or notorious) Bull: “The way of religion is to lead the things which are lower to the things which are higher through the things which are intermediate. According to the law of the universe all things are not reduced to order equally and immediately; but the lowest through the intermediate, the intermediate through the higher.”14 Thus social institutions assume a character which may almost be called sacramental, for they are the outward and imperfect expression of a supreme spiritual reality. Ideally conceived, society is an organism of different grades, and human activities form a hierarchy of functions, which differ in kind and in significance, but each of which is of value on its own plane, provided that it is governed, however remotely, by the end which is common to all. Like the celestial order, of which it is the dim reflection, society is stable, because it is straining upwards:

Anzi è formale ad esto beato esse
Tenersi dentro alla divina voglia,
Per ch’ una fansi nostre voglie stesse.

Needless to say, metaphysics, however sublime, were not the daily food of the Middle Ages, any more than of today. The fifteenth century saw an outburst of commercial activity and of economic speculation, and by the middle of it all this teaching was becoming antiquated. Needless to say, also, general ideas cannot be kept in compartments, and the teleology of medieval speculation colored the interpretation of common affairs, as it was colored by physics in the eighteenth century and by the idea of evolution in the nineteenth. If the first legacy of the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century was the idea of religion as embracing all aspects of human life, the second and third flowed naturally from the working of that idea in the economic environment of the time. They may be called, respectively, the functional view of class organization, and the doctrine of economic ethics.

From the twelfth century to the sixteenth, from the work of Beckett’s secretary in 1159 to the work of Henry VIII’s chaplain in 1537, the analogy by which society is described—an analogy at once fundamental and commonplace—is the same.15 Invoked in every economic crisis to rebuke extortion and dissension with a high doctrine of social solidarity, it was not finally discarded till the rise of a theoretical individualism in England in the seventeenth century. It is that of the human body. The gross facts of the social order are accepted in all their harshness and brutality. They are accepted with astonishing docility, and, except on rare occasions, there is no question of reconstruction. What they include is no trifle. It is nothing less than the whole edifice of feudal society—class privilege, class oppression, exploitation, serfdom. But these things cannot, it is thought, be treated as simply alien to religion, for religion is all-comprehensive. They must be given some ethical meaning, must be shown to be the expression of some larger plan. The meaning given them is simple. The facts of class status and inequality were rationalized in the Middle Ages by a functional theory of society, as the facts of competition were rationalized in the eighteenth by the theory of economic harmonies; and the former took the same delight in contemplating the moral purpose revealed in social organization as the latter in proving that to the curious mechanism of human society a moral purpose was superfluous or disturbing. Society, like the human body, is an organism composed of different members. Each member has its own function, prayer, or defense, or merchandise, or tilling the soil. Each must receive the means suited to its station, and must claim no more. Within classes there must be equality; if one takes into his hand the living of two, his neighbor will go short. Between classes there must be inequality; for otherwise a class cannot perform its function, or—a strange thought to us—enjoy its rights. Peasants must not encroach on those above them. Lords must not despoil peasants. Craftsmen and merchants must receive what will maintain them in their calling, and no more.

As a rule of social policy, the doctrine was at once repressive and protective. “There is degree above degree, as reason is, and skill it is that men do their devoir thereas it is due. But certes, extortions and despite of your underlings is damnable.”16 As a philosophy of society, it attempted to spiritualize the material by incorporating it in a divine universe, which should absorb and transform it. To that process of transmutation the life of mere moneymaking was recalcitrant, and hence, indeed, the stigma attached to it. For, in spite of the ingenuity of theorists, finance and trade, the essence of which seemed to be, not service, but a mere appetitus divitiarum infinitus, were not easily interpreted in terms of social function. Comparatively late intruders in a world dominated by conceptions hammered out in a pre-commercial age, they were never fitted harmoniously into the medieval synthesis, and ultimately, when they grew to their full stature, were to contribute to its overthrow. But the property of the feudal lord, the labor of the peasant or the craftsman, even the ferocity of the warrior, were not dismissed as hostile or indifferent to the life of the spirit. Touched by the spear of Ithuriel, they were to be sublimated into service, vocation and chivalry, and the ritual which surrounded them was designed to emphasize that they had undergone a rededication at the hands of religion. Baptized by the Church, privilege and power became office and duty.

That the reconciliation was superficial, and that in attempting it the Church often degraded itself without raising the world, is as indisputable as that its tendency was to dignify material interests, by stamping them with the impress of a universal design. Gentlemen took hard tallages and oppressed the poor; but it was something that they should be told that their true function was “to defend God’s law by power of the world.”17 Craftsmen—the burden of endless sermons—worked deceitfully; but it was perhaps not wholly without value that they should pay even lip-service to the ideal of so conducting their trade, that the common people should not be defrauded by the evil ingenuity of those exercising the craft. If lord and peasant, merchant and artisan, burgess and villager, pressed each other hard, was it meaningless to meet their struggles with an assertion of universal solidarity, to which economic convenience and economic power must alike give way? “The health of the whole commonwealth will be assured and vigorous, if the higher members consider the lower and the lower answer in like manner the higher, so that each is in its turn a member of every other.”18

If the medieval moralist was often too naive in expecting sound practice as the result of lofty principles alone, he was at least free from that not unfashionable form of credulity which expects it from their absence or from their opposite. To say that the men to whom such teaching was addressed went out to rob and cheat is to say no more than that they were men. Nor is it self-evident that they would have been more likely to be honest, if they had been informed, like some of their descendants, that competition was designed by Providence to provide an automatic substitute for honesty. Society was interpreted, in short, not as the expression of economic self-interest, but as held together by a system of mutual, though varying, obligations. Social well-being exists, it was thought, in so far as each class performs its functions and enjoys the rights proportioned thereto. “The Church is divided in these three parts, preachers, and defenders, and … laborers. … As she is our mother, so she is a body, and health of this body stands in this, that one part of her answer to another, after the same measure that Jesus Christ has ordained it. … Kindly man’s hand helps his head, and his eye helps his foot, and his foot his body … and thus should it be in parts of the Church. … As divers parts of man served unkindly to man if one took the service of another and left his own proper work, so divers parts of the Church have proper works to serve God; and if one part leave his work that God has limited him and take work of another part, sinful wonder is in the Church. … Surely the Church shall never be whole before proportions of her parts be brought again by this heavenly leech and [by] medicine of men.”19

Speculation does not develop in vacuo. It echoes, however radical it is, the established order. Clearly this patriarchal doctrine is a softened reflection of the feudal land system. Not less clearly the Church’s doctrine of economic ethics is the expression of the conditions of medieval industry. A religious philosophy, unless it is frankly to abandon nine-tenths of conduct to the powers of darkness, cannot admit the doctrine of a world of business and economic relations self-sufficient and divorced from ethics and religion. But the facts may be difficult to moralize, or they may be relatively easy. Over a great part of Europe in the later Middle Ages, the economic environment was less intractable than it had been in the days of the Empire or than it is today. In the great commercial centers there was sometimes, it is true, a capitalism as inhuman as any which the world has seen, and from time to time ferocious class wars between artisans and merchants.20 But outside them trade, industry, the money-market, all that we call the economic system, was not a system, but a mass of individual trades and individual dealings. Pecuniary transactions were a fringe on a world of natural economy. There was little mobility or competition. There was very little large-scale organization. With some important exceptions, such as the textile workers of Flanders and Italy, who, in the fourteenth century, again and again rose in revolt, the medieval artisan, especially in backward countries like England, was a small master. The formation of temporary organizations, or “parliaments,” of wage-earners, which goes on in London even before the end of the thirteenth century,21 and the growth of journeymen’s associations in the later Middle Ages, are a proof that the conditions which produced modern trade unionism were not unknown. But even in a great city like Paris the 128 gilds which existed at the end of the thirteenth century appear to have included 5,000 masters, who employed not more than 6,000 to 7,000 journeymen. At Frankfurt-am-Main in 1387 actually not more than 750 to 800 journeymen are estimated to have been in the service of 1,554 masters.22

In cities of this kind, with their freedom, their comparative peace, and their strong corporate feeling, large enough to be prolific of associations and small enough for each man to know his neighbor, an ethic of mutual aid was not wholly impossible, and it is in the light of such conditions that the most characteristic of medieval industrial institutions is to be interpreted. To suggest that anything like a majority of medieval workers were ever members of a craft gild is extravagant. In England, at any rate, more than nine-tenths were peasants, among whom, though friendly societies called gilds were common, there was naturally no question of craft organization. Even in the towns it is a question whether there was not a considerable population of casual workers—consider only the number of unskilled workers that must have been required as laborers by the craftsmen building a cathedral in the days before mechanical cranes—who were rarely organized in permanent societies. To invest the craft gilds with a halo of economic chivalry is not less inappropriate. They were, first and foremost, monopolists, and the cases in which their vested interests came into collision with the consumer were not a few. Wyclif, with his almost modern devotion to the conception of a unitary society overriding particular interests for the common good, was naturally prejudiced against corporations, on the ground that they distracted social unity by the intrusion of sectarian cupidities and sinister ambitions; but there was probably from time to time more than a little justification for his complaint that “all new fraternities or gilds made of men seem openly to run in this curse [against false conspirators],” because “they conspire to bear up each other, yea, in wrong, and oppress other men in their right by their wit and power.”23 It is significant that the most striking of the projects of political and social reconstruction produced in Germany in the century before the Reformation proposed the complete abolition of gilds, as intolerably corrupt and tyrannical.24

There are, however, monopolists and monopolists. An age in which combinations are not tempted to pay lip-service to religion may do well to remember that the characteristic, after all, of the medieval gild was that, if it sprang from economic needs, it claimed, at least, to subordinate them to social interests, as conceived by men for whom the social and the spiritual were inextricably intertwined. “Tout ce petit monde antique,” writes the historian of French gilds, “était fortement imbu des idées chrétiennes sur le juste salaire et le juste prix; sans doute il y avait alors, comme aujourd’hui, des cupidités et des convoitises; mais une règle puissante s’imposait à tous et d’une manière générale exigeait pour chacun le pain quotidien promis par l’Evangile.”25 The attempt to preserve a rough equality among “the good men of the mistery,” to check economic egotism by insisting that every brother shall share his good fortune with another and stand by his neighbor in need, to resist the encroachments of a conscienceless money-power, to preserve professional standards of training and craftsmanship, and to repress by a strict corporate discipline the natural appetite of each to snatch special advantages for himself to the injury of all—whether these things outweigh the evils of conservative methods and corporate exclusiveness is a question which each student will answer in accordance with his own predilections. What is clear, at least, is that both the rules of fraternities and the economic teaching of the Church were prompted by the problems of a common environment. Much that is now mechanical was then personal, intimate and direct, and there was little room for organization on a scale too vast for the standards that are applied to individuals, or for the doctrine which silences scruples and closes all accounts with the final plea of economic expediency.

Such an environment, with its personal economic relations, was a not unfavorable field for a system of social ethics. And the Church, which brought to its task the tremendous claim to mediate between even the humblest activity and the divine purpose, sought to supply it. True, its teaching was violated in practice, and violated grossly, in the very citadel of Christendom which promulgated it. Contemporaries were under no illusion as to the reality of economic motives in the Age of Faith. They had only to look at Rome. From the middle of the thirteenth century a continuous wail arises against the iniquity of the Church, and its burden may be summed up in one word, “avarice.” At Rome, everything is for sale. What is reverenced is the gospel, not according to St. Mark, but according to the marks of silver.26

Cum ad papam veneris, habe pro constanti,
Non est locus pauperi, soli favet danti.

⋮

Papa, si rem tangimus, nomen habet a re,
Quicquid habent alii, solus vult papare;
Vel, si verbum gallicum vis apocopare,
‘Payez, payez,’ dit le mot, si vis impetrare.27

The Papacy might denounce usurers, but, as the center of the most highly organized administrative system of the age, receiving remittances from all over Europe, and receiving them in money at a time when the revenue of other Governments still included personal services and payments in kind, it could not dispense with them. Dante put the Cahorsine moneylenders in hell, but a Pope gave them the title of “peculiar sons of the Roman Church.”28 Grosstête rebuked the Lombard bankers, and a bishop of London expelled them, but papal protection brought them back.29 Archbishop Peckham, a few years later, had to implore Pope Nicholas III to withdraw a threat of excommunication, intended to compel him to pay the usurious interest demanded by Italian moneylenders, though, as the archbishop justly observed, “by your Holiness’s special mandate, it would be my duty to take strong measures against such lenders.”30 The Papacy was, in a sense, the greatest financial institution of the Middle Ages, and, as its fiscal system was elaborated, things became, not better, but worse. The abuses which were a trickle in the thirteenth century were a torrent in the fifteenth. And the frailties of Rome, if exceptional in their notoriety, can hardly be regarded as unique. Priests, it is from time to time complained, engage in trade and take usury.31 Cathedral chapters lend money at high rates of interest. The profits of usury, like those of simony, should have been refused by churchmen, as hateful to God; but a bishop of Paris, when consulted by a usurer as to the salvation of his soul, instead of urging restitution, recommended him to dedicate his ill-gotten wealth to the building of Notre-Dame.32 “Thus,” exclaimed St. Bernard, as he gazed at the glories of Gothic architecture, “wealth is drawn up by ropes of wealth, thus money bringeth money. … O vanity of vanities, yet no more vain than insane! The Church is resplendent in her walls, beggarly in her poor. She clothes her stones in gold, and leaves her sons naked.”33

The picture is horrifying, and one must be grateful to those, like M. Luchaire and Mr. Coulton, who demolish romance. But the denunciation of vices implies that they are recognized as vicious; to ignore their condemnation is not less one-sided than to conceal their existence; and, when the halo has vanished from practice, it remains to ask what principles men valued, and what standards they erected. The economic doctrines elaborated in the Summae of the Schoolmen, in which that question receives its most systematic answer, have not infrequently been dismissed as the fanciful extravagances of writers disqualified from throwing light on the affairs of this world by their morbid preoccupation with those of the next. In reality, whatever may be thought of their conclusions, both the occasion and the purpose of scholastic speculations upon economic questions were eminently practical. The movement which prompted them was the growth of trade, of town life, and of a commercial economy, in a world whose social categories were still those of the self-sufficing village and the feudal hierarchy. The object of their authors was to solve the problems to which such developments gave rise. It was to reconcile the new contractual relations, which sprang from economic expansion, with the traditional morality expounded by the Church. Viewed by posterity as reactionaries, who damned the currents of economic enterprise with an irrelevant appeal to Scripture and to the Fathers, in their own age they were the pioneers of a liberal intellectual movement. By lifting the weight of antiquated formulae they cleared a space within the stiff framework of religious authority for new and mobile economic interests, and thus supplied an intellectual justification for developments which earlier generations would have condemned.

The mercantilist thought of later centuries owed a considerable debt to scholastic discussions of money, prices, and interest. But the specific contributions of medieval writers to the technique of economic theory were less significant than their premises. Their fundamental assumptions, both of which were to leave a deep imprint on the social thought of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were two: that economic interests are subordinate to the real business of life, which is salvation, and that economic conduct is one aspect of personal conduct, upon which, as on other parts of it, the rules of morality are binding. Material riches are necessary; they have a secondary importance, since without them men cannot support themselves and help one another; the wise ruler, as St. Thomas said,34 will consider in founding his State the natural resources of the country. But economic motives are suspect. Because they are powerful appetites, men fear them, but they are not mean enough to applaud them. Like other strong passions, what they need, it is thought, is not a clear field, but repression. There is no place in medieval theory for economic activity which is not related to a moral end, and to found a science of society upon the assumption that the appetite for economic gain is a constant and measurable force, to be accepted, like other natural forces, as an inevitable and self-evident datum, would have appeared to the medieval thinker as hardly less irrational or less immoral than to make the premise of social philosophy the unrestrained operation of such necessary human attributes as pugnacity or the sexual instinct. The outer is ordained for the sake of the inner; economic goods are instrumental—sicut quaedam adminicula, quibus adjuvamur ad tendendum in beatitudinem. “It is lawful to desire temporal blessings, not putting them in the first place, as though setting up our rest in them, but regarding them as aids to blessedness, inasmuch as they support our corporal life and serve as instruments for acts of virtue.”35 Riches, as St. Antonino says, exist for man, not man for riches.

At every turn, therefore, there are limits, restrictions, warnings against allowing economic interests to interfere with serious affairs. It is right for a man to seek such wealth as is necessary for a livelihood in his station. To seek more is not enterprise, but avarice, and avarice is a deadly sin. Trade is legitimate; the different resources of different countries show that it was intended by Providence. But it is a dangerous business. A man must be sure that he carries it on for the public benefit, and that the profits which he takes are no more than the wages of his labor. Private property is a necessary institution, at least in a fallen world; men work more and dispute less when goods are private than when they are common. But it is to be tolerated as a concession to human frailty, not applauded as desirable in itself; the ideal—if only man’s nature could rise to it—is communism. “Communis enim,” wrote Gratian in his decretum, “usus omnium, quae sunt in hoc mundo, omnibus hominibus esse debuit.”36 At best, indeed, the estate is somewhat encumbered. It must be legitimately acquired. It must be in the largest possible number of hands. It must provide for the support of the poor. Its use must as far as practicable be common. Its owners must be ready to share it with those who need, even if they are not in actual destitution. Such were the conditions which commended themselves to an archbishop of the business capital of fifteenth-century Europe.37 There have been ages in which they would have been described, not as a justification of property, but as a revolutionary assault on it. For to defend the property of the peasant and small master is necessarily to attack that of the monopolist and usurer, which grows by devouring it.

The assumption on which all this body of doctrine rested was simple. It was that the danger of economic interests increased in direct proportion to the prominence of the pecuniary motives associated with them. Labor—the common lot of mankind—is necessary and honorable; trade is necessary, but perilous to the soul; finance, if not immoral, is at best sordid and at worst disreputable. This curious inversion of the social values of more enlightened ages is best revealed in medieval discussions of the ethics of commerce. The severely qualified tolerance extended to the trader was partly, no doubt, a literary convention derived from classical models; it was natural that Aquinas should laud the State which had small need of merchants because it could meet its needs from the produce of its own soil; had not the Philosopher himself praised αὐτάρκεια? But it was a convention which coincided with a vital element in medieval social theory, and struck a responsive note in wide sections of medieval society. It is not disputed, of course, that trade is indispensable; the merchant supplements the deficiencies of one country with the abundance of another. If there were no private traders, argued Duns Scotus, whose indulgence was less carefully guarded, the governor would have to engage them. Their profits, therefore, are legitimate, and they may include, not only the livelihood appropriate to the trader’s status, but payment for labor, skill, and risk.38

The defence, if adequate, was somewhat embarrassing. For why should a defence be required? The insistence that trade is not positively sinful conveys a hint that the practices of traders may be, at least, of dubious propriety. And so, in the eyes of most medieval thinkers, they are. Summe periculosa est venditionis et emptionis negotiatio.39 The explanation of that attitude lay partly in the facts of contemporary economic organization. The economy of the medieval borough—consider only its treatment of food supplies and prices—was one in which consumption held somewhat the same primacy in the public mind, as the undisputed arbiter of economic effort, as the nineteenth century attached to profits. The merchant pure and simple, though convenient to the Crown, for whom he collected taxes and provided loans, and to great establishments such as monasteries, whose wool he bought in bulk, enjoyed the double unpopularity of an alien and a parasite. The best practical commentary on the tepid indulgence extended by theorists to the trader is the network of restrictions with which medieval policy surrounded his activities, the recurrent storms of public indignation against him, and the ruthlessness with which boroughs suppressed the middleman who intervened between consumer and producer.

Apart, however, from the color which it took from its environment, medieval social theory had reasons of its own for holding that business, as distinct from labor, required some special justification. The suspicion of economic motives had been one of the earliest elements in the social teaching of the Church, and was to survive till Calvinism endowed the life of economic enterprise with a new sanctification. In medieval philosophy the ascetic tradition, which condemned all commerce as the sphere of iniquity, was softened by a recognition of practical necessities, but it was not obliterated; and, if reluctant to condemn, it was insistent to warn. For it was of the essence of trade to drag into a position of solitary prominence the acquisitive appetites; and towards those appetites, which to most modern thinkers have seemed the one sure social dynamic, the attitude of the medieval theorist was that of one who holds a wolf by the ears. The craftsman labors for his living; he seeks what is sufficient to support him, and no more. The merchant aims, not merely at livelihood, but at profit. The traditional distinction was expressed in the words of Gratian: “Whosoever buys a thing, not that he may sell it whole and unchanged, but that it may be a material for fashioning something, he is no merchant. But the man who buys it in order that he may gain by selling it again unchanged and as he bought it, that man is of the buyers and sellers who are cast forth from God’s temple.”40 By very definition a man who “buys in order that he may sell dearer,” the trader is moved by an inhuman concentration on his own pecuniary interest, unsoftened by any tincture of public spirit or private charity. He turns what should be a means into an end, and his occupation, therefore, “is justly condemned, since, regarded in itself, it serves the lust of gain.”41

The dilemma presented by a form of enterprise at once perilous to the soul and essential to society was revealed in the solution most commonly propounded for it. It was to treat profits as a particular case of wages, with the qualification that gains in excess of a reasonable remuneration for the merchant’s labor were, though not illegal, reprehensible as turpe lucrum. The condition of the trader’s exoneration is that “he seeks gain, not as an end, but as the wages of his labor.”42 Theoretically convenient, the doctrine was difficult of application, for evidently it implied the acceptance of what the sedate irony of Adam Smith was later to describe as “an affectation not very common among merchants.” But the motives which prompted it were characteristic. The medieval theorist condemned as a sin precisely that effort to achieve a continuous and unlimited increase in material wealth which modern societies applaud as a quality, and the vices for which he reserved his most merciless denunciations were the more refined and subtle of the economic virtues. “He who has enough to satisfy his wants,” wrote a Schoolman of the fourteenth century, “and nevertheless ceaselessly labors to acquire riches, either in order to obtain a higher social position, or that subsequently he may have enough to live without labor, or that his sons may become men of wealth and importance—all such are incited by a damnable avarice, sensuality, or pride.”43 Two and a half centuries later, in the midst of a revolution in the economic and spiritual environment, Luther, in even more unmeasured language, was to say the same.44 The essence of the argument was that payment may properly be demanded by the craftsmen who make the goods, or by the merchants who transport them, for both labor in their vocation and serve the common need. The unpardonable sin is that of the speculator or the middleman, who snatches private gain by the exploitation of public necessities. The true descendant of the doctrines of Aquinas is the labor theory of value. The last of the Schoolmen was Karl Marx.