by Peter Watson
What links potlatch with the other practices described in this chapter – though perhaps not too much should be made of this – is the concern with status, with rank. With the emergence of chiefdoms, and early states, status in the New World became a major concern. Warfare, or a concern with warfare, was widespread but in a world without the horse, or the wheel, wars were localised and, because all transport was on foot, it was much harder to hold on to territory gained in conflict (when that was the aim, which it wasn’t always). Polities therefore remained small and people did not, by and large, exchange ideas about each other’s gods. Everyone kept much more to themselves and there were no large-scale conflicts over wide areas, as there were in the Old World, stemming from the wide distribution and changing environmental conditions of the horse-riding pastoral nomads. There were no ‘international’ languages, like Arabic or Latin, to allow people to move freely across wide areas.
There is one other reason why potlatch deserves its place in this chapter. Its very existence shows that food was abundant on the northwest Pacific coast, thanks to the teeming salmon rivers discussed in chapter 14. This contrasts with the Mesoamerican civilisations, where the differences in height and diet which separated the nobility from the commoners shows that food, and food surpluses, were much more of a problem and a factor in hierarchy. This serves to remind us that ‘civilisation’ is not always the ‘advance’ it is made out to be. It also helps us understand the painful religious rituals of the Mesoamericans which were designed, as much as anything, to maintain social divisions and reinforce the privileges of the rulers and nobility. Pain, on this understanding, was a form of propaganda.
Possibly the most important point to be raised in the last two chapters is the link between religion, war and elite status. The lengths that the New World elites went to, in order to maintain their privileged status, even pursuing warfare so as to manipulate threat levels, is extraordinary and distinctive. As introduced in the previous chapter, this seems related to the basic nature of religion in the New World: the widespread threat of ‘supernatural’ forces, such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes and so on which were impossible to control, whereas war, to an extent, was. This trajectory is taken further in chapter 23.
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MONASTERIES AND MANDARINS, MUSLIMS AND MONGOLS
In chapter 18 we explored how monotheism evolved in the Old World and what some of the more important consequences were, producing phenomena which never occurred in pre-Columbian America. In the early development of monotheism, the experiences and ideas of the Israelites – the nomadic pastoralist Hebrews – stood out. However important that development was, historically speaking, many historians now take the view that it was the advent of Christianity – the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus – that was, intellectually speaking, the more important development in the long run. They argue this because, according to them, the Christian concept of God, although it may have begun as a new way of trying to be Jewish, became over time even more radically different from anything else that had gone before. It was, on this account, and according to a raft of figures which includes St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas, A.N. Whitehead, Henri Pirenne, Ernest Gellner, John Gilchrist, David Lindberg and Rodney Stark, why Europe forged ahead in the millennium and a half leading up to Columbus’s discovery of the New World.
On this view, theology – as we understand it in the modern world – can exist only where human beings embrace the view that there is but one God and that He (invariably a He) is a rational creature, as understood by the Greeks. On this view, the modern world – the world that discovered the Americas – is made possible only by an environment in which classical Greek rationalism is taken over by a Christian understanding of a rational God.
Rodney Stark has put the case most bluntly in his recent book, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism and Western Success (2005). He begins by arguing that the gods of polytheism ‘cannot sustain theology because they are far too inconsequential’. Indeed, theology cannot exist unless we accept that God is conscious and rational, a supernatural being of unlimited power and scope, ‘who cares about human beings and imposes moral codes and responsibilities on them’. Only in this way do such questions arise as why sin is allowed to exist or when does an infant acquire a soul.1 To underline his case, Stark argues that there are no theologians in the East. Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism, for example, envisage ‘the way’ or ‘nirvana’ but these are unsatisfactory phenomena, he says – one might meditate ‘for ever’ on such an essence but there is little to reason about, whereas in the West, as David Lindberg put it, God is the epitome of reason. Ernest Gellner agreed, adding that although the development of the ‘Transcendental’ was a wholly new stage in human thought, it yet required a figure like Jesus, a divine intervention in history, because ‘men may dread a high god, but they will not quake before a high concept . . . abstractions will not inspire awe’.2 This is the role of miracles, so much more important in Christianity than other religions. So too is free will.
Only with Christianity, beginning with St Augustine in the fifth century, do we encounter the idea that God has given us free will. This is an enormous innovation because at a stroke it vitiates such ideas as astrology and fatalism. As a direct result, new doctrines are allowed to emerge on the basis of reason. As Clement of Alexandria warned in the third century, ‘Do not think that we say these things are only to be received by faith, but also that they are to be asserted by reason. For indeed it is not safe to commit these things to bare faith without reason, since assuredly truth cannot be without reason.’3
Christianity stands out because, unlike Muhammad or Moses, ‘whose texts were accepted as divine transmissions and therefore have encouraged literalism’, Jesus wrote nothing, so that the church fathers were required to reason about the meanings of his remembered sayings: the New Testament is an anthology, not a unified scripture, like the Qu’ran. As a direct result, a ‘theology of deduction’ began with Paul, who accepted that ‘our knowledge is imperfect and our prophesy is imperfect’. This is to be contrasted with the second verse of the Qu’ran, which proclaims itself ‘the Scripture whereof there is no doubt’.4
What this implies, therefore, is that, from the beginning, Christian theologians subscribed to the view that the application of reason can yield an increasingly accurate understanding of God’s will. This is a crucial difference between Christianity and other faiths, what Gellner called its ‘socially fertile anxiety’.5 Augustine, early on, noted that although there were ‘certain matters pertaining to the doctrine of salvation that we cannot yet grasp . . . one day we shall be able to do so’, a view which still obtained in the thirteenth century when Gilbert of Tournai wrote, ‘Never will we find truth if we content ourselves with what is already known . . .’ It followed, therefore, on this account, that Christians, much more than those of other faiths, were committed to progress through rational means, a doctrine which reached its apex in the Summa Theologiae of St Thomas Aquinas, published in Paris in the late thirteenth century. This attempt to arrive at ‘logical proofs’ of Christian doctrine assumed also that God was the epitome of reason, one of the important side-effects being that the bible ‘is not to be understood always literally’.6
Throughout the Middle Ages, therefore, the idea flourished that a rational God – a god who favoured an orderly and unified Nature – gradually revealed himself as humans gained the capacity to better understand. Indeed, given that the universe is God’s personal creation, it ‘necessarily’ had a rational, lawful, orderly stable structure, awaiting increased human comprehension. This was the key to everything that happened in Christendom and is why, according to scholars like White-head, Nathan Sivin (University of Pennsylvania) and Joseph Needham (University of Cambridge), real science arose only once, in Europe. ‘Only in Europe did alchemy develop into chemistry. Only in Europe did astrology develop into astronomy.’ Whitehead was just one who said the ‘widespread faith
in the possibility of science . . . [was] derivative from medieval theology . . . [that] there is a secret, a secret which can be unveiled . . . It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God.’ Whitehead insisted that the gods of other religions, especially in Asia, ‘are too impersonal or too irrational to have sustained science’. On this account, science arose as the handmaiden of theology.*
In China, for example and in contrast, the mandarins prided themselves on following ‘godless’ religions, where the supernatural was understood as an ‘essence’ or ‘principle’ governing life – such as the Tao. In marked contrast to Christian theologians, Joseph Needham, in his massive Cambridge-based study of Chinese science, concluded that Chinese intellectuals ‘pursued “enlightenment”, not explanations’. In China, ‘the conception of a divine celestial lawgiver imposing ordinances on non-human Nature never developed.’7 Mott T. Greene agreed: ‘It is a characteristic of enlightened knowledge that it cannot be put into words.’8
Likewise with the Greeks where, says the historian A.R. Bridbury, such figures as Parmenides conceived the universe as being in a static state of perfection. Platonic idealism, in particular, acted against the idea of change or innovation, and much the same was true of Islam, where all attempts to formulate natural laws were condemned as blasphemous, because they denied Allah’s freedom to act. Moreover, as Caesar Farah put it, Arabic intellectuals treated Greek learning almost as holy scripture, to be believed rather than tested and investigated. This too was in marked contrast to Christian scholars who, by the time they encountered Aristotle and other Greeks, had, as Nathan Sivin and Geoffrey Lloyd have shown, acquired the habit of disputation.9
Politically and morally (psychologically), Christianity focused on the individual – the idea that sin was a personal matter promoted individualism and at the same time the idea of moral freedom, that actions have consequences. ‘Most important of all was the doctrine of free will. Unlike the Greek and Roman gods, who did not concern themselves with human misbehaviour (other than failures to propitiate them in an appropriate manner), the Christian god is a judge who rewards virtue and punishes sin . . . The God that treats all equally is fundamental to the Christian message: all may be saved.’ Pope Callistus (died 236) had been a slave.
Another important corollary of the doctrine of free will was that, in theory at least, theologians could propose new doctrines without provoking charges of heresy. Christianity, of course, was not always as tolerant as this makes it sound but, at the same time, ‘To say that sages or saints in times past may have had imperfect or limited understanding of religious truth is rejected out of hand by Buddhists, Confucianists, Hindus and Muslims.’10
RELIGIOUS CAPITALISM
A second – and perhaps still surprising influence of Christianity – was on the development of capitalism, beginning early in the ninth century. This was an achievement of Catholic monks in the great monasteries who made a number of innovations despite having put aside worldly things. Their motivation was a concern to ensure the continued economic security of what were becoming vast monastic estates.
Augustine had been one early source who had taught that wickedness was ‘not inherent’ in commerce. As with any activity, he said, it was up to the merchant to live within the church’s teaching. But by the ninth century, as a result of several technological changes discussed immediately below, monastic estates were no longer operating on subsistence agriculture. Rather, they became increasingly specialised and found themselves able to sell their produce at a profit, which brought with it a cash economy. They found a ready outlet for the reinvested profits with noble families, to whom they became, in effect, a form of bank. And it was this financial creativity of the monasteries, what the American sociologist Randall Collins called ‘religious capitalism’, which turned them into an institution that provided the backbone of the medieval economy.
It was helped by the fact that, throughout the medieval era, the church was by far the largest landowner in Europe, its liquid assets and annual income far surpassing not only those of the wealthiest king but probably that of all Europe’s nobility added together. As well as receiving many gifts of land, as endowments, the orders reclaimed still more poor land, by drainage, resulting in extensive property holdings over a large area. Cluny may have had a thousand priories by the eleventh century but it was far from being the only behemoth: it was by no means uncommon for monasteries to establish fifty or more outposts. As Paul Johnson has pointed out, many Cistercian houses farmed 100,000 acres or more.11
Some monasteries specialised in wine, others in fine horses, others in grain, still others in sheep and cattle. On to this early system were grafted three more important developments. One, a meritocratic management system appeared with talented administrators able to make plans for the future. Next, there was the all-important shift from barter to cash – a transformation that occurred mainly in the ninth century.12 Third, there arose the phenomenon of credit. Cash and interest were easy enough to understand and calculate and the historian Lester K. Little has shown how a monastery like Cluny, for example, was able, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, to lend huge sums to Burgundian nobles. In turn this gave rise by the thirteenth century to mortgages, a system in which the borrower pledged land as security, with the lender (the monastery) collecting all income on that land during the course of the agreement. In the event of default, the monastery acquired yet more land.
Nor was this all. On top of everything, the monks offered their liturgical services, for which they also charged, further adding to their income, ‘raising it to luxury levels’, says Lutz Kaelbar. (Henry VII of England, for example, paid for no fewer than 10,000 masses to be said for the state of his soul.) One knock-on effect of this was that the monasteries were now able to hire their own labour for the fields they owned so that, by the thirteenth century, ‘many monasteries resembled modern firms’ – well administered and quick to respond to changes in the market or in technology. This in itself was a marked evolution in ideology.
Just how important this change was may be seen by comparing the Christian attitude to work that emerged in the monasteries with, say, the Chinese mandarinate, ‘who grew their nails to fantastic lengths to emphasise they did no manual work’. The developing Christian attitude was supported by doctrinal advances – Aquinas, for example, declared that profits were ‘morally legitimate’, and even found time to justify interest rates. In other words, as Stark puts it, the church made its peace with capitalism, mainly because the church’s own institutions were doing so well out of it.
It would be truer to say, probably, that the church reinvented capitalism, in that Rome at its peak had been a successful fully monetarised economy; and although many scholars have stopped using the Dark Ages as a concept, there seems no doubt that standards of living did drop markedly between AD 400 and 900. (A hoard found at Hoxne in Suffolk in Great Britain from the late Roman Empire had 14,000 coins, while the Sutton Hoo treasure a few miles away and dated to two centuries later had 40.)13
If the church had moved a long way in terms of economics, it also played an important role in providing a moral basis for democracy, certainly far beyond anything envisaged by classical philosophers. Bernard Lewis, the great Western scholar of Islam, has conceded that the idea of a separation of church and state ‘is in a profound sense Christian’, something that could not exist in the Muslim world. ‘In most other civilisations religion was so much an aspect of the state that rulers often were regarded as divine.’ But Jesus himself, in the New Testament, stipulated the separation of church and state: ‘Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.’ Paul further argued that Christians should always obey secular rulers, unless ordered to violate a commandment. Augustine believed that states were necessary to maintain an orderly society, but still lacked overall legitimacy – as he put it, ‘What are kingdoms but great robberies?’14 The divine right of kings was nowhere endorsed by th
e church and, in fact, by insisting on the secularity of kingship, the church improved its position and yet made it possible to highlight the natural history of worldly power, of what would come to be called realpolitik.
There was one final factor concerning the interaction of the church and the European landscape that would prove fundamental. As the economic historian Eric Jones (among others) has pointed out, Europe’s physical layout – mountains, many rivers, peninsulas, islands, inland seas – resulted in a continent with a host of small political units: during the fourteenth century there were about a thousand independent statelets in Europe which had three important consequences. In the first place, it made for weak rulers alongside which the centralised papacy was welcomed as a strength (see immediately below). Second, this great diversity and endemic weakness made for intense creative competition. Third, the great number of political entities meant that there were many other places people could go if they couldn’t get on where they were. It was a state of affairs that made for at least some very responsive governments. Well-led, smaller statelets played off imperial, papal and Byzantine ambitions, added to which the independent developments in trade produced a wide dispersion of power, all of which strengthened the hold of the nobility, clergy and military elements, of the traders, bankers, manufacturers and workers guilds rather than centralised monarchs with top-heavy bureaucracies. Thus arose the twin developments of post-religious capitalism and an early form of democracy, most vividly seen in the Italian republics of Venice, Milan, Florence, Lucca, Pisa and Genoa.15
