Religion and the rise of capitalism

by R. H. Tawney

To such questions liberal theologians answered that the crucial point was not the letter of the law which forbad the breeding of barren metal, but the observance of Christian charity in economic, as in other, transactions. Their opponents appealed to the text of Scripture and the law of the Church, argued that usury differed, not merely in degree, but in kind, from payments which, like rent and profits, were morally unobjectionable provided that they were not extortionate in amount, and insisted that usury was to be interpreted as “whatever is taken for a loan above the principal.” The literature of the subject was voluminous. But it was obsolete almost before it was produced. For, whether theologians and moralists condemned all interest, or only some interest, as contrary to Christian ethics, the assumption implied in their very disagreement had been that economic relations belonged to a province of which, in the last resort, the Church was master. That economic transactions were one department of ethical conduct, and to be judged, like other parts of it, by spiritual criteria; that, whatever concessions the State might see fit to make to human frailty, a certain standard of economic morality was involved in membership of the Christian Church; that it was the function of ecclesiastical authorities, whoever they might be, to take the action needed to bring home to men their social obligations—such doctrines were still common ground to all sections of religious thought. It was precisely this whole conception of a social theory based ultimately on religion which was being discredited. While rival authorities were discussing the correct interpretation of economic ethics, the flank of both was turned by the growth of a powerful body of lay opinion, which argued that economics were one thing and ethics another.

Usury, a summary name for all kinds of extortion, was the issue in which the whole controversy over “good conscience” in bargaining came to a head, and such questions were only one illustration of the immense problems with which the rise of a commercial civilization confronted a Church whose social ethics still professed to be those of the Bible, the Fathers and the Schoolmen. A score of books, garnished with citations from Scripture and from the canonists, were written to answer them. Many of them are learned; some are almost readable. But it may be doubted whether, even in their own day, they satisfied any one but their authors. The truth is that, in spite of the sincerity with which it was held that the transactions of business must somehow be amenable to the moral law, the code of practical ethics, in which that claim was expressed, had been forged to meet the conditions of a very different environment from that of commercial England in the seventeenth century.

The most crucial and the most difficult of all political questions is that which turns on the difference between public and private morality. The problem which it presents in the relations between States is a commonplace. But, since its essence is the difficulty of applying the same moral standard to decisions which affect large masses of men as to those in which only individuals are involved, it emerges in a hardly less acute form in the sphere of economic life, as soon as its connections ramify widely, and the unit is no longer the solitary producer, but a group. To argue, in the manner of Machiavelli, that there is one rule for business and another for private life, is to open a door to an orgy of unscrupulousness before which the mind recoils. To argue that there is no difference at all is to lay down a principle which few men who have faced the difficulty in practice will be prepared to endorse as of invariable application, and incidentally to expose the idea of morality itself to discredit by subjecting it to an almost intolerable strain. The practical result of sentimentality is too often a violent reaction towards the baser kinds of Realpolitik.

With the expansion of finance and international trade in the sixteenth century, it was this problem which faced the Church. Granted that I should love my neighbor as myself, the questions which, under modern conditions of large-scale organization, remain for solution are, Who precisely is my neighbor? and, How exactly am I to make my love for him effective in practice? To these questions the conventional religious teaching supplied no answer, for it had not even realized that they could be put. It had tried to moralize economic relations by treating every transaction as a case of personal conduct, involving personal responsibility. In an age of impersonal finance, world-markets and a capitalist organization of industry, its traditional social doctrines had no specific to offer, and were merely repeated, when, in order to be effective, they should have been thought out again from the beginning and formulated in new and living terms. It had endeavored to protect the peasant and the craftsman against the oppression of the money-lender and the monopolist. Faced with the problems of a wage-earning proletariat, it could do no more than repeat, with meaningless iteration, its traditional lore as to the duties of master to servant and servant to master. It had insisted that all men were brethren. But it did not occur to it to point out that, as a result of the new economic imperialism which was beginning to develop in the seventeenth century, the brethren of the English merchant were the Africans whom he kidnaped for slavery in America, or the American Indians whom he stripped of their lands, or the Indian craftsmen from whom he bought muslins and silks at starvation prices. Religion had not yet learned to console itself for the practical difficulty of applying its moral principles by clasping the comfortable formula that for the transactions of economic life no moral principles exist. But, for the problems involved in the association of men for economic purposes on the grand scale which was to be increasingly the rule in the future, the social doctrines advanced from the pulpit offered, in their traditional form, little guidance. Their practical ineffectiveness prepared the way for their theoretical abandonment.

They were abandoned because, on the whole, they deserved to be abandoned. The social teaching of the Church had ceased to count, because the Church itself had ceased to think. Energy in economic action, realist intelligence in economic thought—these qualities were to be the note of the seventeenth century, when once the confusion of the Civil War had died down. When mankind is faced with the choice between exhilarating activities and piety imprisoned in a shriveled mass of desiccated formulæ, it will choose the former, though the energy be brutal and the intelligence narrow. In the age of Bacon and Descartes, bursting with clamorous interests and eager ideas, fruitful, above all, in the germs of economic speculation, from which was to grow the new science of Political Arithmetic, the social theory of the Church of England turned its face from the practical world, to pore over doctrines which, had their original authors been as impervious to realities as their later exponents, would never have been formulated. Naturally it was shouldered aside. It was neglected because it had become negligible.

The defect was fundamental. It made itself felt in countries where there was no Reformation, no Puritan movement, no common law jealous of its rights and eager to prune ecclesiastical pretensions. But in England there were all three, and, from the beginning of the last quarter of the sixteenth century, ecclesiastical authorities who attempted to enforce traditional morality had to reckon with a temper which denied their right to exercise any jurisdiction at all, above all, any jurisdiction interfering with economic matters. It was not merely that there was the familiar objection of the plain man that parsons know nothing of business—that “it is not in simple divines to show what contract is lawful and what is not.”[[87]] More important, there was the opposition of the common lawyers to part, at least, of the machinery of ecclesiastical discipline. Bancroft in 1605 complained to the Privy Council that the judges were endeavoring to confine the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts to testamentary and matrimonial cases, and alleged that, of more than five hundred prohibitions issued to stop proceedings in the Court of Arches since the accession of Elizabeth, not more than one in twenty could be sustained.[[88]] “As things are,” wrote two years later the author of a treatise on the civil and ecclesiastical law, “neither jurisdiction knowes their owne bounds, but one snatcheth from the other, in maner as in a batable ground lying betweene two kingdomes.”[[89]] The jurisdiction of the Court of High Commission suffered in the same way. In the last resort appeals from the ecclesiastical courts went either to it or to the Court of Delegates. From the latter part of the sixteenth century down to the removal of Coke from the Bench in 1616, the judges were from time to time staying proceedings before the Court of High Commission by prohibitions, or discharging offenders imprisoned by it. In 1577, for example, they released on a writ of Habeas Corpus a prisoner committed by the High Commission on a charge of usury.[[90]]

Most fundamental of all, there was the growth of a theory of the Church, which denied the very principle of a discipline exercised by bishops and archdeacons. The acquiescence of the laity in the moral jurisdiction of the clergy had been accorded with less and less readiness for two centuries before the Reformation. With the growth under Elizabeth of a vigorous Puritan movement, which had its stronghold among the trading and commercial classes, that jurisdiction became to a considerable proportion of the population little less than abhorrent. Their dislike of it was based, of course, on weightier grounds than its occasional interference in matters of business. But their attitude had as an inevitable result that, with the disparagement of the whole principle of the traditional ecclesiastical discipline, that particular use of it was also discredited. It was not that Puritanism implied a greater laxity in social relations. On the contrary, in its earlier phases it stood, at least in theory, for a stricter discipline of the life of the individual, alike in his business and in his pleasures. But it repudiated as anti-Christian the organs through which such discipline had in fact been exercised. When the Usury Bill of 1571 was being discussed in the House of Commons, reference to the canon law was met by the protest that the rules of the canon law on the matter were abolished, and that “they should be no more remembered than they are followed.”[[91]] Feeling against the system rose steadily during the next two generations; excommunications, when courts ventured to resort to them, were freely disregarded;[[92]] and by the thirties of the seventeenth century, under the influence of Laud’s régime, the murmur was threatening to become a hurricane. Then came the Long Parliament, the fierce denunciations in both Houses of the interference of the clergy in civil affairs, and the legislation abolishing the Court of High Commission, depriving the ordinary ecclesiastical courts of penal jurisdiction, and finally, with the abolition of episcopacy, sweeping them away altogether.

“Not many good days,” wrote Penn, “since ministers meddled so much in laymen’s business.”[[93]] That sentiment was a dogma on which, after the Restoration, both Cavalier and Roundhead could agree. It inevitably reacted, not only upon the practical powers of the clergy, which in any case had long been feeble, but on the whole conception of religion which regarded it as involving the control of economic self-interest by what Laud had called “the body of the Church.” The works of Sanderson and of Jeremy Taylor, continuing an earlier tradition, reasserted with force and eloquence the view that the Christian is bound by his faith to a rule of life which finds expression in equity in bargaining and in works of mercy to his neighbors.[[94]] But the conception that the Church possessed, of its own authority, an independent standard of social values, which it could apply as a criterion to the practical affairs of the economic world, grew steadily weaker. The result, neither immediate nor intended, but inevitable, was the tacit denial of spiritual significance in the transactions of business and in the relations of organized society. Repudiating the right of religion to advance any social theory distinctively its own, that attitude became itself the most tyrannical and paralyzing of theories. It may be called Indifferentism.

The change had begun before the Civil War. It was completed with the Restoration, and, still more, with the Revolution. In the eighteenth century it is almost superfluous to examine the teaching of the Church of England as to social ethics. For it brings no distinctive contribution, and, except by a few eccentrics, the very conception of the Church as an independent moral authority, whose standards may be in sharp antithesis to social conventions, has been abandoned.

An institution which possesses no philosophy of its own inevitably accepts that which happens to be fashionable. What set the tone of social thought in the eighteenth century was partly the new Political Arithmetic, which had come to maturity at the Restoration, and which, as was to be expected in the first great age of English natural science—the age of Newton, of Halley, and of the Royal Society—drew its inspiration, not from religion or morals, but from mathematics and physics. It was still more the political theory associated with the name of Locke, but popularized and debased by a hundred imitators. Society is not a community of classes with varying functions, united to each other by mutual obligations arising from their relation to a common end. It is a joint-stock company rather than an organism, and the liabilities of the shareholders are strictly limited. They enter it in order to insure the rights already vested in them by the immutable laws of nature. The State, a matter of convenience, not of supernatural sanctions, exists for the protection of those rights, and fulfills its object in so far as, by maintaining contractual freedom, it secures full scope for their unfettered exercise.