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THE REFORMATION
Martin Luther is one of very few, even among canonical thinkers, for whom a persuasive case can be made that, had he never been born, history would not have unfolded as it did. He may, for this reason alone, seem to present a special challenge to a social-contextual history like this one. If the ideas of one man can seem to change the course of history in such dramatic ways, must we not reconsider the primacy of discourse? Yet to ask the question in this way would be to misunderstand what is entailed by the kind of contextualization proposed in this book. Whatever doubts we may have about the decisive role of this or that historic figure, the social history of political theory does not require us to denigrate the creativity or world-historic influence of individuals. It does not oblige us to think that a Protestant movement would have emerged more or less in the form that it did with or without Martin Luther, nor does it suggest that if Martin Luther had never existed he would have had to be invented, or, for that matter, that Protestantism had no significant effects on the truly ‘basic’ processes of history.
How, then, should we pose the question? We shall certainly want to ask how the particularities of Luther’s time and place shaped the particular configuration of problems he sought to resolve; and we shall want to consider how it came about that the same ideas were mobilized so differently, to such divergent purposes, in different contexts. But in the case of Luther more than most other thinkers, we are compelled to ask how a conceptual shift in the realm of ideas could have had such massive historical consequences; and it may turn out that the greater the world-historic effects we claim for Luther’s ideas, the more – not the less – we must appeal to a contextual explanation.
The Roots of Reformation
Some historians have questioned the very existence of a Reformation conceived as a radical discontinuity in Christian dogma and reactions to it. The ideas of Luther and other major Protestant thinkers, they point out, were deeply rooted in the medieval Church, which was already alive with debate and projects for internal reformation; and there had long been heresies to challenge the institutions, no less than the theological orthodoxies, of the Catholic Church. Conflicts in the Church had been vastly aggravated by geopolitical rivalries among rising territorial states, as the papacy at Avignon had increasingly come under the influence of the French monarchy, and competing papal claimants in Avignon and Rome became embroiled in inter-state rivalries between France and its European neighbours. In the late fourteenth century, these rivalries produced the so-called Western Schism, which would last for decades and helped to generate a climate of reform and outright heresy.
The conciliar movement, which flourished in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, elaborated the idea that it was not the pope but the corporate body of Christians in the form of a general Church council that held ultimate authority in spiritual matters. While the movement would give way to a revived papal dominance, its influence remained alive, even if more as a model for secular theories of constitutional government than as a programme for reform of the Church. More scathing attacks on the papacy, as well as on the abuses and corruptions of the Church, would come from the Englishman John Wycliffe (1330–84) and, most importantly, from the Bohemian Jan Hus (1369–1415), whose influence on Luther would run very deep. Both Wycliffe and Hus denied that the ecclesiastical hierarchy, from pope to cardinals to priests, constituted the Church; and both called on secular rulers to initiate reform of the Church. They even demanded that ecclesiastical possessions should be subject to secular rule, on the grounds that the Church did not enjoy ownership but only use rights conditional on good behaviour.
Renaissance humanism, too, played a critical part. Indeed, there may be something artificial about distinguishing the ‘Reformation’ from ‘Christian humanism’. The humanist preoccupation with ancient texts would be extended to the Bible, encouraging theologians to mobilize scripture in challenging the current practices of ecclesiastical authorities. The spread of printing, needless to say, gave a new force to this kind of textual challenge. Christian humanism, especially in the person of Erasmus, may have remained committed to internal reform of the Church and deeply suspicious of the Lutheran ‘reformation’; but it also encouraged, if not necessarily outright anti-clericalism, at least the subjection of Church rituals and orthodoxies to critical scrutiny and the moral judgment of the individual. All these challenges to clerical authority, both Christian humanist and ‘Protestant’, would at the same time, directly or by implication, affect attitudes towards the powers of secular rulers.
Ideas such as these – not only criticism of the Church and its abuses but also, and not least, the elevation of secular authority – would be central to the Reformation. Yet even if we acknowledge that the institutions of the Church were in the end resistant to the necessary changes, and even if we treat Luther’s ideas as a profoundly revolutionary transformation in theology, the magnitude of the Lutheran rupture seems incommensurate with the novelty of his theology. There is also a massive disparity – which, of course, there often is with major thinkers but which, in Luther’s case, is particularly striking – between the meaning or intentions of his doctrine and the direction of the changes that emerged in its wake. It will be argued in what follows that the scale and consequences of the break had less to do with the originality and revolutionary import or intent of Luther’s ideas than with the geopolitical and social conflicts into which they were drawn.
That Luther challenged some of the beliefs and practices of Roman Catholicism with drastic effect is beyond question, as is, needless to say, the separation of ‘Protestants’ – in all their various and often antithetical guises – from the Catholic Church. We shall look at the nature and implications of Luther’s challenge to medieval Catholicism, but Luther’s doctrine was something else too. Inextricably connected with his attacks on the Church, not only its corruptions but its very claims to jurisdiction, are his views on secular government. For all Luther’s occasionally stinging attacks on German princes, there hardly exists in the Western canon a more uncompromising case for strict obedience to secular authority; and this, as we shall see, belongs to the essence of Lutheran doctrine no less than does the attack on the medieval Church’s practice of indulgences or Luther’s idea of justification by faith.
Yet, while this fundamental aspect of Protestant doctrine was certainly not lost on German princes or on European kings, it was also somehow transformed into its opposite, a doctrine of rebellion. The question, then, must be how such a rigid doctrine of obedience could have such revolutionary effects and, beyond that, how a doctrine that seems far better suited to defending than to challenging the supremacy of princely power could be transformed into a doctrine of resistance. The answer lies in specificities of context, which both impelled Luther to formulate his doctrine of obedience and also permitted it to be transformed into its opposite.
Martin Luther
If the sixteenth century was a period of rising territorial states in Western Europe, Germany, like Italy, represented an exception. While in other cases the crisis of feudalism had meant a growing challenge to parcellized sovereignty from centralizing monarchies, in Germany it gave new life to the fragmentation of governance. Feudal lordship may have given way to princely government, and the feudal powers of the lesser nobility may have been weakened; but German principalities and duchies vigorously resisted the kind of monarchical centralization that was taking place elsewhere in Western Europe and produced in its stead a new kind of parcellized sovereignty.
In the Holy Roman Empire, which was the nearest thing to a national state in German territories, the emperor’s authority was severely and explicitly limited by the autonomous powers of local duchies, principalities and cities. In the thirteenth century, Frederick II – partly in a fruitless effort to maintain the presence of the Empire in northern Italy – had ceded even more powers to local German lords, including princes of the Church. Although German landed classes in the west were never able to consolidate their powers over peasants in a ‘second serfdom’ as their eastern counterparts would do, the Empire had effectively transformed them from feudal lords into local rulers, territorial princes with state-like powers of their own, not least the power to tax. This gave them access to increasing revenues from peasants, especially from more prosperous peasant farmers who, even while freed from feudal dependence, bore the greatest burden of taxation. This would become a major source of grievance in the peasant war of 1524–5.
Secular authority had been further fragmented, especially from the twelfth century, with the foundation of cities by both emperors and dukes, for administrative or commercial purposes. These cities would challenge the powers of both emperor and local princes. Like the Italian city-states, German cities often governed their surrounding villages, exacting taxes from the peasantry by means of a collective urban lordship; but they stood in a different relation to landed aristocracies and princes than did the Italians. In northern Italy, the major city-states could trace their urban lineage back to imperial Rome, and the landed aristocracy was, in general, weaker than it was elsewhere in feudal Europe. The German cities, by contrast, owed their late foundations to superior lords. Even as they built upon the independence granted by higher authorities, they were obliged to defend their autonomous powers, inseparably political and economic, against other claimants within the imperial hierarchy, from emperors to princes.
Here, as in Renaissance Italy, political struggles were difficult to disentangle from economic rivalries and conflicts. Just as German princes relied on their political and military dominance for access to the revenues derived from cities and especially from peasant labour, so too was the success of the commercial cities dependent on their ‘extra-economic’ powers and privileges. The commercial dominance of the Hanseatic League in Northern Europe, for instance, relied on the League’s coercive powers, the capacity to enforce monopolies, embargoes and blockades, which might require military interventions up to and including outright war. The League’s dominance was threatened not so much by the purely ‘economic’ superiority of its commercial rivals – the kind of competitive advantage enjoyed by cost-effective capitalist producers – as by their more effective geopolitical reach and military power.
In 1519, the Habsburg King Charles I of Spain became the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. His reign would be marked by intense and varied conflicts with German princes and municipal authorities, to say nothing of the peasant revolt. Charles was constantly distracted by the Empire’s rivalries with other rising states, as well as Spain’s project of imperial expansion, revolt on Spanish soil and the ever-present Turkish threat. He never succeeded in subduing local powers in the German territories. His reign would play a decisive role in the life of Martin Luther and in the Reformation, which flourished in the context of the Holy Roman Empire, not only because the emperor’s attacks on Luther helped to concentrate the theologian’s mind but because Lutheran doctrine proved so useful to various protagonists in the rivalries among competing powers.
Born in 1483 into a reasonably comfortable family, Luther was intended for the law; but he soon gave up his legal education for the Church and became an Augustinian monk. The monastic life seems to have generated little but doubt and despair. The Christianity he had learned from preachers and a very pious mother was obsessed with sin, repentance and the wrath of God. It did, to be sure, suggest that repentant sinners can make some contribution to their own salvation; and theology appeared to teach that, even if salvation is a matter of God’s grace and not just a simple reward for a virtuous life, believers can and must engage in a constant struggle to cooperate with God – always, of course, with the help of the Church. But, to Luther, this appeared to mean that, torn between virtue and sin, between God and the devil, we can in this life never know whether all our efforts are enough to please God. Not even the extreme asceticism he adopted in the monastery could offer any certainty or comfort. As he described his own experience, it only turned his soul upon itself. He began to break free from this tormented struggle when his superior, Johann Staupitz, convinced him that repentance is not a matter of seeking God’s love, which is already evident in the sacrifice of Christ, but, on the contrary, begins with our own love of God.
Luther was also persuaded by Staupitz, who was dean of the new University of Wittenberg, to pursue an academic career in biblical theology; and it was not as any kind of activist but as professor of theology that Luther launched his attack on the corruptions of the Church. He would later attribute his theological innovations to a transformative moment, a rebirth, which came to him while grappling with the doctrine of St Paul. ‘For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith:’ said Paul in Romans 1: 17, ‘as it is written: the just shall live by faith.’ Luther would later recount that, while lecturing on the Psalms, he finally came to understand this passage to mean that the righteousness of God was not revealed by punishment. Instead, in his grace, he declared the sinner righteous – or ‘justified’ him – by means of faith alone. Salvation was not, in other words, the uncertain outcome of a lifelong human effort but a free and loving gift of God.
Luther never resolved the question of predestination, and debate still rages about what he meant on this score. Lutherans would come to distinguish themselves from Calvinists on the grounds that, while both theologians believed in election by God, only Calvin insisted on a ‘double’ predestination, according to which God also chose those who are damned. Luther, they maintain, never taught that some were predestined to eternal damnation. Yet, if this is so, some would argue, Luther remained caught in an irreducible contradiction, which undermined belief in God’s total sovereignty. It might be better simply to accept that Luther deliberately refused to confront the conundrum of predestination, because preoccupation with this issue was, in his eyes, a distraction from acknowledging our sinfulness and from unwavering faith in God’s grace and salvation through Christ. This would also, as we shall see, have the effect of strengthening Luther’s doctrine of obedience to secular authority.
Whether or not Luther’s revelation was as sudden as he later made it out to be, the doctrine of ‘justification by faith’ represents a revolutionary moment in the history of Christianity. It is true that St Augustine had elaborated a doctrine of salvation that seemed to leave very little scope for repentance and good works as the road to salvation. For him, too, salvation was a free and unearned gift of God through grace; and he had a particularly uncompromising view of predestination. But Luther, as influenced as he was by St Augustine, was convinced that, once he had experienced his revelation on St Paul, he had put Augustine behind him.
For Augustine, justification by God’s grace was not something that happened all at once. It was a process that occupied a lifetime in this world and could only be completed in the next, while, for Luther, it was God’s immediate and unconditional gift in this life. Augustine may have been no less intent than was Luther on emphasizing that salvation was an unearned gift from God; but his formulation may have seemed open to the interpretation that human beings could in their lifetime, at least in some small way, cooperate in their own transformation by divine grace. In any case, whatever St Augustine had intended, the authority of the Catholic Church clearly depended on maintaining the sinner’s role in achieving salvation, with, of course, the necessary help of sacramental interventions by the Church; and Augustinian theology would be interpreted by medieval popes, such as Gregory the Great (590–604), in just this way. Luther would have none of that – not on the grounds that Christian virtue and good works meant nothing to him, but on the grounds that, while they should be undertaken freely for the love of God, they had nothing to do with earning God’s love and the free gift of justification. Sinners are saved not by their own righteousness but, all at once and in this life, by the righteousness of God, which means that, even while remaining sinners, they are ‘justified’ by faith alone. This doctrine had fatal implications for the sacramental functions of the Church, but its implications for obedience to secular authority may have been even greater.
Whenever Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith reached maturity – and commentators disagree on when and how it happened – Luther’s challenge to the authority of the Catholic Church did not at first depend on it. The most famous moment in his career, which is conventionally depicted as the Reformation’s true beginning, was his attack on the corruptions of the Church, and especially the practice of indulgences, in his Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, commonly called the 95 Theses, which he issued in 1517, nailing them, as tradition (if not historical evidence) tells us, to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. His target was the pope’s claims to powers that were, for Luther, God’s alone: the power to award salvation or to affect the scope and duration of penance in the afterlife. This attack on the pope did not require, nor did Luther invoke, the doctrine of justification by faith as he would later formulate it.
Luther would soon be threatened by a papal ban, which would lead to his excommunication; and his personal fate became enmeshed in public conflicts between the Church and secular authorities over the distribution of temporal power. His immediate response to papal threats was a series of treatises in 1520, the first of which was his Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation. Here, his theological preoccupations shifted, significantly, from the disposition of power between God and the pope to the conflicts between the Church – specifically the pope, together with the Holy Roman Emperor – and German secular authorities.
This would be followed in rapid succession by two other treatises, laying the groundwork for his mature theology: On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, which, written in strongly vituperative terms, attacked the papacy and challenged the sacramental functions of the Church; and On the Freedom of a Christian, which, though framed in more conciliatory language and even dedicated to Pope Leo X, outlined the principles that would constitute the doctrine of justification by faith. Luther here elaborated on the dualism, or the paradox, at the root of his theology: the simultaneity of human sin and divine justification, the nature of humanity as irreducibly sinful yet saved.
Human beings, Luther argued, are at once sinners by nature and saints by faith. Redeemed by God, they may freely undertake service to others; but, while Luther can be interpreted to mean that justification by faith is simultaneously a free commitment to good works, he insists that ordinary human beings are free as any lord or king and subject to no overlord in matters affecting the soul. Yet, at the same time, as he would soon make clear, the irreducible sinfulness of humanity requires temporal authorities to whom all Christians owe obedience. It is true that, in these early works, Luther not only challenged the division of the world into temporal and spiritual jurisdictions but established the principle that all baptized Christians are equally priests; and the idea of a universal priesthood would be taken up by radical forces as a justification of rebellions far beyond anything envisaged by Luther himself, including the peasant revolt. But this radical appropriation of Lutheran doctrine should not disguise the fact that Luther’s account of the simultaneous duality of sin and justification entailed both a denial of ecclesiastical jurisdiction and an insistence on strict obedience to secular authority.
In 1521, Luther was called before an assembly of the estates of the Holy Roman Empire at the Diet of Worms; and, refusing to recant the views expressed in the 95 Theses and other writings, he was outlawed by the emperor, Charles V. Under threat of arrest, he disappeared for a time. Despite imperial orders for his apprehension and punishment, declaring it a crime to shield him, he was offered protection at Wartburg Castle in Eisenach by a leading German prince, Frederic III, Elector of Saxony. It was then that he began his translation of the Bible into German, which would be printed in 1534 and can reasonably be regarded as his most far-reaching accomplishment, with influences well beyond the German language or Lutheran theology.
The Doctrine of Obedience to Secular Authority
In Luther’s treatises of 1520, ideas essential to the Reformation, challenging the spiritual authority of the Church, its monopoly on the interpretation of scripture and its sole right to call a council of the Church, were formulated with direct reference to the relation between ecclesiastical and secular authority. Whatever effects these treatises may have had in undermining ecclesiastical authority, their implications for obedience to secular government were very different. To challenge the claims of the Church as privileged mediator between humanity and God, it might have been enough to reject, as Luther did in the 95 Theses, its efforts to usurp divine powers of punishment and absolution. Challenging the Church’s claims to temporal power and its usurpation of secular authority required something more, and even that would not suffice to impose on Christians a strict obedience to secular government. The doctrine of justification by faith would achieve all these effects.
Commentaries on Luther’s theology have tended to identify his greatest innovation as his challenge to the Church’s sacramental, sacerdotal powers. By the late Middle Ages, they say, a clear distinction had been established between the sacramental powers of the Church and its jurisdictional authority in the temporal domain, its coercive powers in the public realm (in foro exteriori et publice), its ‘plenitude of power’. Indeed, others before Luther, such as Marsilius of Padua, had challenged its temporal authority. But Luther took the extra step. No one had yet gone quite so far in questioning not just the Church’s temporal authority but even its powers over the souls of the faithful.
Yet, if we follow the logic of Luther’s theological development, it is striking that it proceeds in the opposite direction. He begins by questioning the Church’s power to punish sins, to excommunicate or to confer benefices and indulgences, and then advances from there not simply to attack the temporal authority of the Church but to support secular governments and their claims to almost unconditional obedience. It is at this point that the doctrine of justification by faith becomes truly essential. That doctrine may have contributed even more to the defence of secular authority, and the necessity of obedience to it, than to the attack on the sacramental powers of the Church.
The Lutheran creed of obedience looks back to St Augustine and St Paul, who had, at different moments in the history of the Roman Empire, enunciated doctrines of obedience to secular authority.1 In the first volume of this history, it was argued that the defining principle of Western Christianity was the rendering unto Caesar and God their respective domains of law and obedience. The ‘universal’ Catholic Church was born when what had been a Jewish cult detached itself, in accordance with the doctrines of St Paul, from Judaism’s all-embracing religious law, which applied to both matters of faith and the mundane practices of everyday life. The distinction between Caesar and God, each with his own proper sphere of obedience, would perhaps more than anything else set Christianity, especially in its Western form, apart from the other monotheistic religions.2 It was this, above all, that permitted Christianity to become an imperial religion, which relinquished to Caesar the right to rule this world.
Before the Constantinian conversion, St Paul had already invoked this principle to impose upon Christians a need to obey imperial authority. After Christianity had become the official religion of empire, St Augustine elaborated the principle of obedience to secular power into an even more uncompromising doctrine, which still included submission to pagan rulers. He accomplished this by transforming the old Christian dualism into a rather more complex dichotomy. Instead of a simple distinction between earthly and heavenly realms, or secular and spiritual authority, or even the sacred and the profane, Augustine proposed a dichotomy between the divine and earthly ‘cities’, which are antithetical but inextricably united in this world: the one representing the saintly, holy, elect, pious and just, the other representing the impure, impious, unjust and damned, which runs through every human society and every human institution, including holy institutions of the Church. Since all human beings and all human institutions are tainted by unholiness and sin, no truly just and rightful order is possible in this world; and they must all subject themselves, by divine ordination, to the earthly powers whose purpose is not to achieve some higher principle of holiness or justice on this earth but simply to maintain peace, order and a degree of physical comfort.
For early Christian theologians under imperial rule, a doctrine of obedience to Caesar may have been a relatively simple matter. The issue became infinitely more complicated when empire gave way to the medieval fragmentation of temporal power, in which ecclesiastical authorities were major players. Now theologians had to confront not only a division of labour between Caesar and God, with their respective claims to obedience, but also between Empire and Church, or princes and popes, among a bewildering variety of other autonomous powers, from feudal lords to civic corporations. It is not surprising that much of Christian theology soon took the form of legalistic arguments on jurisdiction.
No philosopher or theologian could ever have decisively resolved the boundary disputes between ecclesiastical jurisdiction and secular governments, especially between the papacy and rising feudal kingdoms, which increasingly plagued Western Christendom in the later Middle Ages; but medieval Christian theology was at least obliged to confront the question in a way that early Christianity was not. It may have been enough in the time of St Paul to elaborate the principle of rendering unto Caesar and God their respective domains; and it may have been enough in St Augustine’s time to construct a theology of other-worldliness, like Christian Neoplatonism, which allowed obedience to Caesar to coexist with a devaluation of earthly existence and a philosophy of mystical release from the material world. But, in the age of Thomas Aquinas, theologians were compelled to contend with, and even to justify, the preoccupation of medieval Christians with the intricacies of worldly governance and conflicts among competing claims to temporal power.
This was a time when rising kingdoms like France were contending with other temporal powers, such as the German princes of the Holy Roman Empire and above all with the papacy. Christian theologians confronted not only the contests between spiritual and secular domains but ecclesiastical powers that laid claim to temporal authority on the grounds of their privileged access to the spiritual domain. Aquinas himself never systematically spelled out in practical terms his views on the relation between spiritual and temporal powers; but, drawing on the rediscovered Aristotle, he did find a way of situating the secular sphere in the cosmic order, retaining for the Church its own rightful domain while securing the position of secular governments. Although he placed the secular political sphere in a descending hierarchy from the divine to the mundane, he ascribed to it a positive function in the greater scheme of things, not simply in the role of necessary evil, as it had been for Augustine. The spiritual realm still reigned supreme in the cosmic hierarchy, and the Church still had its privileged position in that sphere; but secular government, which was granted substantial autonomy, could, on Thomistic principles, be treated as the highest of Christian concerns in this world.
Here, too, the cosmic order was defined in legalistic terms, as Thomas distinguished among various kinds of law, divine, eternal, natural and positive. Natural law was that aspect of divine regulation and the cosmic order accessible to human reason and hence available to secular governments no less than to ecclesiastical authorities. Political society was not directly instituted by God but by natural law as mediated through positive law. This doctrine went some distance in sustaining the authority of secular princes against ecclesiastical powers claiming temporal supremacy. While Aquinas himself remained aloof, his doctrines were soon deployed in favour, for instance, of Philip IV of France in his struggles with Pope Boniface VIII.3
Lutheran theology disrupted this neat Thomistic structure. The hierarchy of the cosmic order was replaced by a particularly rigid separation of spiritual and temporal domains, which denied any temporal jurisdiction to the Church. As we have seen, Luther took this further than ever before by denying the jurisdiction of the Church in foro interno, no less than in foro externo, not only depriving it of authority in matters temporal but restricting even its formal sacramental functions, divesting the Church’s officers, the priesthood, of their role as humanity’s only and official channel to God. The powers of coercion belonged solely to secular government, to which Christians owed their obedience.
In spiritual matters affecting the soul, Christians were, to be sure, obliged to follow their Christian conscience; and, if commanded to act in ungodly ways, they might be obliged to disobey. Yet this obligation did not constitute a right to resist or rebel. If Christians felt compelled in conscience to disobey, they were obliged simply to accept the punishment for disobedience. True Christian liberty belongs to the soul and is perfectly consistent with bodily imprisonment. The right of refusal was reserved to the individual Christian conscience and could not be translated into active, collective and organized resistance to secular authority. A radical reading of Luther might seem to suggest that civil authority could not reside in ungodly princes, and more radical resistance theories would interpret Lutheran doctrine in this way. But the master himself would make very clear, most emphatically during the peasants’ revolt, that the ungodliness of rulers is no warrant for rebellion.
Luther would, in his later years, reluctantly accept – at the strong and repeated urging of German princes – a right of resistance that went beyond his earlier convictions; but the issue then was whether the princes had a right, even a duty, to form a league to resist the emperor, which Luther had earlier opposed. Some supporters even appealed to Roman civil law in support of the right to resist force with force and to disobey unjust judges. There were those who argued, invoking ‘private law’, that an unjust ruler might forfeit his public authority and effectively become a private person subject to resistance on the grounds of self-defence. Even Luther himself with great hesitation accepted the ‘private law’ doctrine; but, while some did indeed interpret the doctrine as implying a more radical right of individual resistance, for Luther the narrowly circumscribed issue was the right of lesser authorities like German princes actively to resist the higher authority of the emperor.4 The argument developed by rebellious princes to justify resistance to the imperial power was intended, from beginning to end, to be formulated in such a way as to ensure that resistance was not conceived as a general right residing in the people. It was meant, from the start, to be a constitutional argument about the rights of princes and other officials to resist the higher authority of the Empire, especially in matters of religion, and even to repel the emperor with military force. Even if the emperor had become a private person by governing unjustly, his punishment remained a public duty, performed by proper authorities, and not a private right.
Other Christian theologians had devised theories of obedience to secular authority, but Luther faced specific problems that no other theologian had effectively confronted. Unlike, for instance, Marsilius of Padua, who attacked the papacy on behalf of the Holy Roman Empire and its allies in Italian civic communes, in particular the Ghibelline nobility, Luther was asserting the authority of secular rulers, sometimes kings but in particular local princes, who were in conflict with both pope and emperor. To establish that Christians owed obedience to German princes, it was not enough to declare that the Church had no jurisdiction, public or private. This might suffice to shift the balance of authority in worldly affairs from Church to secular government, but princes whose authority was in no way derived from divine associations – such as even the Holy Roman Emperor enjoyed – would seem to have a tenuous claim on the strict obedience of Christian believers. Augustine had gone a long way in establishing the principle that secular and even pagan rulers could command the obedience of Christians; but there remained some loopholes, which were closed by Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith.
Augustine had certainly argued that temporal government is providentially ordained by God to deal with a fallen humanity. Since the purpose of government was simply to maintain peace, order and a fair degree of comfort among sinful human beings who could expect no justice in this world, even pagans could fulfil this modest purpose and could command obedience on the same grounds as did a Christian ruler. The principle of obedience was underwritten by his doctrine of predestination, which seemed to leave little, if any, scope to human effort in achieving salvation. At the same time, as we have seen, Augustine’s view of salvation appeared, in the eyes of some interpreters, to leave room for human effort in cooperating with the grace of God, while his attitude to heresy and his support for its brutal suppression by the state might be understood to imply that Christians did, after all, stand in a different relation to secular authority than did heretics or non-believers. Some might even be inclined to interpret the distinction between the sinful mass of humanity and the elect, rooted in the doctrine of predestination, to mean that secular government was necessary to control the many but that the few might somehow be exempt.
Luther decisively closed all the doors left ajar by Augustine. The Reformation would, to be sure, produce sects, in particular the Anabaptists, who believed that true Christians were subject only to the Word of God and not to the temporal sword. But Luther’s theology is emphatically on the side of obedience to secular government and the need for Christians to submit to it. Whatever he may have believed about predestination or the division between damned and elect, his doctrine of justification by faith effectively rendered them irrelevant to the question of obedience to secular authority, while at the same time giving secular government an unambiguous claim to divine ordination.
Luther accepted the Augustinian opposition between the realm of God and the earthly realm, or the devil’s; but that antithesis was trumped by another distinction, between temporal and spiritual realms, with their corresponding modes of authority, both of which are divine. The antithesis of divine and diabolic ‘kingdoms’ remained important; but it figured in the argument on divinely ordained temporal and spiritual realms only in the sense that it reflected the dual nature of humanity, the simultaneous unity of sin and justification that characterizes Christians, whose human sinfulness requires the temporal sword.
The distinction between temporal and spiritual realms, or between the kinds of order to which they are respectively subject, does not, then, correspond to the antithesis of God’s realm and the devil’s, because, as we have seen, both orders are divine. Nor does Luther situate temporal and spiritual orders in some kind of Thomistic hierarchy. Each has its rightful and inviolable domain and its own mode of governance: the spiritual realm is the domain of the Word, with no business in the sphere of jurisdiction or coercion, which is the preserve of secular government. The line of demarcation between the two domains is clear, and any confusion between them is the work of the devil. This formulation puts paid to the temporal pretensions of the Church, while elevating secular authority to a status no less divine than the spiritual order.
Obedience Transformed into Resistance
Despite the doctrine of obedience, there was always a danger that attacks on abuses of clerical power might put in question any religious legitimation of secular authority; and Lutheran theology was – selectively – invoked by radical Protestants to justify rebellions of a kind Luther himself vehemently opposed. In his absence from Wittenberg after the Diet of Worms, some of his followers promoted more radical reforms of the Church than he had envisaged; and their rebellion did not stop with ecclesiastical authorities but extended to the government of civic magistrates. Luther responded, already in 1521, with A Sincere Admonition to All Christians to Guard Against Insurrection and Rebellion. He was, to be sure, critical of German princes; but even in his treatise Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed (1523), which most clearly expresses his reservations about how princes are actually using their divinely ordained power, he never abandons his call to obedience. Luther admonishes the princes – without much hope, it must be said – to behave like Christians; and he also appears to suggest that true Christians are obliged to sustain the powers of secular government only out of Christian love and service to others who are more in need of coercive correction. Yet his principal message is that, while the Christian soul is governed by the Word, Christians, whether because of their own sinfulness or in service to others, are in the temporal domain no less subject than anyone else to the sword of secular authority and the obligation to obey.
On his return to Wittenberg, Luther managed to subdue his most radical followers; but this did not prevent others – notably the Anabaptist Thomas Müntzer, who had broken with him – from supporting and leading the peasant rebellion. While Müntzer certainly had Luther in his sights when he excoriated a view of the world in which all things and creatures have been turned into property, support for the peasants’ revolt did not require anything quite as radical as an attack on the very institution of private property. But even short of that, given Luther’s unambiguous insistence on obedience to secular authority, it may not be immediately obvious how Lutheran doctrine could lend support to a popular uprising.
Luther’s attack on the Church could be more readily mobilized against the ecclesiastical hierarchy, princes of the Church and the imposition of tithes, which were indeed a major grievance. But during the peasant revolt the challenge to authority went beyond ecclesiastical jurisdiction to include secular authorities, the ever-increasing burden of taxation and gross inequalities of property and power. To justify rebellions such as these in Lutheran terms required a considerable stretch. If Luther advocated the personal and passive disobedience of Christians when commanded to act in an ungodly way, his radical followers transformed that principle into militant collective rebellion against ‘ungodly’ rulers, in a way Luther never intended. His doctrine of a universal priesthood or the equality of all baptized Christians before God had to be translated, in distinctly un-Lutheran ways, into principles of social equality and challenges to any kind of earthly lordship.
If some peasant rebels were driven by Lutheran ideas and expected support from the master, they were soon disillusioned. In Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants, Luther left no ambiguity at all about the obligation to obey the secular authorities, however ungodly their behaviour. Whatever legitimate grievances the peasants may have had, they were in the very act of rebellion guilty of terrible sins against God and man; and for that they must be brutally suppressed. ‘Therefore let everyone who can, smite, slay and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful or devilish than a rebel. It is just as when one must kill a mad dog; if you do not strike him, he will strike you, and a whole land with you.’5
This invitation to princely brutality may seem a far cry from Luther’s earlier admonitions to misbehaving princes, and there can be no doubt that the peasant revolt aroused his anger as never before; but his strictures against rebellion follow seamlessly from the insistence on obedience to secular authority that lies at the heart of his theology. When the rebellion was finally defeated by German princes and their troops, there remained a sharp rupture between radical sects that challenged the temporal sword, and Luther’s Reformation, which supported secular powers and enjoyed their protection. In the end, he would even compromise his basic principles about the sharp dividing line between temporal and spiritual authority, allowing secular governments to invade the spiritual domain in order to defend true religion, even, when needed, by force.
The doctrine of obedience that lay at the heart of Protestantism was certainly a boon to German princes, and this advantage was certainly not lost on other European kings. Where territorial monarchs were already far advanced in their centralizing projects and (unlike, say, the Spanish monarch, who was also Holy Roman Emperor) not dependent on attachment to the Catholic Church, Protestant doctrine could easily be deployed in support of monarchical power. This was particularly true in England. Henry VIII in his earlier, orthodox years wrote an attack on Luther that earned him a papal endorsement as ‘defender of the faith’. But, while his attitude towards Lutheranism remained at best ambivalent, Protestant doctrine was soon enlisted in the cause of royal supremacy, which granted the monarch command of state and Church at once. The same ideas would be no less serviceable to James I when he claimed the divine right of kings.
The irony is that, while (mis)interpretations of Lutheranism were used to justify the peasant revolt, the most systematic and influential Protestant doctrines of resistance emerged not from radical rebellion but from assertions of power by secular authorities. It should be no surprise that this transformation first took place in the Holy Roman Empire, with its intricate web of competing jurisdictions. Rivalries among various claimants to secular authority spawned new ideas of resistance to power quite different from those that drove radical sects or the peasant revolt. It was one thing for peasants to rebel against their superiors. It was quite another for princes to rebel against Holy Roman Emperors, or civic magistrates against both emperors and princes. When princes challenged the emperor, or civic magistrates resisted princes, they were certainly pursuing their own economic interests by defending or augmenting their hold on political power, just as burghers and guildsmen fought urban patriciates to gain the material advantages deriving from a greater share in civic governance, or peasants rebelled against princes to free themselves of tithes and taxes. The difference was that, in their resistance to higher authorities, princes or civic magistrates could claim to be acting not in their private interests but in defence of their own public powers.
Luther’s theology proved well adapted to these conflicts; and its success must be at least in part explained by its capacity to serve the interests of secular powers in various ways, depending on the balance of forces in any given principality or city at any given time. The complex of ideas that combined separation from the Catholic Church with a doctrine of obedience to secular authority served princes and civic authorities particularly well. The adoption of Lutheranism, however genuine the spiritual motivations, had distinct political and economic advantages. It freed principalities and cities from papal jurisdiction and taxation, while also challenging imperial authority and the diversion of German resources to other imperial territories.
So, while Luther himself was quick to denounce the peasant revolt against princes and other secular powers, his doctrine of obedience did not prevent princes themselves from mobilizing Lutheran theology – nor did it prevent Luther from supporting them – against the Holy Roman Empire. Their resistance could remain consistent with the doctrine of obedience because they launched their opposition not as private citizens resisting authority but rather as one competing temporal jurisdiction against another. Much the same would be true of Protestant urban elites, who challenged higher authorities not to defend the liberties of citizens so much as to assert the rights and jurisdictions of ‘lesser’ authorities against emperors and princes. At the same time, princes and civic elites could invoke the doctrine of obedience to secular authority in countering threats of rebellion from below.
In 1531, when Emperor Charles V threatened to suppress Lutheranism by military means, a group of principalities and cities, led by two powerful German princes, the Landgrave of Hesse and the Elector of Saxony, formed the Schmalkaldic League to defend the Protestant faith. A theory of resistance was devised, which invested in ‘lesser magistrates’ – the lower levels of imperial government, such as local civic officials – a right to resist by military force. It was made very clear that no such right belonged to private citizens: never again should there be such a thing as a peasant revolt. Indeed, the right to resist was less a right than an official duty.
Luther himself – belatedly and reluctantly – had come around to this point of view, having been repeatedly called upon by the Elector of Saxony and others to write in support of the princes’ political moves against the Empire or the Catholic Church. At first, he supported the princes on narrowly constitutional grounds, saying that if the lawyers were right in their interpretation of the imperial constitution and the rights of lesser officials, then the princes were entitled to resist the emperor. Even then he narrowly defined the right of those public authorities and explained his change of mind on the grounds that imperial law itself, that is, law imposed by the emperor himself, called for resistance to a notorious injustice wrought by government. For German princes and their supporters, resistance remained a prerogative of office, and the right of other authorities to repel force with force rested on the emperor’s having himself become a rebel – whose punishment was clearly a duty of office. Even when the argument expanded from purely constitutional principles to arguments from natural law, the issue was still the rights of princes, or at least the right to disobey the orders of the emperor to take up arms against Protestants.6 For Luther, if the private citizen had any rights, they almost certainly did not go beyond the citizen’s right to join his prince’s army against the emperor.
Later, under the influence of Calvin, who was himself – as we shall see – a strong advocate of secular obedience, this defence of Protestant religion against imperial threats would be transformed into a doctrine of secular resistance against any overweening royal power; but even then it remained – as in the Huguenot resistance tracts in France – not a declaration of individual freedom but, above all, an assertion of autonomous powers belonging to provincial nobles and civic officials.
John Calvin
The city of Geneva, where John Calvin would find his spiritual home, had, like other cities in the Holy Roman Empire, long been a battleground for power struggles among bishops, counts and dukes. In the Middle Ages, the bishop of Geneva had been a prince of the Empire; but there were constant battles between the bishops and other princely claimants, eager to gain access to the fruits of the city’s commercial success. When the House of Savoy sought to turn Geneva into a duchy, the city countered the threat by joining the Swiss federation in 1526; but this union would soon be disrupted by a division between Catholic and Protestant cities. When Geneva finally asserted its autonomy as a republic in 1536, it did so under the banner of Protestantism, for obvious practical and economic no less than spiritual reasons, and managed to maintain its independence as a city-state against prevailing trends.
Calvin would arrive in Geneva the year of its establishment as a Protestant republic, and – except for a period of exile from 1538 to 1541 – he would stay there until his death in 1564. Born in France in 1509 as Jean Cauvin, he began his career as clerk to a bishop; intended for the priesthood, he studied philosophy in Paris, but then gave up the Church for the study of law. At the University of Bourges, he came under humanist influences. The exposure to humanism clearly played a major part in his religious conversion; and like other humanist reformers, he would soon abandon the Catholic Church. On his return to Paris, caught up in conflicts between the reformers and the orthodox Catholics, he was compelled to flee and in 1535 settled for a time in the Protestant city of Basle.
It was during his stay in Basle that Calvin, in 1536, published the first edition of his major life’s work, the Institutes of the Christian Religion, a catechism of his faith and the principles of reformation to which he subscribed. Written first in Latin, it would later appear in French editions, which would have an enormous influence not only on theology but also on the French language. He would continue to edit and amplify this work throughout his life. On his return to Paris from Basle, finding his reforming views unwelcome in his native France, he set out for the free imperial city of Strasbourg; but, forced by circumstances to take a detour, he arrived in Geneva, and there he would remain.
Calvin settled in Geneva at the urging of another Frenchman, who invited him to join in reforming the Church. Their proposals for ecclesiastical reform, undertaken at the behest of civic authorities, were immediately accepted by the city council. Although Calvin would find himself in conflict with the council in 1538 and yet again forced into exile, the civic authorities of Geneva invited him to return in 1541 to carry on his project of reform. In November of that year, the council amended and passed the Ecclesiastical Ordinances drafted by Calvin, which spelled out the organization and functions of the Church in what amounted to a blueprint for a division of labour between civic and ecclesiastical jurisdictions in governing the city. The Ordinances struck a difficult balance between separating the functions of Church and state, allocating each its proper domain, and at the same time establishing a partnership between them in governing the city according to the principles of the reformed religion. There would be other moments of conflict and danger for Calvin, especially when some Genevan notables challenged the Ordinances, in opposition to the strict discipline imposed on them by both civic and ecclesiastical jurisdictions. But in the end, the so-called libertines were defeated and their leaders banished or executed.
It is difficult to disentangle Calvin’s theological development from the evolution of his political consciousness. His first book, a commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia, which he began writing while still a law student, was not a work of theology but a humanist essay on a classical text. Seneca’s work, addressed to the emperor Nero, has been called a forerunner of what would become the humanist genre of ‘mirrors for princes’. While it would be too much to say that Calvin’s commentary was intended as a comparable lesson to Francis I, some of the essential principles of his later views on civil government already make an appearance here. There is, for instance, a significant note citing St Paul’s Romans 13 to demonstrate that Christianity requires obedience to princes; and there are several references to princes as the vicars or delegates of God, an idea that would play a central part in his mature political theology. By the time he wrote the first edition of the Institutes after his conversion, his theological principles were already bound up with his views on civil government; and, whichever came first, Calvin’s political ideas are securely grounded in the most fundamental tenets of his theology. The inextricable connection would be firmly sealed by his career in Geneva.
The first edition of the Institutes was introduced by an epistle dedicatory to Francis I of France, which presents the catechism that follows as a defence of the reformed religion against threats faced by French Evangelicals. In his effort to demonstrate that the reformed faith poses no threat to the king’s authority, Calvin proceeds on two fronts: he seeks to show that the Roman Church, in its usurpations of temporal power, represents a more sinister challenge to the monarch’s authority, while at the same time the theologian opposes radical reformers, notably the Anabaptists, who deny the legitimacy of civil governance. The book ends with a long chapter on civil government, which may be read as a continuation of his letter to the king; but it also confronts a different set of questions, posed not by the threat of the Catholic Church but by the distinctive relations between civic authority and a reformed Church within the free Protestant city.
It has been said that Calvin’s theology, like that of Zwingli and Bucer, is ‘the result of the Reformation message filtered through the actuality of the free city’.7 It is true that the very specific relationship between secular and spiritual spheres that characterized the Protestant cities, where civic and ecclesiastical authority were both separate and intertwined in such distinctive ways, posed different problems for theology than those that preoccupied Luther. When Calvin wrote the first edition of the Institutes, he was certainly concerned with the fate of French Evangelicals under threat from the Catholic Church; but he was also compelled to address a very different set of questions, which did not have to do with the rival claims to temporal authority in conflicts between kings or German princes and the Holy Roman Empire or the papacy. While maintaining a distinction between secular and spiritual realms, he could not rely, as Luther did, on denying any jurisdiction to the Church; but nor could he simply assert the authority of secular government over the Church. He was obliged to explain the division of labour between secular and ecclesiastical authorities, both of which had an essential role in sustaining the reformed faith and both of which played a central role in governing the earthly city.
Political life in a city like Basle or Geneva thus placed a special burden on Protestant theology. For Luther, in a different context, it was enough to confine the functions of the Church to preaching the Word and administering certain sacraments, while asserting the exclusive jurisdictional claims of secular government against ecclesiastical pretensions, yet asking little more of earthly government than that it rein in a sinful humanity. His theology achieves this effect by stressing the simultaneous duality of sin and justification: God’s loving grace ‘justifies’ humanity as a free and unearned gift, even while the sinfulness of human beings, their implication in the devil’s ‘kingdom’, requires submission to secular government, which is divinely ordained.
Calvin may have been more reluctant to give secular governments a dominant authority over the Church; but within its own domain he demanded more of secular power than did Luther, and his views on civil government therefore required a different theology. He certainly shares the principal tenet of Lutheranism, the doctrine of justification by faith; but his emphasis is less on God’s loving grace than on his total sovereignty.8 While justification remains an unearned gift, which is not a reward for virtue, good works, or freedom from sin, the godly life of the Christian community is not just a matter of service and good works freely undertaken by the Christian faithful in answer to God’s loving grace. It follows from God’s unconditional will that Christians must in this world live a life of godly discipline.
Calvin’s theology underwrites a partnership between secular and spiritual authorities, in which both, equally under the sovereignty of God, exercise temporal jurisdiction. This not only restores to the Church its own temporal authority but also elevates the role of civil government. Its function is not simply to maintain civil peace and good order among sinful human beings but, in a joint project with the Church, to impose a godly discipline on the Christian community in recognition of God’s total sovereignty. Civil government, in other words, is not just a divinely ordained institution to cope with the ‘kingdom’ of the devil as it manifests itself in human sinfulness. Civic authorities act together with the Church in the fulfillment of God’s sovereign will. This means that, even while the Church ministers to the soul as civil government takes care of more mundane concerns (which include defending the true faith), there can be no clear distinction between the godly standards upheld by the Church and some kind of lesser, more modest, less divine criteria applied to civic life.
Calvin’s doctrine of predestination may seem to complicate the issue. After all, if human beings are damned or saved through no fault or virtue of their own, what can it mean to demand of them that they live according to the dictates of a godly discipline? Yet if we start not with predestination but with God’s sovereign will, the logic of Calvin’s argument may be easier to trace: the doctrine of predestination – the idea that our fate depends entirely, without condition, on God’s determination – follows directly from the notion of God’s total and unconditional sovereignty, as does the idea of godly discipline and the role of both jurisdictional spheres in maintaining it.
It is almost as if Calvin arrives at his doctrine of predestination less because it expresses his deepest convictions than because it seems an unavoidable consequence of God’s total sovereignty, which is central to his views on the role of the Church and civil government. In the Institutes, the argument for predestination – the predestination of the damned no less than of the elect – comes down to this: we must believe in it, because to do otherwise is to detract from the glory of a totally sovereign God. But, in Calvin’s view, there is little to be gained by dwelling on it. Precisely because it represents God’s unconditional sovereign will, which cannot be understood or judged by any human standards, it must remain a mystery; and we should not attempt to penetrate God’s judgment on our own fate in the afterlife. The best that Christians can do, in their humility and unconditional obedience to God, is to act in this world with confidence in the goodness and generosity of God’s justification, proceeding in their earthly callings as if they and their fellows belonged to the elect, with faith that not only their souls but their works are justified by divine grace.
Christians, then, must serve their community in accordance with the principles of godly discipline. This certainly elevates earthly callings to a new respectability and even grants an element of godliness to the most humble human labours. But, while Calvin’s idea of the calling, more than Luther’s, invites the faithful to take an active part in shaping the social and political conditions of their lives on this earth, it also means that civil governments must be regarded as representatives of God; and this carries with it a strong obligation to obedience: ‘When those who bear the office of magistrate are called gods, let no one suppose that there is little weight in that appellation. It is thereby intimated that they have a commission from God, that they are invested with divine authority and, in fact, represent the person of God, as whose substitutes they in a manner act’ (IV.20.4). It follows that Christians owe obedience to civil government, and even tyrants must be treated as the delegates of God: ‘even an individual of the worst character, one most unworthy of all honour, if invested with public authority, receives that illustrious divine power which the Lord has by his word devolved on the ministers of his justice and judgment, and that, accordingly, in so far as public obedience is concerned, he is to be held in the same honour and reverence as the best of kings’ (IV.20.25). Christians should obey secular government not simply out of fear ‘but because the obedience which they yield is rendered to God himself, inasmuch as their power is from God’ (IV.20.22).
Nevertheless, if Calvin’s doctrine of obedience to civil authority seems hardly less, or even more, stringent than Luther’s, his roots in the free Protestant city do make a difference. When considering the various forms of government, he expresses a preference for collective governments instead of kings, if only on the grounds that human imperfections make it useful to have magistrates who can keep an eye on one another. The ideal might be a city like Geneva, governed by civic elites through the medium of magistrates and city councillors, who have an official duty to preserve the city’s liberty. This means that, on the whole, aristocracy is best, or perhaps a mixed constitution in which aristocracy is leavened by an element of popular government. There is nonetheless, Calvin tells us, no point in discussing which government is best, since that depends on circumstances; and, in any case, we must assume that, whatever the prevailing type of government in any given circumstance, it was decreed by God. While the Lord may take vengeance against ‘unbridled domination’, ‘let us not therefore suppose that that vengeance is committed to us, to whom no command has been given but to obey and suffer’ (IV.20 31).
There seems to be no ambiguity in Calvin’s views on strict obedience, but here he introduces a qualification that would have major consequences for political theory. ‘I speak’, he says, ‘only of private men’; because there have existed public offices – presumably decreed by God – whose duty it has been ‘to curb the tyranny of kings’, such as the Ephori in Sparta, the tribunate in Rome, the Demarchs in Athens, and perhaps even the assembled three estates in a kingdom like France (IV.20.31). It has been the public duty of these ‘lesser magistrates’ to defend the people against the tyranny of rulers. Although Calvin himself would never go beyond the observation that there have existed public offices whose official duty is to represent the interests of the people as a check on princely power, the doctrine of the ‘lesser magistrate’ would become the basis of more wide-ranging and militant resistance theories.
That doctrines supporting the power of temporal authorities, and even the need for obedience to them, could be mobilized in support of resistance to power and even popular rebellion is a peculiarity of Western culture. Other societies have certainly created doctrines of rebellion, but they took a very special form in Western Europe. The fragmentation of political power in feudal Europe, and the constant jurisdictional battles that followed from it for centuries thereafter, produced quite distinctive effects. The assertion of one jurisdiction against another could be formulated as a right to resist illegitimate power or tyranny. While this meant that ideas of resistance could be adopted and disseminated by ruling classes, landlords and civic elites, it also meant that their interests would shape and constrain Western conceptions of democracy, in ways that persist to this day.
Protestantism and the Rise of Capitalism?
What, then, should we make of the proposition that Protestantism had something to do with the ‘rise of capitalism’? It is certainly true that Lutheranism became a powerful force when it established itself in great commercial centres. It is also true that, in some commercial cities, where urban patriciates had become rentiers instead of active merchants and where they restricted access to the political domain, burghers and new merchants without political privileges might use Protestant doctrine to challenge patrician dominance. It may even be true that Protestantism, and Calvinism in particular, removed ecclesiastical constraints on commercial activities, or that Protestant doctrine, and especially Calvin’s doctrine of the calling, called into question old verities about the unworthiness of commercial pursuits and the acquisition of wealth, or about work as a curse and simply a punishment for original sin. But, even if we accept that Protestantism promoted a ‘work ethic’ or that it had certain benefits for merchants, and even if we set aside its equal usefulness to nobles, princes and kings, its bearing on the ‘spirit of capitalism’ is another matter altogether.
Let us first be clear about what is meant by capitalism and the conditions of its ‘rise’. Conventional wisdom – and, indeed, a great deal of scholarly work – treats the rise of capitalism as little more than the quantitative growth of commerce or exchange for profit. Capitalism, in other words, is ‘commercial society’ as understood by classical political economy, a society in which commercial practices that have existed since time immemorial have, with the expansion of cities, markets and trade, become the economic norm. Human beings have, time out of mind, engaged in profitable exchange, and capitalism is just more of the same. This means that, if the birth of capitalism requires any explanation, all that needs to be explained is the growth of market opportunities and the removal of obstacles to the expansion of commerce.
Yet this understanding of capitalism takes no account of the very specific economic principles that came into being in early modern Europe, principles very different from anything that had existed before even in the most commercialized societies: not simply the growth of market opportunities with the expansion of vast trading networks, but the emergence of wholly new compulsions, the inescapable imperatives of competition, profit-maximization, constant accumulation and the endless need to reduce the costs of labour by improving labour productivity. These imperatives did not operate in the age-old practices of commercial exchange even in its most elaborate forms. Traders made their fortunes not by means of cost-effective production in integrated competitive markets but rather by negotiating separate markets, the ‘buying cheap and selling dear’ that was the essence of pre-capitalist commerce. A revolutionary transformation of relations between producing and appropriating classes, as well as changes in the nature of property, would be required to set in train the imperatives of the capitalist market – as happened in English agrarian capitalism
Once we identify capitalism with market imperatives, the search for its origins must take a different form. The question then becomes not how commercial opportunities expanded and economies were freed to take advantage of them, or even how the cultural and moral climate changed to justify pursuit of profit, but rather how social arrangements and the production of basic human needs were so fundamentally transformed as to impose compulsions and necessities unlike any that had governed human social life before.
This is not a question addressed by the most influential advocates of the view that Protestantism in one way or another promoted the development of capitalism – Max Weber and R.H. Tawney – nor, indeed, by their later supporters and critics. Both traced the evolution of Protestantism, especially in its Calvinist form, into a particular variety of Puritanism, especially in England, that encouraged ‘capitalist’ values and practices; but neither of them actually argued that Protestantism caused the emergence of capitalism. It would be fair to say that in both arguments the development of Protestantism into a doctrine favouring capitalism (in the sense they understood it) presupposes the existence of certain forms of property and economic practices that, if not already fully ‘capitalist’ (in their terms), are ‘capitalist’ in embryo and mark a significant break from feudal forms and principles.
