Catholicism and capitalism

From a 1999 article by Michael Novak, dredged up by AEI in a retrospective of Wall Street Journal pieces on its 125th birthday:
The people of the high Middle Ages (1100-1300) were agog with wonder at great mechanical clocks, new forms of gears for windmills and water mills, improvements in wagons and carts, shoulder harnesses for beasts of burden, the ocean-going ship rudder, eyeglasses and magnifying glasses, iron smelting and ironwork, stone cutting and new architectural principles. So many new types of machines were invented and put to use by 1300 that historian Jean Gimpel wrote a book in 1976 called "The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages."
Without the growth of capitalism, however, such technological discoveries would have been idle novelties. They would seldom have been put in the hands of ordinary human beings through swift and easy exchange. They would not have been studied and rapidly copied and improved by eager competitors. All this was made possible by freedom for enterprise, markets and competition -- and that in turn was provided by the Catholic Church.
The church owned nearly a third of all the land of Europe. To administer those vast holdings, it established a continentwide system of canon law that tied together multiple jurisdictions of empire, nation, barony, bishopric, religious order, chartered city, guild, confraternity, merchants, entrepreneurs, traders, etc. It also provided local and regional administrative bureaucracies of arbitrators, jurists, negotiators and judges, along with an international language, "canon law Latin."
Even the new emphasis on clerical celibacy played an important capitalist role. Its clean separation between office and person in the church broke the traditional tie between family and property that had been fostered by feudalism and its carefully plotted marriages. It also provided Europe with an extraordinarily highly motivated, literate, specialized and mobile labor force.
The Cistercians, who eschewed the aristocratic and sedentary ways of the Benedictines and consequently broke farther away from feudalism, became famous as entrepreneurs. They mastered rational cost accounting, plowed all profits back into new ventures, and moved capital around from one venue to another, cutting losses where necessary, and pursuing new opportunities when feasible. They dominated iron production in central France and wool production (for export) in England. They were cheerful and energetic. "They had," Mr. Collins writes, "the Protestant ethic without Protestantism."

8 comments:

Grim said...

The point about being made in the image of God, and thus a (sub)creator, is one that meant a lot to Tolkien even in our own age. Indeed it is what differentiates Tolkien from most other science-fiction or fantasy writers: the sense that his power to create ought to follow the moral order that inheres in the world into which he was created. His felt duty to God, as well as his joy at being a part of the creative process, is what infuses his work with such heroic beauty.

Joseph W. said...

Indeed it is what differentiates Tolkien from most other science-fiction or fantasy writers: the sense that his power to create ought to follow the moral order that inheres in the world into which he was created.

I think you can see the same thing in the early writings of that agnostic, Robert Heinlein - his view of the moral order around him comes out in this famous speech and gives his early stories their own flavor of "heroic beauty."

(Come to that, it's a central theme in Kipling...who wrote what is sometimes called the first true sci-fi tale, though I can argue for some earlier. I think he was religiously ambiguous, though he must've believed in God in some form in order to be a Freemason.)

Grim said...

I myself am no authority on Heinlein, having read no more of him than Starship Troopers (required reading at one point). However, John C. Wright specifically divides them in his book on science fiction (of which I have only read the introduction, highly recommended by an acquaintance, and available for free at the "Look Inside" feature at the Amazon link above).

It may interest you, actually, that essay; it's on the topic of trying to treat metaphysics from the perspective of psychological health, which might be in line with your overarching project. It's not my bag, which is aimed more at the truth of Truth rather than the health of Truth, so to speak. But perhaps, if we are talking about a morality that inheres in nature, health is a kind of marker.

Grim said...

I meant to say, too, on Tex's topic: not only did the Catholic Church come up with the political philosophical category of "civil society" -- subsequently recognized as a truly and justly independent sphere by Hegel, but not most other political thinkers -- they also invented a number of other important non-governmental functions. The Knights Templar are thought to have been the developers of one of the earliest means of transferring wealth without having to actually carry something intrinsically valuable, as part of their mechanism for funding the Crusades. But the idea (which was essentially that you could pay them gold here, and they'd send a letter documenting the credit to be paid out there rather than sending the actual money) was of such general utility that they ended up accumulating vast properties and wealth by providing the service for general audiences.

Probably that is what caused the destruction of the Order, when the King of France realized all that wealth could be seized if the leadership of the Order were kidnapped and tortured into confessing to blasphemies. At that point the King of France had already kidnapped the Pope, after all.

Joseph W. said...

A much shorter essay on the "deep norms" of science fiction is this one on Eric S. Raymond's weblog (where I sometimes see our old friend Karrde, though not in that thread)...Raymond, unlike you or me, really is an expert on Heinlein.

btw, in that thread, I added a couple of posts about Ambrose Bierce's short stories, linking to online versions of "The Damned Thing" and "Moxon's Master." I think they're both science fiction proper, though I wonder if you'd consider the latter to be "philosophy fiction" instead (short and well written if you find a moment for them).

I was never assigned Starship Troopers but read it on my own in elementary school, as I have some of his other earlier works. Whatever their setting...you can feel that these early tales came from the era when Have Gun, Will Travel fit in with the national ethos.*

I definitely "divide" him because I heartily disliked his later works, Job and The Number of the Beast.

*Trivia, kinda-sorta-almost linking the worldviews of Heinlein and Tolkien: In the Rankin-Bass 70's cartoon of The Hobbit, Smaug is voiced by Richard Boone, who played Paladin. Oh, go on, listen to his boast but picture Boone's face, having the time of his life as he tears off those lines..."I am strong, strong, strawng!!!!")

Grim said...

Hah! I would never have guessed that until you said it, but as soon as you did I can easily tell that it was him.

Grim said...

The shorter essay is interesting, but is not only of lesser length but of lesser scope. The other talks about fantasy as well as SF, and figures as different as Tolkien, Rand, and Heinlein (among others he considers rather worse).

What is interesting about it is that it seems to pinpoint the function of things like truth, beauty, and virtue in constructing worlds of imagination that are progressively more (or less) healthy to inhabit for a human mind. That's interesting, especially if health is a marker; if the model holds, it says something objective about the value of these things, at least for human beings.

David Foster said...

There is an interesting history of waterpower, "Stronger Than a Hundred Men." According to the author, the Greeks and Romans were familiar with the principles of waterpower and did exploit it to a limited extent, but large-scale use had to wait for the Middle Ages. He gives the monastic orders a lot of credit for this (one letter from a monk visiting a neighboring monastery waxed enthusiastic about that establishment's use of waterpower but did not even mention the church), and suggests that not only did the costs of free labor (okay, pseudo-free labor) versus slavery play a part in the greater waterpower uptake in that era, but also that the image of Christ the Carpenter had created more respect for manual labor. (Though I wonder to what extent this respect had really penetrated the aristocracy to any meaningful degree.)

OTOH, I've seen later comments suggesting that the real use of waterpower in classical times was much greater tha has been generally thought and reported in the above book...on my list of things to research one of these days.