Dear Reader: This is a crude draft as of August 15, 2018. The three asterisks or the bold

Use Everyman play by my friend Jo of Edinburgh if it fits]

And yet. Elsa Strietman, in discussing the Dutch version of Everyman, sees in the text a pre-Reformation focus “on the individual’s responsibility to live a just life,” and quotes the theologian Alisdair McGrath on its similarity to Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. ¹¹² The Dutch version was a product of the “chambers of rhetoric” in the little cities of the Low Counties 1450-1550, described elsewhere as being institutions where “the self-confidence of the wealthy citizens manifested itself” against the prestige of courtly literature at Brussels or the Hague. “At a social level the rederijkers [the rhetoricians] formed a [haut bourgeois] liberation movement.”¹¹³ “The material side of life,” Streitman remarks, “is not condemned or belittled as unworthy per se, which would fit in well if the intended audience of the play were not a world-forsaking monastic audience, but [as was the case] an urban community actively engaged in trading and banking. . . . The complaint against Elckerlijc [the Dutch name for Everyman] is that he has amassed possessions and loved them extravagantly. . . . It is . . . the immoderate use of God’s creation which invokes the Creator’s terrible wrath.”

A rich man may enter the kingdom of heaven, if he is temperate in his pursuit and use of wealth. The economist and intellectual historian Jacob Viner asserted in 1939 that "the Renaissance, especially in its Italian manifestations, brought new attitudes with respect to the dignity of the merchant, his usefulness to society, and the general legitimacy of the moderate pursuit of wealth through commerce, provided the merchant who thus attained riches used it with taste, with liberality, and with concern for the welfare and the magnificence of his city."¹¹⁴ The attitude in bourgeois towns has not in truth changed much since the Renaissance. Nowadays, at least outside of the corrupting theories of the economists, it is still judged blameworthy in a merchant to pursue wealth immoderately, extravagantly, tastelessly, illiberally, and without concern for the welfare and magnificence of the city. Talk about this to the Pritzkers of Chicago, heirs to the Hyatt fortune.

But Viner was mistaken in not seeing the medieval precedents for an ethical bourgeoisie—though he was correct that the precedents did not until much later become large enough to be the thing itself, a large-scale bourgeois civilization mainly free from aristocratic or clerical interference. Viner’s history was off by a couple of hundred years, so far as some high theory and a lot of low practice was concerned. At the time he wrote, the Renaissance was still seen by scholars as utterly novel, a sharp beginning for the modern world. Viner wrote at the height of the scholarly conviction that a chasm divides us moderns from the Dark Ages of medieval times. Since then historians such as Quentin Skinner and Jacques Le Goff and Lynn White and Ambrose Raftis have looked back into the scholastic and medieval sources, finding even a natural right of revolution in the writings of Dominicans and a justification for market work in the writings of Franciscans and widespread technical innovation in a Europe allegedly uninterested in this-worldly success.

Yet the words mattered. That merchants were not honored, and that the taking of interest was officially banned, put hooks and chairs in the way of innovation. As Timur Kuran puts it in discussing the parallel “ban” on paying interest among Moslems, “by blocking honest public discussion of commercial, financial, and monetary matters, it hindered the development of the capitalist mentality.”¹¹⁵ There’s the problem, to such the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Northwestern Europe provided the solution.

&Chapter 7:

Though There Were Precursors

of a Self-Respecting Bourgeoisie

In other words, the attitude of medieval Europe and its church towards the bourgeoisie was nothing like entirely hostile, especially in northern Italy and in some of the ports of Iberia, even if it did not result in the business-dominated civilization of the southern Low Countries after 1400, and Holland after 1568, and England after 1689. Barcelona for example was from medieval times an exception to the anti-bourgeois character of the rest of Spain—as in some ways it still is, and as Basque Bilbao came to be in the nineteenth century. And in Portugal the merchants were respected during the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century. The Portuguese had reconquered their territories from the Moslems with much less effort than the Spaniards had, and one could argue therefore that they were less militarized and therefore less captured by aristocratic values. Albert Hirschman quotes, and applies to the anti-bourgeois Castillians, the backward-looking opinion of the Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715-1747) that “a man of quality, by fighting, acquires wealth more honorably and quickly than a meaner man by work.”¹¹⁶ It was an antique sentiment of the nobility. According to Tacitus the ancient German warrior thought it “tame and spiritless to accumulate slowly by the sweat of his brow what can be gotten quickly by the loss of a little blood.”¹¹⁷ By contrast the Portuguese merchant and the “knight merchant” (cavaleiro-mercador) encouraged by Henry the Navigator and others in its vigorous line of kings gave little Portugal the first European empire of trade—though they were very willing to lose a little blood in getting it, quickly.

In Christian theory from the twelfth century certain high theorists admitted trading and profit as ethical goals. Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, among others, such as Sinibaldus de Fieschi (later Pope Innocent IV, who perhaps earned a law degree at Bologna), worked out in the high Middle Ages an ethical life for merchants. We moderns are inclined on the contrary to imagine with Hume and Voltaire and other anti-Papists, anticlericals, atheists, or Protestants nowadays that the Middle Ages were dark in their elevation of “monkish virtues” over the trade that Hume and Voltaire found so very civilizing. The monks in fact emphasized the dignity of work—“to work is to pray,” Benedict had said—in a proto-bourgeois fashion that sat poorly with the aristocratic values of the Roman Empire.

In any case the anti-market theme in radical monkishness, seen in the desert fathers from the third to fifth century, culminating in St. Augustine’s (qualified) disdain for the City of Man, and echoing down the centuries to follow, fit poorly with a Europe reviving commercially from the late eighth century on. The second Avignon pope, John XXII (reigned 1316-1334 , and who had studied law, in Paris), was highly suspicious of the poverty-glorifying friars. One of them, the German mystic Meister Eckhart, was condemned for claiming (according to John’s Bull In the Lord’s field, 1329, item 8) that “God is honored in those who do not pursue anything, neither honor nor advantage, neither inner revelation nor saintliness, nor reward, nor the Kingdom of Heaven itself, but who distance themselves from all these things, as well as from all that is theirs.”¹¹⁸ John burned a number of such anti-thing-pursuing communists and declared heretical the belief that Christ and the Apostles did not have possessions. In 1329 he argued that man’s possession of property was parallel to God’s possession of the universe, an instance, you see, of man being made in the image of God. Altogether, with many of the popes, John XXII was satisfied with private property, if it was used for Christian or at any rate Church purposes

Nor was disdain for work in God’s world consistent, as Giacamo Todeschini has recently observed in an important essay, with the task that popes and abbots faced, “the pragmatic need to manage the system of Church properties.”¹¹⁹ The economic theorizing of the Church, however, was not solely a self-interested trick—though a church taxed by, say, Philip the Fair of France did need some interested arguments if it was to survive in law courts and in courtly opinion. The medieval doctors of the church devised a justification for trade—and this against their heritage from old Aristotle the teacher of aristocrats or, as I say, their more spiritual heritage from work-and-world-disdaining Augustine—that emphasized the work involved in trade. (If you think buying low and selling high is not work, you need to read the anxious correspondence of the Tuscan merchant Francesco Datini [1335-1410]).¹²⁰ Thus, what everyone thinks she knows about the medieval economymthat interest was forbidden—was made false in practice. Work allowed the charging of interest, even if in veiled forms, such as by foreign exchange transactions and false sales. Said the theologians: as God had worked to make the universe, so the Italian merchants worked to earn their just rewards. Both rested on the seventh day. Admiration of work is the central characteristic of a modern bourgeoisie. Here it fits easily with Abrahamic theology, which after all from its beginnings in Abram’s property deal with the Lord has admired a hard-working engagement with God’s creation. And a little dealing on the side.

Todeschini argues that to understand the cultural identity of late medieval businessmen it won’t do to adopt “a forced and timeless separation of the lay and religious rationalities or of the opposition between economics and moral codes.”¹²¹ I would only add to his formulation that to understand the cultural identity of modern businesspeople it won’t do to adopt a forced and timeless separation of the lay and religious rationalities or of the opposition between economics and moral codes.

The medieval Italian manufacturers and merchants that Todeschini describes were not merely Easter-duty Christians. They worked at their faith as they worked at their trading. (But I repeat: they do so now, too, unless some professor or novelist has persuaded them that economic activity is inconsistent with moral codes.) “The conceptual grammar utilized in medieval economic treatises. . . were strictly connected with the theological language of election, salvation, and spiritual profit.”¹²² In thirteenth and fourteenth century Italy the “body” of merchants (il corpo de la compagni check) is imagined as “the mystic Body of the city as the double of Christ’s Body.”¹²³

Really, it was. In a secular age we sophisticated and agnostic and even anti-clerical intellectuals can’t quite believe such talk, and suppose with a smirk that we are witnessing hypocrisy. “Aha, Senior Datini: caught again pretending to be motivated by love of God!” But read the ample writings and confidential notebooks of Italian merchants of the time, Todeschini argues, and you have to abandon the materialist hypothesis. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 figures with his Italian businessmen as much or more than the merely present bottom line—as the Council of Trent in 1562-63 figured in the motivations of their descendents. In the thirteenth century even in bourgeois Italy “the notion of ‘good reputation’ (fama) . . . is deeply related to the theological and juridical discourse about the importance of Christians to carefully protect the purity of their civic and religious ‘name’” (p. 8). As Fr. Augustine Thompson argues in an important recent book on “the lost holiness of the Italian republics,” the communes of northern and central Italy in their democratic heydays 1125-1328 “were simultaneously religious and political entities. . . . Even the most evocative appreciations of communal political theory obscure its Christian character. Ecclesiastical and civic institutions formed a single communal organism.” He instances the construction of baptisteries, such as the Florentine one with Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise, used for the characteristic rite of popular religion in the Italian cities then, “the civic rite of the Easter vigil, with its mass baptism of infants, a ritual innovation distinctive of the communes. Baptism made the children citizens of both the commune and of heaven. At Easter the commune renewed itself and reaffirmed its identity as a sacred society. These rites came to be so closely associated with republican identity that they were among the first things to go as princes established seigniorial rule in the early 1300s,” and at last even in Genoa and Florence, the eldest children of liberty.¹²⁴

Todeschini agrees: the commune was a “sacred society,” even among its merchants. “It would be easy,” Todeschini writes, “to underestimate this attention . . . to the reputation of the merchant and define it as the obvious result of an increasing market society, duly concerned about the economic trustworthiness of its members: but it would be an error, . . . a . . . very reductive point of view.”¹²⁵ Licentiousness or commercial unreliability was a sin against the Body of Christ. The proverb on men’s lips was “Gain at the cost of a bad reputation ought rather to be called a loss.”¹²⁶ Says Death to Everyman, “He that loveth riches I will strike with my dart,/ His sight to blind, and from heaven to depart—/ Except that alms be his good friend—/ In hell for to dwell, world without end.”¹²⁷ Again, “hell” was no figure of speech among these men. They trembled in living terror of it. The merchants of Siena and Prato and Milan “had the duty to be rich and at the same time honorable men” (p. 15). It is rather like the merchants of New York and Tokyo and Mumbai today. Donato Ferrario founded a divinity school in fifteenth-century Milan, the way the property billionaires the Pritzkers of Chicago have financed hospitals and libraries and architectural prizes, and it would be “improper and anachronistic” to decode “this choice as [a] simple and clever social expedient” for Denato Ferrario—or James N. Pritzker.¹²⁸ The gospel of wealth of a medieval merchant was based on the literal gospels, and on the interpretation of the gospels by doctors of the church. The problem in modern life is the undermining of a gospel of wealth, an undermining powered by a forced and timeless separation of the lay and religious rationalities.

And greed in northern Italy was constrained by secular virtues, too, dating in their theorizing back to classical times and to aristocracy-admiring Aristotle. The manuals for Italian businessmen in the fifteenth century appropriated the qualities that civic humanism assigned to the leaders of the polis.¹²⁹ Benedetto Cotrugli advises the captain of a merchant ship to be sober, vigorous, temperate, eloquent, and well-renowned (de extimatione predito). The Northern Italian bourgeoisie of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries exercised the virtue of profit-seeking prudence, to be sure, but it balanced prudence with holy faith and love, and pagan courage and justice, too.

Admittedly, Todeschini himself explicitly asserts that “the caution and vigilance concerning moral, civic, . . . [and] economic behaviors” in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries ”cannot be reduced to an early manifestation of [a] ‘bourgeois’ spirit.”¹³⁰ In his complaint about coding honorable and charitable behavior of the Florentines as “anachronistic” he implies that such decoding is all right for nowadays. ume that “ (p. 6). They aren’t reportsa Todeschini appears to mean by “bourgeois” the modern notion after Rousseau and Marx and Sartre of single-minded pursuit of the largest possible bottom line, the restless stirring for gain, the absolute desire for enrichment, the passionate hunt for value. And he appears to think that it is characteristic of the modern world. He too is trapped in the modern prejudice against the very world “bourgeois,” and in its recent use as a term of contempt.

I would reply that early and late, nowadays as in the fourteenth century, the member of la borghesia believes that “the social Corpus only . . . can sanctify his economic activities and identify him as a trustworthy merchant” (Todeschini, p. 13). Businesspeople want to be good, no less than politicians or priests or professors do, and indeed the businesspeople have the moral luck to be in situations daily where good and bad are obvious, and the results clear. A rotten order of fish served in his restaurant has a more immediate result than a rotten set of ideas offered up by the anti-bourgeois professor. The earnest businesspeople often fail, as fallen humans do. Yet so do the politicians, priests, and professors. But anyway, contrary to the notion that medieval people were very different from you and me, the medieval church allowed the merchants to do their good work—but held them to a high standard, with the tortures of the Inferno awaiting those who failed their duty.

Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) is best known for his pioneering of art criticism, but he wrote also a dialogue about the family, in which the character “Giannozzo” declares that “it is, perhaps, a kind of slavery to be forced to plead and beg with other men in order to satisfy our necessity [instead of working and trading to do so]. That is why we do not scorn riches.” In quoting the passage, Richard Pipes notes that “this positive view of property and wealth came to dominate Western thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”¹³¹ True, the theme here. But such views did not flower even in commercial Florence into a fully bourgeois civilization. Perhaps it is because they took root in an anti-bourgeois Italy dominated by princes of the land and church.

At the other end of the five centuries of the momentous turn from an anti-business to a pro-business civilization, Dante to Adam Smith, stands a pious dyer of wool cloth in Leeds, Joseph Ryder. The historian Matthew Kadane has recently described Ryder’s diary, kept from 1733 to 1768 in forty-odd volumes, amounting to 2,000,000 words (this book contains a mere 103,000 ***adjust to final count). Dissenters were known for such spiritual exercises, a genre out of which Robinson Crusoe grew. His diary is probably not an exception, though in the nature of the case we do not have a random sample of a hundred such works to scrutinize—merely the long tradition of Puritan scrupulosity and its literary effusions from men and women accustomed to keeping accounts.

The job was, as Kadane puts it, “to watch oneself for the smallest sign of deviation from the godly course.”¹³² Ryder watched himself with the intensity of a Woody-Allen character under psychoanalysis, and for the same reason: his modern life in trade, he believed, might corrupt his soul. He wrote—Ryder could have been a writer of hymns, it seems: “The dangers numerous are which every saint surround/ Each worldly pleasure has its snare if riches do abound.”¹³³ It is an ancient theme, that one cannot serve both God and mammon (“mammon” is Aramaic for “wealth”). The sin of pride in possessions or in success leads away from God, as does pride in anything here below (said Augustine). As Ryder put the matter in another of his hymn lines: “If I’m concerned too much with things below/ It makes my progress heavenward but slow.”¹³⁴ “By daily striving for worldly achievements undertaken to honor God,” Kadane writes, “Ryder risked transforming his successes into excesses and his achievements into vanity.” The last temptation is such spiritual pride: I am proud that I am not proud, and Satan swoops in at the last moment to claim my soul.

Kadane finds no evidence for the materialist claim that appropriate consumption was merely a demonstration of creditworthiness, the outward and visible sign of inward and economic grace. His man Ryder does not resemble the credit-obsessed man that Craig Muldrew, Alexandra Shepard, and Liz Bellamy (following Marx in this) find in England then and earlier, keeping up appearances to keep up his credit score.¹³⁵ In Ryder’s diary any “social implications of failure to meet credit obligations were subordinate to his worry about God’s perception of him” (p. 12). Kadane concludes, “What is the first instance gave shape to Ryder’s economic outlook, self-image, and the image he projected to others was a spiritual struggle he wages daily in the privacy of his journal to stay poised between damning extremes,” that is, the extreme of denying the use of God’s gifts in the world and the other extreme of worldly pride.¹³⁶ Kadane argues that Adam Smith’s amiable view of vanity tried to free exactly such people from their own worries. I’m all right, you’re all right, capitalism’s all right. But only someone who like Smith was free of serious engagement with his spiritual life could take such a relaxed and pop-psychological view. Right down to the present many businesspeople have insisted that God’s work comes first.¹³⁷ They are not always lying.

In modern times a strictly materialist hypothesis, the “hermeneutics of suspicion” à la Marx or Freud or Samuelson that dominates modern social science, strips away any ethics except prudence only. “Mr. Moneybags, I see through your phony sermonizing into your plot to accumulate, accumulate!” But such a stripping of ethics originates from the rhetorical habits of our social sciences, not from the facts. The economists Peter Boettke and Virgil Storr, again, complain that “economists discuss actors as if they have no families, are citizens of no countries, are members of no communities.” In the language of sociology, “individuals, in the hands of economists, are typically undersocialized, isolated creatures.”¹³⁸ By erroneously depicting businesspeople only as creatures of the restless stirring for gain we paradoxically take away the ethical limits on their greed. Go for it; greed is good, because after all you are merely a disgusting capitalist. A proud disgusting capitalist. The modern clerisy, left and right, scornful of the virtue of prudence, and attributing the corresponding sin of greed to anyone who watches his costs and considers his benefits, has thus returned to the anti-economic ethic of the desert fathers.

&Chapter 8:

Yet on the Whole the Bourgeoisies

Have Been Precarious

So the bourgeoisie is always with us. Yet bourgeoisies have usually been precarious. Braudel again chronicled the reluctant triumph of a business civilization: “as the years passed, the demands and pressures of everyday life [in Europe in early modern times] became more urgent. . . . So with a bad grace, it allowed change to force the gates. And the experience was not peculiar to the West." Even during the momentous turn 1300-1776 in Europe there were de-bourgeoisfications. The “knight-merchants” of venturing Portugal lost their influence at court, and did not create a bourgeois nation, though the nation was allied from 1386 on with what at length became an even more bourgeois England, arrayed against a fiercely aristocratic and increasingly anti-bourgeois Spain. The historical sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein noted that in Portugal in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries “there seemed to be advantage in the ‘discovery business’ for. . . the nobility, for the commercial bourgeoisie. . . [and] even for the semiproletariat.”¹³⁹ But except for obsessed figures like Prince Henry the Navigator himself, the heirs settled down to routine exploitation.¹⁴⁰

Venice came to be ruled by a quasi-aristocracy out of a total population of 100,000, the 500 men of the leading families who were permitted to have political careers, such as Shakespeare’s nobleman Bessanio (not that Shakespeare is a reliable source on Venetian politics, about which he knew nothing: his characters owe more to his views about bourgeois and aristocrat in London). The historian William McNeill observes that "by 1600, if not before, the [Venetian] republic came to be governed by a small clique of rentiers, who drew their income mainly from land, and to a lesser degree from office-holding itself. Active management of industry and commerce passed into the hands of domiciled foreigners [compare the metics of ancient Athens, or the Germans of Russia]. . . . The kind of commercial calculations that had governed Venetian state policy for centuries tended to lose persuasiveness. . . . The men who ruled Venice were no longer active in business, but devoted a large part of their official attention to regulating business behavior."¹⁴¹ The regulations killed innovation [