No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
The Application of Christian Principles to Economics in the Past
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2025
I
The infant Church was born at a time when the greatest state that the world has ever seen was attaining to its full development. The whole civilised world west of the Euphrates was united under a single head. The age of civil war, of social unrest, of the exploitation of the conquered peoples was at last over. Everywhere new cities were springing up, trade was flourishing and population increasing. It was ‘the hour of the prince of this world,’ the apotheosis of triumphant material power and wealth.
And yet the whole splendid building rested on non-moral foundations—often on mere violence and cruelty. The divine Caesar might be a Caligula or a Nero, wealth was an excuse for debauchery and the prosperity of the wealthy classes was based on the institution of slavery—not the natural household slavery of primitive civilisation, but an organised plantation-slavery which left no room for any human relation between slave and master.
The early Church could not but be conscious that she was separated by an infinite gulf from this great material order, that she could have no part in its prosperity or in its injustice. She was in this world as the seed of a new order, utterly subversive of all that had made the ancient world what it was. Yet though she inherited the spirit of the Jewish protest against the Gentile world-power, she did not look for any temporal change, much less did she attempt herself to bring about any social reform.
1 Ep. to Diognetus V passim.
2 James ii, 5–7
3 Cato, De Re Rustica ii, 142, etc.
4 St. Ambrose on. Naboth XII.
5 St, Basil Hom. in Lucam.
6 Cf. Jansen, Hist. of the German People, Vol. II, p. 9.
7 Jansen, Hist. of the German People, Vol. II, p. 9.
8 Professor Ashley thus sums up the general tendency of mediaeval economic legislation. ‘Doubtless the yardlings and cotters and craftsmen sometimes suffered from famines; doubtless their surroundings were often insanitary. Still, there was a standard of comfort which general opinion recognised as suitable far them, and which prices were regulated to maintain. But now we are content that wages should be determined by the standard of comfort which a class can manage to maintain, left to itself, or rather exposed to the competition of machinery and immigrant foreign labour.’ (English Economic History, Vol. I, p. 139).
9 In Southern Europe the mare or less decadent guilds were destroyed mainly by the ‘enlightened despotism’ of the eighteenth century, e.g. by Leopold in Tuscany and by Charles IV in, Spain. In both these cases their suppression went hand in hand with that of the popular religious confraternities.
10 Cf. On Spain Cambridge Modem History, Val. X, ch. viii, esp. p. 263, etc. On France and the contrast of French and English systems, ditto Vol. VII, pp. 97–102.
11 'While there was a strong sense (among the Puritans) of the religious duty of insisting on hard and regular work for the welfare, temporal and eternal, of the people themselves, there was complete indifference to the need of laying dawn or enforcing any restrictions as to the employment of money. Capital was1 much needed in England, and still more in Scotland, for developing the resources of the country and for starting new enterprises; freedom for the formation and investment of capital seemed to the thoughtful city men of the seventeenth century, who were mostly in sympathy with Puritanism, the best remedy for the existing social evils. They were eager to get rid of the restrictions imposed by the Pope's laws, which it was still possible to bring up in the ecclesiastical courts, as well as to be free from the efforts of the King's Council to bring home to the employing and mercantile classes their duty to the community … In so far as a stricter ecclesiastical discipline was aimed at, or introduced, it had regard to recreation and to immorality of other kinds, but was at no pains to interfere to check the action of the capitalist or to protect the labourer.' Quoted by Tröltsch Soziallehre and W. Cunningham, The Moral Witness of the Church on the Investment of Money and the use of Wealth, 711–712. He also gives examples of the Scotch legislation against unemployment (1663). ‘Capitalists who set up manufactories were empowered to impress any vagrants, ad “employ them far their service, as they see fit,” for eleven years without wages except meat and clothing. Good subjects were recommended to take into their service poor and indigent children, who were to do any task assigned to them till they had attained the age of thirty, and to be “subject to their master's correction and chastisement in all manner of punishment (life and torture excepted)”.’ Compare the system of binding parish apprentices to the manufacturers in England from 1760–1816.
12 Nevertheless, the chief defender of the Catholic social tradition at the beginning of the nineteenth century, de Bonald (1754–1840) insisted strongly on the falsity of the moral premises on which the new economic theories rested. Moreover, he advocated the restoration of the Guilds; the destruction of which he held to be one of the great evils resulting from the anti-Christian propaganda of the eighteenth century (Cf. Legislation Primitive, Pt. 3, ch. 4).