Thus God and Nature formed the general frame
Faith working through love is the foundation of justice, and without justice there is no commonwealth.
It follows that, like the exiles whom Jeremiah urged to seek the peace of Babylon, and like the early Christians who were urged to pray for kings and rulers, those who—as citizens of the city of God—are resident aliens in the earthly city, must nevertheless seek its good order, and, when called to responsibility as rulers, must accept it in the spirit of servants of the common good. This is required by obedience to the law of God, which is love. Thus the citizens of the heavenly city will actively seek the peace and good order of the earthly city, not seeking to forestall, but patiently awaiting, the final judgment when the two will be visibly separated and the heavenly city will appear in all its beauty. Meanwhile, the monastic communities, such as the one to which Augustine belonged, are a visible sign and preliminary realization of a world ruled solely by the love of God in the midst of a world ruled by the love of self.
Such was the vision that controlled the relationship of church and society in the western part of Europe for the thousand years from the death of Augustine. The public world of government, of education, of buying and selling, of ruling and serving, was to be shaped so far as possible by the vision of an order in which love is expressed through the relations proper to a hierarchical order of which God, who is the source of all love, is the head. There are no illusions about the reality of sin that always threatens this order. But the greater reality is the sovereign Creator and Judge, who will at the end separate forever the just from the unjust, and justice will be equal, whether for peasant or pope.
Yet throughout the thousand-year period this order was challenged over and over again by movements that drew their inspiration from the apocalyptic strands of biblical and postbiblical writings. These writings voiced the anger and despair of those who saw the contrast between the gospel of Jesus and the worldliness of the church, and who again and again announced the imminent destruction of the present order and the arrival of the heavenly Jerusalem. In Norman Cohn’s fascinating account of the millenarian movements that erupted throughout this period, the first of his examples dates from a mere 150 years after the death of Augustine. There is a continuous line of such movements stretching through the people’s crusades, the flagellants, the brethren of the Free Spirit, the Taborites of Bohemia, and the peasants’ revolts, to the messianic reign of John of Leyden in Münster and the Ranters in England. In every case the vision they express is of the total disappearance of the existing political, economic, and ecclesiastical order and its replacement by some sort of theocracy—whether of a semidivine emperor or of the elect saints. And it is not difficult to see that the same line continues through the intellectual crisis of the Enlightenment and reappears in the heavenly city of the eighteenth-century philosophers, which has been so well described by Carl Becker in his book of that title. In the course of the nineteenth century that view developed into the twin visions that have dominated the twentieth century: the liberal capitalist dream of inevitable progress toward a more and more enlightened, liberated, and happy world; and the Marxist dream of the apocalypse of freedom in a cataclysm that would abolish both private property and the state and create a society of perfect harmony.
We are at a time when both of those visions have faded. It can be claimed (as Langdon Gilkey has) that the only convinced Marxists today are the dissidents in the West, and the only convinced liberals are the dissidents in the East. In spite of the conflict between them, the two ideologies that officially operate on the two sides of the Iron Curtain have this in common: they are both atheist. The one attempts without success to enforce atheism in the private as well as the public sector. The other permits belief in God as an option for private life but excludes it from any controlling role in public life. We have to look briefly at the steps by which Christendom moved from the medieval assumption that economics is part of ethics and therefore depends upon theology, to the modern assumption that economics is an autonomous science with which theology has nothing to do.
R. H. Tawney’s classic study Religion and the Rise of Capitalism shows that the Reformers—both Lutheran and Calvinist—continued to take it for granted that a Christian is governed by the law of God in his economic life as much as in any other activity. Luther regarded the rising capitalism of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Germany as a work of the devil, maintained intact the traditional teaching that absolutely forbade interest on loans, and condemned as sin the selling of goods for the highest price they would bear. But, characteristically, he made no attempt to revise the medieval casuistry to bring it into touch with the new economic facts; it was enough that the man set free by grace would learn how to love his neighbor in all the practical affairs of life by consulting Scripture and his conscience. Calvin, on the other hand, much closer than Luther to the economic forces that were changing the nature of European society, recognized that credit is a necessary element in the growth of commerce and industry. He thus allowed a reasonable interest on loans for this purpose but in no way altered the ancient doctrine that all such activity is subject to the law of God. Accepting urban society, with its trade and industry, Calvin sought to create a civic society in which every sort of activity—political, economic, or cultural—was controlled in accordance with the purpose of all human life as set forth in Scripture, namely, the glory of God and the salvation of men and women. Neither for Luther nor for Calvin would it have appeared as anything other than incomprehensible blasphemy to suggest that human behavior in the sphere of economics was outside the jurisdiction of theology. On the contrary, buying and selling, hiring labor and working for a master, amassing wealth and enclosing land—these are precisely the human activities in greatest need of the reminder that every man stands under the law of God and will be accountable to God for his treatment of his neighbor.
Of course, there has never been a time when it was easy to keep this in mind; but there were forces at work in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that made it more than ordinarily difficult. The Black Death’s devastation had disrupted feudal society. The discovery of the New World was flooding Europe with silver and gold and producing a huge inflation of prices, destroying the ancient balance in society, and making possible a vast extension of trade to the far corners of the earth. Old rules governing wages, prices, interest, and land tenure became impossible to maintain. Capital was no longer primarily the adjunct of the labor of the small craftsman; it became more and more the master that controlled economic organization.
Through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Protestant divines continued to insist that the writ of Christ ran in all the working of economics: they denounced the amassing of capital, the enclosure of lands, and the oppression of the poor. And some, such as William Law and John Wesley, carried the same teaching into the eighteenth century. But other forces were at hand to provide armor for the cupidity of the natural man against the thunder of a preacher like Luther or the calm advice of a pastor like Richard Baxter. One was a development of Calvinism itself; the other came from the new philosophy and science of Descartes and Newton. The Puritan development of Calvinism took over from Geneva both the assumption that economic activity falls under the rule of God and also the reformer’s great emphasis on the personal responsibility of every Christian to manifest the reality of his calling and election by a life of hard work, self-denial, order, and rigorous discipline. These were the qualities that led to success in the new and expanding world of trade and industry in seventeenth-century Europe. Thus it happened (and this, of course, is an oft-repeated statement) that many of Calvin’s most successful later followers forgot the strict limits he had drawn around economic activity and (to quote Tawney) added a “halo of ethical sanctification to the appeal of economic expediency”—with results that the Geneva Consistory would certainly not have approved.
But the other force I have referred to was more enduring and is much more significant today. It was and is the view of human affairs that found its inspiration in what the philosophers of the Enlightenment called “the geometrical spirit,” which saw in the physics of Newton the true model for the explanation of all things, and which therefore sought to understand economics not in terms of man’s chief end but in terms of laws that could be stated in mathematical and mechanical forms. Sir William Petty, author of the influential work Political Arithmetic in 1690, defined its objective as follows: “To express itself in terms of numbers, weight or measure, to use only arguments of sense, and to consider only such causes as have visible foundations in nature; leaving those that depend upon the mutable minds, opinions, appetites, and passions of particular men to the consideration of others.” Here we have, of course, an early setting forth of that elimination of purpose as a category of explanation, that determination to seek all explanation in universally acknowledged natural causes, and that separation of a world of public facts from a world of personal values with which we are now familiar.
The autonomous science of economics was thenceforth to develop on the basis of the assumption that self-interest is a universal, natural, and calculable force analagous in this realm to the forces of gravity and inertia in the realm of physics, and that consequently it is possible to develop a science of economics that will be as mathematical and as independent of theology as is the physics of Newton. And since, for the eighteenth century, nature has taken the place of God and has inherited his benevolent character, it follows that the pursuit of self-interest will coincide with the purpose of God. Alexander Pope, as usual, concisely sums up the faith of his age:
Thus God and Nature formed the general frame
And bade self-love and social be the same.
Traditional Christian ethics had attacked covetousness as a deadly sin, and Paul had equated it with idolatry: the putting of something that is not God in the place belonging to God (Col. 3:5). The eighteenth century, by a remarkable inversion, found in covetousness not only a law of nature but the engine of progress by which the purpose of nature and nature’s God was to be carried out.
The enormous consequences that have followed from this reversal of traditional values are familiar to us. It has shattered the age-long assumption that the world we inhabit is basically stable and finite and that consequently economics is mainly about the sharing of limited resources. It has shifted the focus of attention from distribution to production. It has made us familiar with the idea of ceaseless and limitless growth, of unending possibilities of increased mastery over nature that provides increased resources of food, materials, and energy. This is a world in which economics is mainly about increasing production, and it is assumed that if everyone pursues his rational self-interest, production will grow and distribution will take care of itself. Two hundred years after the Enlightenment, we live in a world in which millions of people enjoy a standard of material wealth that few kings and queens could have matched then, but in which the gulf between the rich minority and the abjectly poor majority is vast and growing, a world therefore threatened as never before by destructive violence. In protest against the injustices of unrestrained free-market capitalism, the Marxist creed holds out the hope of an apocalypse in which the dispossessed will seize power, the oppressors will perish, and all will live forever in perfect harmony. As that vision recedes farther and farther into the future, the Marxist states seek to combine the dynamism of modern science with a state control of economic activity designed to secure some equality in the distribution of wealth. In the quest for equality they sacrifice individual freedom, as capitalist states in the name of freedom sacrifice equality. Yet neither system can survive except by modifying the rigor of its ideology. All Marxist governments have to give some place to free-market enterprise, and all capitalist governments have to use state power to limit the injustices that unrestrained free-market enterprise creates.
Meanwhile, each side portrays the other as the very incarnation of evil, and the self-righteous fury of their ideological warfare threatens us for the first time in human history with the annihilation of the human race. The eighteenth-century philosophers turned from the Christian vision of a city that would come down from heaven to the enterprise of building the heavenly city on earth. That radical apostasy has now brought us to the place where we face another kind of apocalypse, the threat of global annihilation and the extinction of the human species.
Yet the biblical and classical Christian belief that the rule of Christ extends to all of life has never been totally extinguished. Christian faith has not only inspired programs for the relief of the victims of unrestrained capitalism both through welfare legislation and through voluntary work for sufferers, but it has also inspired ventures for the restructuring of economic life. Non-Marxist Christian socialism has an honorable history with real achievement to its credit. The Roman Catholic Church has continued to insist on its right and duty to make ethical judgments in economic affairs and—especially since the rise of the ecumenical movement—the non-Roman churches, through national and world bodies, have been active in doing the same. At the present time we are witnessing a strong countermovement that either asserts that churches have no right to meddle in matters of economics or—as in Michael Novak’s The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism—boldly claims that capitalism is the form of economic organization that Christians must espouse. A brief look at Novak’s position will bring us to the heart of our present discussion.
Novak takes as fundamental the separation of three elements of public life: the political, the economic, and the moral-cultural. These are separate realms, and any attempt of one to exercise control of the others will be disastrous. In the economic realm the basic law is that the free operation of rational self-interest will alone secure general well-being. Medieval ideas of a just price and fair wage were relevant to a static economy but are positively damaging to an economy of growth. Each person must be free to better his condition as far as he can, and he alone is the judge of what is better. There can be no imposed or even generally accepted norm of what is good. In the world of economic values “the central shrine is empty,” for no image is adequate to express what is ultimately good. Any attempts to subordinate economics to ethics would bring us back to the clerical control from which we had to escape in order to achieve growth; and any generally accepted vision of social order is a violation of transcendence. But alongside the economic order is the moral-cultural order. Novak does not tell us what, if any, is the image in the central shrine here, but over and over again he tells us that the proper working of capitalism requires conscientious behavior in all concerned. “Capitalism,” he tells us, “depends upon a moral-cultural system separate from the state.” Capitalism, he goes on to say, “needs strong moral guidance.” And the family, where moral values are nourished, has therefore inalienable rights in a capitalist society. But to say that capitalism requires a certain kind of moral foundation is to say that capitalism cannot survive permanently in a purely secular society. To quote a recent writer, “The disinterested devotion which was vital to the creation of the capitalist world order and to the public life of industrial nations and which rested on a religious idea-system appears as a type of moral capital debt which is no longer being serviced.” But this means that capitalism cannot be a self-sustaining system. It depends on the moral-cultural system and cannot be separated from it. But moral imperatives cannot operate merely as useful props for a profitable economic order. If they are not rooted in some belief about how the universe is in fact ordered, they collapse; and if they are so rooted, then the economic order cannot be isolated from their jurisdiction. If capitalism depends on the insights of a moral conscience, then that conscience has to have authority over the working of capitalist economics.
Novak’s argument thus seems to be both incoherent and—where it is coherent—anti-Christian. Its incoherence lies on the surface. The conscience that is required to keep capitalism going has no ontological basis. It is a carry-over from an earlier world-view. It is a fragment, a broken piece left over from the destruction of the older view, preserved for the purpose of keeping the new system going. But moral imperatives only retain their power as part of a living system of belief, some vision of what is the case. Moral imperatives cannot be hired to prop up a wholly different set of values. As Jacques Maritain has said, “The sorest disasters can result in the life of a people when [morality] instead of acting as consubstantial with politics, essays to act on them from without, i.e., in the imposition of apolitical moral values on an amoral conception of politics.” A conscience that is forbidden to operate in the choice of goals for economic activity is not conscience in the sense in which any moralist, pagan or Christian, has ever understood the term. And the family (which Novak regards as vital to the spirit of democratic capitalism) is precisely the place where the noncapitalist values have to be learned, where one is not free to choose his company and where one is not free to pursue self-interest to the limit. Because capitalism pursues the opposite goals—the freedom of each individual to choose and pursue his own ends to the limit of his power—the disintegration of marriage and family life is one of the obvious characteristics of advanced capitalist societies. And insofar as Novak’s argument is coherent, it is anti-Christian. To say that the central shrine is empty is to deny the Incarnation.
The driving power of capitalism, as Novak correctly emphasizes, is the desire of the individual to better his material condition. It is the unleashing of this power from the restraints imposed by traditional Christian morality that has transformed static societies into the dynamic and growing society of which we are a part. No one can deny either the reality of the motive force or the magnitude of what it has achieved. The name the New Testament gives to the force in question is covetousness. The capitalist system is powered by the unremitting stimulation of covetousness. The apostolic advice that a person should be content with food and clothing (1 Tim. 6:8) is not compatible with the development of our kind of society, and it would be better to acknowledge that frankly, as Novak does. The shrine has to be vacated if capitalism is to flourish. Modern capitalism has created a world totally different from anything known before. Previous ages have assumed that resources are limited and that economics—housekeeping—is about how to distribute them fairly. Since Adam Smith, we have learned to assume that exponential growth is the basic law of economics and that no limits can be set to it. The result is that increased production has become an end in itself; products are designed to become rapidly obsolete so as to make room for more production; a minority is ceaselessly urged to multiply its wants in order to keep the process going while the majority lacks the basic necessities for existence; and the whole ecosystem upon which human life depends is threatened with destruction. Growth is for the sake of growth and is not determined by any overarching social purpose. And that, of course, is an exact account of the phenomenon which, when it occurs in the human body, is called cancer. In the long perspective of history, it would be difficult to deny that the exuberant capitalism of the past 250 years will be diagnosed in the future as a desperately dangerous case of cancer in the body of human society—if indeed this cancer has not been terminal and there are actually survivors around to make the diagnosis.
But I should also acknowledge that many of Novak’s criticisms of socialism are convincing. It is true that socialists, Christian socialists not excepted, tend to judge capitalism by actual practice but socialism by an ideal that has never yet been put into practice anywhere. There is a pathetic catalogue of socialist regimes that have been hailed one after another as models for the Christian to emulate and then found to be full of all kinds of corruptions and illusions. Novak is quite right to describe a great deal of Christian socialism as, in the strict sense, utopian. It is the politics of nowhere.