God is a Capitalist

by Roger McKinney

  Slavery had ceased being profitable, so many farmers freed their slaves. Along with the urban migrants, the free slaves rented land from the large landholders and grew their own food, a portion of which they paid in rent. Ludwig von Mises wrote in Human Action, “Italy and the provinces of the empire returned to a less advanced state of the social division of labor. The highly developed economic structure of ancient civilization retrograded to what is now known as the manorial organization of the Middle Ages.”

  The emperors responded to the deteriorating economy with greater enforcement of the maximum price laws, more debasement of the coins and heavier taxes, but they only accelerated the decay. “To him [Diocletian], and to his successors, only a command economy in which the government regulated nearly every aspect of economic life could provide the resources needed to maintain both the army and a newly expanded bureaucracy. All pretense of a free market was abandoned,” wrote Stephen Hause and William Maltby in Western Civilization: A History of European Society. The emperors destroyed their monetary system and as a result lost the ability to pay a professional army. They had to replace the army with militias made up of farmers who lived along the frontier. When the Romans had weakened themselves sufficiently, the barbarians invaded. The population of Italy declined from seven million in 200 AD to five million in 400 AD.

  After the barbarian invasions in Spain and Gaul, power shifted from Rome to the local German kings and the tax money followed. As Peter Brown wrote, “Once the farms and villages had broken loose from the tight net spread by the villa, it was next to impossible to extract from them the high level of wealth that had supported the affluent residences of the fourth-century age of gold.”

  The Eastern Roman Empire, known today as the Byzantine, lasted another thousand years, partly because the emperors never resorted to debasing the coins until the later centuries. The Byzantine Empire took great pride in its laws protecting private property, which later influenced the formation of European property laws. Still, property was insecure in the Eastern Empire, as well, for all but the governing elites. As if in imitation of the pharaohs, the Byzantine emperor enjoyed absolute power. He was not as god-like as pharaoh, but he was the next worst thing, the vicar of God on Earth. As such, he controlled the lives and property of his subjects and could punish or confiscate without appeal. Common sense restrained the exercise of this arbitrary power most of the time.

  Diocletian constructed a massive bureaucracy to enforce his commands. Succeeding emperors in the Eastern Roman Empire expanded the bureaucracy and regulated every aspect of economic, political, and religious life. It fixed prices and wages while preventing people from leaving their homes or occupations by installing a system of internal passports. Heavy taxes to pay for the bureaucracy, army and navy allowed only a few to rise above the poverty level. Escape from common poverty led through the military or the bureaucracy. In other words, Egyptians living 2,000 years earlier would have been quite at home in the Byzantine Empire.

  The immaculate conception of individualism

  Four centuries before the sack of Rome by barbarians, a carpenter from Nazareth had already planted the seeds of the destruction of Greek and Roman culture. Larry Siedentop wrote,

  The ancient doctrine of natural law was being revised to take account of belief in the incarnation, the idea that ‘God is with us’. For that belief removed the previous radical divide between divine agency (whether in the form of the ‘gods’ of polytheism or the Old Testament’s Yahweh) and human agency. The idea of the incarnation is the root of Christian egalitarianism.”

  Siedentop credits Paul for developing the idea of Christian liberty, which is a major theme of the books in the New Testament that the Apostle authored and one most fully developed by him. With the incarnation, God became accessible to everyone regardless of social status. As the Apostle John put it in the Book of Revelations, followers of Jesus became a “kingdom of priests.” The Emperor, one of whom would become a Christian centuries later, held no greater standing with God than did the lowest slave or poorest field hand. Believers did not have to go through a priest or the patriarch to reach God. And the roles into which they were born no longer limited their identities.

  In his letters to the churches, Paul insisted that God sees no difference between Jew and gentile, male and female, slave and freeman, rich and poor in terms of their access to him. All are equal before him. All mankind is God’s creation and all believers his children. Roman society had been built on the ancient Greek idea of natural inequality: some were born to rule and others to serve with gradations in between. The patriarch was the priest who provided access to the gods. Women were virtual slaves while slaves were cattle. Aristotle called slaves ‘living tools.’ Paul’s theme of Christian liberty destroyed the foundations which supported that hierarchical structure of society.

  Paul and the Apostles taught the ancient Jewish theology of a single God, not a superior god among many, as was Zeus, but the one and only God. Any other creature with the title of god did not actually exist. Monotheism threatened Roman society by erasing the many gods upon which it depended. Christianity threatened the gods that protected the cities and thus survival of the cities. Christians were called atheists not only because they refused to worship the pantheon of gods but because they denied their existence. As a result, pagans not only considered Christians unpatriotic, or idiots, but terrorists as well. Finally, Christians endangered the solidarity and peace of the Roman Empire by refusing to worship Caesar. Siedentop recognizes that few ideas in history have been as subversive to the dominant culture as early Christianity:

  Was Paul the greatest revolutionary in human history? Through its emphasis on human equality, the New Testament stands out against the primary thrust of the ancient world, with its dominant assumption of ‘natural’ inequality. Indeed, the atmosphere of the New Testament is one of exhilarating detachment from the unthinking constraints of inherited social roles. Hence Paul’s frequent references to “Christian liberty”.

  Luc Ferry teaches philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris and agrees with Siedentop. Although an atheist, he devotes chapter 3 of his book, A Brief History of Thought, to the Christian origins of modern liberty. Here are excerpts from that chapter:

  To explain further: the Greek world is an aristocratic world, one which rests entirely upon the conviction that there exists a natural hierarchy…of plants, of animals, but also of men: some men are born to command, others to obey, which is why Greek political life accommodates itself easily to the notion of slavery.

  It would be obtuse to try and pass from the Greek experience to modern philosophy without any mention of Christian thought.

  But there is more: by resting its case upon a definition of the human person and an unprecedented idea of love, Christianity was to have an incalculable effect upon the history of ideas. To give one example, it is quite clear that, in this Christian re-evaluation of the human person, of the individual as such, the philosophy of human rights to which we subscribe today would never have established itself.

  Christianity was to bring to ethical thought at least three novel ideas, none of which was Greek – or not essentially Greek – and all of which directly linked to the theoretical revolution we have just observed in action. These new ideas were arresting in their modernity. It is probably impossible for us, no matter how much effort we make, to imagine just how disruptive they must have seemed to contemporaries. The Greek world was fundamentally an aristocratic world, a universe organized as a hierarchy in which those most endowed by nature should in principle be ‘at the top’, while the less endowed saw themselves occupying inferior ranks. And we should not forget that the Greek city-state was founded on slavery.

  In direct contradiction, Christianity was to introduce the notion that humanity was fundamentally identical, that men were equal in dignity – an unprecedented idea at the time, and one to which our world owes its entire democratic inheritance.

  At the same time, the idea of the equal
dignity of all human beings makes its first appearance: and Christianity was to become the precursor of modern democracy. Although at times hostile to the Church, the French Revolution – and, to some extent, the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man – owes to Christianity an essential part of its egalitarian message.

  First century Christianity attacked traditional Roman and Greek culture from above by denying the gods that protected the cities and the superior status of the patriarchs. From below it undermined the foundation of that society by intentionally breaking up families. Jesus had said in Luke 14:26 "If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters – yes, even their own life – such a person cannot be my disciple.” And the record shows that the new faith did divide families.

  Early Christians put the family back together in the Church. In Acts, Christians shared their wealth with each other as if they were family. Paul tapped into the power of family bonds by urging Christians to think of each other as family members. In Romans 12:10 he wrote, “Be devoted to one another in love.” The word for love is philostorgoi. Most people are familiar with the Greek words for Godly love, agape, brotherly love, philos or philadelphia, and sexual love, eros. But Paul used a different word, philostorgoi, which refers to the natural love within a family between parents and children. And in I Timothy 5:8 Paul wrote, “Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” The process of converting a novel religion into an organizing principle of society would take fifteen centuries. This section includes only the highlights of Siedentop’s account.

  Christianity had an early impact on society with the response of Christians to persecution and execution by Roman authorities. Pagans paid attention. The martyrs insisted that they were willing to die for a relationship they found more valuable than that of family and that their relationship with God gave them a will of their own, not one dictated to them from the patriarch. Siedentop observed that,

  Martyrdom illustrated the exercise of an individual will, founded on conscience. It made that will visible.”

  In making martyrs of Christians, the ancient world was consecrating what it sought to destroy and destroying what it sought to preserve. For the Christian martyrs gained a hold over the popular imagination. And it is easy to see why that should have been so. The martyrs offered a model of heroism open to all, a democratic model of heroism...Thus an unintended consequence of the persecution of Christians was to render the idea of the individual, or moral equality, more intelligible. The glimpse of a depth of motivation, at once individual and potentially universal, was not easily forgotten.

  The next shock to the equilibrium of ancient Greek and Roman culture came from the development of monasticism. The earliest monastics had absorbed some of the Platonic contempt for the material world as well as the heresy of Gnosticism and the pagan mysticism of the cynics. They were mostly individuals who moved to the wilderness on the edge of town and lived as simply as possible, keeping body and soul together. Others joined them and eventually communities developed, but they were voluntary. Siedentop wrote,

  The first striking thing about that new identity was that its basis lay in voluntary association, in individual acts of will. This was a radical departure from the beliefs and practices of the ancient world. Family cult, civic status and servitude had been assigned by birth or imposed by force.

  Christianity continued to subvert traditional values and the structure of society as people began to see the monastic communities as more spiritual. Still, none of the monks intended to commit suicide. They needed food, water and shelter to live, simple as it might be, so they spent much of their day performing manual labor. Only slaves had done manual labor in the traditional Greek and Roman societies. That status conscious culture did all it could to avoid manual labor in order to prevent being seen as slaves. But monks, many of whom came from wealthy, aristocratic families, embraced manual labor. As a result, they rehabilitated labor according to Siedentop: “Work acquired a new dignity, becoming even a requirement of self-respect.” In other words, the Protestant work ethic imagined by Max Weber appeared a millennium before the term “Protestant.” Second and third century monks engaged in their own style of protest against materialism, the caste system, and sloth.

  Around the year 300 the Emperor Constantine embraced Christianity and ended persecution by the state. The Eastern Church fell under the domination of the emperor and remained subservient to the state until after its conquest by Muslims. As a result, Christian liberty had very little influence on the organization of society in the East where the ancient Greek and Roman structure based on hierarchies of status persisted. But the invasion of the barbarians in the West forced change.

  Christianity today in the U.S. is primarily a rural and suburban phenomenon, but for most of its history in Europe it was limited primarily to the cities and the middle class. When barbarians flooded into the weakened Roman Empire and set up their governments, the pagan patriarchs were killed or fled leaving the bishops of the towns as the de facto rulers of the people and intercessors with the conquerors. Bishops had earned their political power over the centuries by representing the common people to the emperor. After the fall of the Roman Empire, they represented the people to the German invaders and earned the respect of the new rulers because of their education, eloquence, and genuine concern to assist the new governors with understanding their conquered people and customs. The new rulers began sending their sons to local monasteries to become educated like the bishops and in the process the descendants were indoctrinated into the egalitarianism of Christian liberty. Gradually, Christian egalitarianism eroded the legitimacy of slavery until it disappeared from Europe except in the east under the Ottoman Empire.

  Charlemagne subjected the Church to the state as the Eastern Roman Empire had, but with his death the Church reasserted its sovereignty by inventing the concept of secularism. Kings and nobility had gained increasing control over the Church until they were appointing popes and bishops. The Church fought back after Charlemagne’s death by insisting that the Church needed to govern itself and be separate from the state because the Church represented God on earth and needed to be able to criticize kings and governments when they abused their citizens. Siedentop quoted one pope who wrote, “But it may be said, that kings are to be treated differently from others. We, however, know that it is written in the divine law, ‘You shall judge the great as well as the little and there shall be no difference of persons’.”

  Over time, the Church succeeded in achieving its independence from the civil rulers and creating two spheres of control – religion for the Church and all other matters for the civil government. As it has separated the roles of church and state, the Church initiated a revolution in science by exorcising ghosts from the physical world. Science had been chained for centuries to Aristotle’s physics in which material objects were categorized by their nobility and intentions. Led primarily by the influence of William of Ockham, church councils began to exorcise demons and demigods that had controlled the movement of objects in Aristotle’s world. Modern science began to develop by observing, testing theories, and using inductive reasoning.

  The churches had elected their bishops since the end of the period of the apostles and monasteries continued that tradition by having members elect their leadership. Christianity reformed cities as citizens began to see themselves as associations of equal individuals that elected their own government. Historians often credit the growth of cities in Europe for its economic development, but they fail to inform the reader that European cities enjoyed many advantages over cities in any other part of the world due to the Church’s long struggle to instantiate Christian individualism.

  That model, with its roots in the church and canon law, promoted egalitarianism by reinforcing the notion that the individual was the fundamental unit of legal subjection...There was a major difference between Europea
n and Islamic cities in that respect. Islamic cities developed, but they were never legally constituted. They grew, but they were never founded as autonomous legal entities.

  During the “Dark” Ages, the Church adopted and transformed the Stoic concept of natural rights to fit with Christian liberty. Under the Stoic concept, rights came from the status that nature had assigned different groups and those could not change. Patriarchs held all of the rights with slaves, children and wives having none. The Church reconstructed natural rights along individual lines where they came to mean the sphere of action and belief that neither the state nor the Church could infringe upon. The incarnation “lies behind the transformation of the ancient doctrine of natural law into a theory of natural rights.” By 1300, property, consent to government, self-defense, marriage, procedural rights and even the rights of infidels to be left in peace were defended as natural. Eventually, these would be boiled down to the formula of the rights to life, liberty and property.

  With the dawn of the fifteenth century, the foundation for what became known as liberalism – “belief in a fundamental equality of status as the proper basis for a legal system; belief that enforcing moral conduct is a contradiction in terms; a defense of individual liberty through the assertion of fundamental or ‘natural’ rights; and, finally, the conclusion that only a representative form of government is appropriate for a society resting on the assumption of moral equality” – had been firmly established in Europe. Siedentop adds that the words “individual” and “state” first appear commonly in dictionaries in the fifteenth century. The ideas were in place, but Europe still awaited a nation to instantiate them. That would happen in the Dutch Republic.