Such antitheses are tempting, and it is not surprising that some writers should have dwelt upon them. To a generation disillusioned with free competition, and disposed to demand some criterion of social expediency more cogent than the verdict of the market, the jealous and cynical suspicion of economic egotism, which was the prevalent mood of the Middle Ages, is more intelligible than it was to the sanguine optimists of the Age of Reason, which, as far as its theory of the conduct of men in society is concerned, deserves much more than the thirteenth century to be described as the Age of Faith. In the twentieth century, with its trusts and combines, its control of industry by business and of both by finance, its attempts to fix fair wages and fair prices, its rationing and food controls and textile controls, the economic harmonies are, perhaps, a little blown upon. The temper in which it approaches questions of economic organization appears to have more affinity with the rage of the medieval burgess at the uncharitable covetousness of the usurer and the engrosser, than it has with the confidence reposed by its innocent grandfathers in the infallible operations of the invisible hand.
The resemblance, however, though genuine, is superficial, and to overemphasize it is to do less than justice to precisely those elements in medieval thought which were most characteristic. The significance of its contribution consists, not in its particular theories as to prices and interest, which recur in all ages, whenever the circumstances of the economic environment expose consumer and borrower to extortion, but in its insistence that society is a spiritual organism, not an economic machine, and that economic activity, which is one subordinate element within a vast and complex unity, requires to be controlled and repressed by reference to the moral ends for which it supplies the material means. So merciless is the tyranny of economic appetites, so prone to self-aggrandizement the empire of economic interests, that a doctrine which confines them to their proper sphere, as the servant, not the master, of civilization, may reasonably be regarded as among the pregnant truisms which are a permanent element in any sane philosophy. Nor is it, perhaps, as clear today as it seemed a century ago, that it has been an unmixed gain to substitute the criterion of economic expediency, so easily interpreted in terms of quantity and mass, for the conception of a rule of life superior to individual desires and temporary exigencies, which was what the medieval theorist meant by “natural law.”
When all is said, the fact remains that, on the small scale involved, the problem of moralizing economic life was faced and not abandoned. The experiment may have been impracticable, and almost from the first it was discredited by the notorious corruption of ecclesiastical authorities, who preached renunciation and gave a lesson in greed. But it had in it something of the heroic, and to ignore the nobility of the conception is not less absurd than to idealize its practical results. The best proof of the appeal which the attempt to subordinate economic interests to religion had made is the persistence of the same attempt among reformers, to whom the Pope was antichrist and the canon law an abomination and the horror of decent men when, in the sixteenth century, its breakdown became too obvious to be contested.
II
The Continental Reformers
“Neither the Church of Christ, nor a Christian Commonwealth, ought to tolerate such as prefer private gain to the public weal, or seek it to the hurt of their neighbours.”
Bucer, De Regno Christi
Lord Acton, in an unforgettable passage in his “Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History,” has said that “after many ages persuaded of the headlong decline and impending dissolution of society, and governed by usage and the will of masters who were in their graves, the sixteenth century went forth armed for untried experience, and ready to watch with hopefulness a prospect of incalculable change.”109 His reference was to the new world revealed by learning, by science, and by discovery. But his words offer an appropriate text for a discussion of the change in the conception of the relations between religion and secular interests which took place in the same period. Its inevitable consequence was the emergence, after a prolonged moral and intellectual conflict, of new conceptions of social expediency and of new lines of economic thought.
The strands in this movement were complex, and the formula which associates the Reformation with the rise of economic individualism is no complete explanation. Systems prepare their own overthrow by a preliminary process of petrifaction. The traditional social philosophy was static, in the sense that it assumed a body of class relations sharply defined by custom and law, and little affected by the ebb and flow of economic movements. Its weakness in the face of novel forces was as obvious as the strain put upon it by the revolt against the source of ecclesiastical jurisprudence, the partial discredit of the canon law and of ecclesiastical discipline, and the rise
