“Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life,” writes Max Weber in his canonical work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, first published in 1904-1905.
To any sixteenth-century humanist or Protestant this line of thought would have sounded not just wrong but downright daft. Yet Weber’s readers nodded their collective understanding. For them, that observation went without saying.
A shift must have occurred in the intervening four centuries, and it did. It’s called Protestantism.
Luther was an Augustinian monk, and he was strongly influenced by the founder of his order. Yet in the time-proven manner of a politicised exegete, Luther focused on those teachings that supported his own thoughts and ignored those that didn’t (such as unquestioning obedience to the church, which Augustine demanded, and the vital importance of sacraments, which Augustine extolled as “the visible form of an invisible grace.”).
One such aspect stands out: the doctrine of predestination, closely linked to original sin.
The Fall, according to Augustine, stigmatised man for ever. Original sin was so grave that it couldn’t be redeemed by anything an individual could do in his lifetime. Only God could determine who would be saved. No one but God could either know a person’s final destination or affect it in any way.
The greatest philosophical problem arising from predestination is its seeming contradiction with free will. After all, if choices we make using our free will are irrelevant to our salvation, what makes our will free in the first place? And why do we need it at all? Free will can only remain man’s most valuable possession if we stand to gain from a correct choice or suffer the consequences of a wrong one.
God’s is the absolute freedom, but if we are truly created in his image, ours has to be at least a relative one. Only God can be totally free, but that doesn’t mean man has to be totally enslaved.
Luther also declared that every man was his own priest, thereby extending humanism to religion. In one fell swoop this made apostolic succession, along with the church hierarchy, redundant and therefore useless.
But it couldn’t have been made completely useless for as long as the church hierarchy was considered essential to the task of preserving Christian tradition. Showing laudable consistency, Luther chopped through that Gordian knot with Alexander’s élan: if it takes a useless church hierarchy to preserve tradition, then tradition is useless too. Who needs it anyway if the Scripture contains the whole truth of Christianity?
This explains why 300 years later John Henry Newman felt justified to write that: “To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant”. For Luther’s denial of equal rights to tradition ignores both the history and the nature of Christianity.
To begin with, the first Gospel wasn’t written until decades after Jesus. Yet the church had survived and spread in the intervening period by subsisting on tradition, mostly oral. Also, since Christianity is a living religion, revelation can be given gradually, not once and for all.
Unlike Judaism and Islam, Christianity isn’t a religion wholly contained in a written document, and nor can it ever be regarded as such this side of heresy. The Scripture may be the first, second and tenth most important parts of doctrine. But it isn’t the only part.
Calvin developed Luther by pushing the idea of predestination to an absurd extreme. He acted in the manner of a heretic who attaches undue significance to one single aspect of faith, however correct it may be.
We are predestined for salvation or damnation, pronounced Calvin, and, since we live in “total depravity”, we can do nothing to affect the outcome. The idea of good works as restitution for sin is Catholic nonsense, a way of keeping the masses in check. Some will be saved and others damned, regardless of their works (apart from faith, which is a work too).
When asked to put a number on the lucky winners of that divine lottery, Calvin tended to change his mind. The range varied from a miserly one in 100 to a generous one in five. In any case we were talking about a small minority, but out of curiosity, how could we know which of us had drawn the lucky ticket?
It’s Calvin’s answer to this question that led Weber to regard capitalism as a predominantly Protestant phenomenon. God, explained Calvin, gave those to be saved a sign of his benevolence by making them rich.
No, God wouldn’t just rain gold on the elect. Rather he’d guide them to a way of life that would deliver wealth as a reward. Hard work would be an important part of it, but piety and frugality also had a role to play, if only as a way of thanking God for the lucre he had allowed the righteous to make. Virtuous conduct was thus an equivalent of a thank-you note to God.
This was nothing short of a revolution, a crucible of class war. For the first time since Christ, a major religious figure upgraded wealth from an object of bare toleration to a sign of divine benevolence. Grace became quantifiable in pieces of gold.
In common with most successful revolutionaries, Calvin sensed the mood of his flock and told them exactly what they craved to hear. Secretly Genevans had always known that God rewarded righteousness with money, just as he did in the Old Testament; now they no longer had to be secretive about it.
Austerity was in their nature too. The burghers eschewed opulence both out of inner conviction, but also to emphasise the difference between themselves and the idle, degenerate aristocracy on the one hand and lazy, impoverished layabouts on the other.
By allowing the bourgeoisie to strike out against both, Calvin provided a much needed tool of social control. He married remunerative work and religion, thus making indolence a sin, only matched by the sin of pleasure-seeking. Now if hoi-polloi were to rebel against the rich, they would be rebelling against God – not something they were prepared to do. Not yet anyway.
For all his (and Luther’s) anti-Semitism, Calvin pushed Christianity even further towards its Judaic antecedents than Luther did. For one thing, material reward for virtue had until then been a feature of the Old Testament only.
Followers of Christ were supposed to leave their possessions behind, not try to multiply them. Unlike Abraham whose faith was rewarded by riches, theirs was rewarded by a lifetime of penury. St Francis, shedding his clothes and walking out of his father’s house naked, was closer to Christ than a successful merchant could ever be.
Those who according to Calvin were predestined for salvation had to show their gratitude by pursuing puritanical self-denial not just during some festivals, such as Lent, but every minute of their lives. Though he attacked Catholic monasticism, Calvin effectively took his own version out of the monastery, extending denial of the world to the world at large.
In theory, there is something attractive about the ideal of pursuing virtue one’s whole life, not just a hundred or so days a year. And it’s easy to poke fun at a hypothetical Catholic who divides his week between debauchery and double-dealing only to go to confession on Sunday and be forgiven. In practice, however, there is a serious obstacle to turning such an ideal into reality. It’s called human nature.
Perfect life can only be achieved by perfect people, and few fit this description. The rest welcome any excuse to practise what they don’t preach.
As a result, many Protestants used their religious freedom to steer clear of the more taxing demands on their lives. In heeding Calvin’s simple explanations, they slit their own religious throats with Occam’s razor. Gradually many of them, along with much of what used to be called Christendom, moved away from the religion itself.
This isn’t what Calvin envisaged, and it is something both he and Luther would have abhorred. They themselves believed in God with sincere passion. What they didn’t seem to believe in was unintended consequences, a failing they share with secular revolutionaries.
Luther was a mentally unstable anti-Semite, who would throw an inkpot at the devil as he saw the latter looming behind every corner, whereas Calvin was a saddist roasting Servetus on slow fire in Geneva – much worse than the Inquisitor. And yet Apostle Peter says the following in 1Peter 2:9: “But you are a chosen generation, a royal PRIESTHOOD, a holy nation, His own special people, that you may proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.” Peter says that about each believing Christian as he writes his epistle to the entire congregation. So while there are different gifts of the Holy Spirit and ministries, each Christian believer belongs to the “royal priesthood” because we are witnesses and preachers to the rest of the world, the salt of this Earth.
I’m not a fan of Calvin, but Servetus was given a fair trial and there’s no doubt of his guilt. The manner of his death was usual for the times in which he lived.
It’s true that all Christians belong to a royal priesthood, but that doesn’t mean that all individual Christians are priests any more than it means that all individual Christians are royal.
” Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
That was how wealthy Americans of the Gilded Age are always portrayed. Rich and greedy, taking advantage and mistreating their and the poor. They are damned. I don’t hear such talk about the super-rich today. The types of Gates, Musk, etc., seem to have created a whole lot of wealth for other persons beyond themselves. Very good or good paying jobs even for average workers. I guess Bill Gates can fit through the eye of the needle after all. Times surely have changed and for the better. I bet even JESUS would be amazed. Is that blasphemous for me to say so
The Holy Theophylactos Hephaistos, Archbishop of All Bulgaria (less impressively known nowadays as St Theophylact of Ohrid), who flourished around A.D. 1100, thought that the notorious errors of Western Christendom were attributable to deficiencies in the Latin language. Certainly many of St Augustine’s errors are attributable to his use of bad Latin translations of the Scriptures, but even such a good scholar of Greek as St Jerome exhibits the deficient Latin way of thinking. Latin has no optative mood or middle voice, and its verbal nouns and adjectives lack distinctions of tense. It’s a language scarely fit for mere philosophy, let alone theology. Thus anybody turning from the Greek Fathers to the Latin Fathers will be aware of entering a smaller and less interesting world of ideas.
And so what we see in the Western Church, from St Augustine onwards, is the increasing elaboration of a small and uninteresting set of theological ideas, some of them based on misunderstandings of the Greek scriptures. From the Orthodox point of view, Luther and Calvin are hard to distinguish from Thomas Aquinas or J H Newman: they’re all trying and failing to fight their way out of the same little cage.
Yes, you’re right that Luther and Calvin distorted St Augustine, but what they distorted was already distorted, or rather partly distorted and partly strangulated.
Thank you for your comments, even though they put me to shame. The only thing I have in common with Shakespeare is that I too have “small Latin and less Greek”. Hence I have to take your word for the insufficiency of St Jerome’s Vulgate translations. Still, Latin was big enough to accommodate Aquinas, one of history’s finest philosophical and theological minds in spite of his lamentable ignorance of the Greek language. St Thomas might not have known the language of Aristotle, but he certainly brought his philosophy into the mainstream of Western thought by ‘baptising’ him. Newman, on the other hand, did know Greek quite well, and he translated many scriptural texts as part of his studies. On a personal note, I find Latin fascinating in its precision and mellifluous sonority. It’s also my favourite liturgical language, though English is the only other language I’ve ever used in church. Sorry, no Greek – and not even Russian.
You partly misunderstand me, but that’s my fault for not being clear. The “bad Latin translations” used by St Augustine were the “Old Latin” versions that St Jerome replaced with his admirable Vulgate. St Jerome’s own deficiencies of thought are exhibited not in that beautiful and accurate translation, but in his commentaries and epistles.
I also failed to make it clear that I respect Aquinas and love Newman. The only thing they have in common with the contemptible semi-Mahometans Luther and Calvin is their Latin way of thinking.
Latin is the best language for law, and among the best languages for poetry and music, but for philosophy and theology it’s defective. Have you read Lucretius? That magnificent poet frequently apologises to his readers for the defects of the Latin language in attempting to convey the ideas of Epicurus; and if Latin isn’t good enough for Epicurus, how can it be good enough for St Paul?
Nevertheless, it’s better to learn Latin than to rely on the debased lingo of one’s own petty tribe.