The Protestant Work Ethic is Catholic
Culture and Commerce
People often consider the early medieval era to have been a bleak, superstitious age in which religion cast humanity into darkness. Hundreds of years later, the story goes, humanity escaped into a new dawn—the Renaissance—and then into the full light of day—the Enlightenment.
There certainly were problems in the medieval world, as in our times, but after the Roman empire broke into many pieces, and as the Christian worldview took root in Europe, people became weary of sculpting statues and erecting colonnades for pompous authoritarians soaking nude in Roman baths. Instead, they began to invent new technologies, improve farming, establish a multinational banking system, build the first universities, fill massive libraries with great books, compose beautiful music, and . . . launch capitalism.
“Freed from the grip of tyrants, the so-called Dark Ages saw an extraordinary outburst of innovation in both technology and culture,” writes Baylor University professor Rodney Stark in his book The Victory of Reason. “There was remarkable progress in areas of high culture—such as literature, art, and music. Moreover, new technologies inspired new organizational and administrative forms, culminating in the birth of capitalism within the great monastic estates” (p. 37).
You read that last line correctly; the birth of capitalism began with the monks. Motivated by theological convictions that God wanted humans to improve the world around them, theistic scientists, merchants, inventors, and monks strove through hard work and innovation to accumulate capital and, for fear of valuing mammon more than God, to reinvest the profit for the ongoing betterment of society.
The rise of this love-your-neighbor capitalism emerged from industrious and productive monastic estates operated by monks, from even before the sixth century. They generated profit from their manual labor, says Stark, and then reinvested the capital to develop new products, technologies, and healthcare designed to benefit the surrounding communities. Many European cities blossomed from these monastic estates.
By the thirteenth century, Europe’s financial system, technologies, and centers of learning had far outpaced the rest of the world. This remarkable progress occurred, says Stark, “because Christianity taught that progress was normal.” Compared to the Greco-Roman views, he added, “This was a revolutionary idea” (p. 55).
This progressive, future-oriented optimism, fueled by Catholic love-your-neighbor capitalism emphasized the theological importance of reinvesting capital into productive activities rather than hoarding wealth for self-interest. Profit was moral if it was applied in accordance with Old and New Testament warnings against greed.
This medieval approach to economics and commerce also transformed Europeans’ views about the nature of work, says Stark. During the Greek and Roman eras, philosophers and politicians—the guys in control—gave high value to “intellectual work” and strongly devalued manual labor. Work, as the Greek myth of Sisyphus portrays, was deemed to be a curse, something best left for those on the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. A caste system, in which slaves were seen as subhuman, caused the oppression of millions of people for centuries.
With the rise of the Jewish and Christian worldview, in which all humans have infinite worth, medieval Europeans began to think differently about work. Work, regardless of the type of labor, came to be seen as intrinsically virtuous and meaningful.
“Notions such as the dignity of labor or the idea that work is a virtuous activity were incomprehensible in ancient Rome,” Stark writes. “[The subsequent rise of capitalism] encouraged a remarkably different attitude toward work” (p. 62).
As Pope John Paul II stated, “The basis for determining the value of human work is not primarily the kind of work being done, but the fact that the one who is doing it is a person. . . . Such a concept does away with the ancient differentiation of people into classes according to the kind of work done” (quoted in The Meaning of Work, GCN Press, 2021).
Despite these changes, which started long before the arrival of “protestants,” sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) famously called this way of thinking about work as the “Protestant work ethic.” Stark bluntly states that Weber was wrong.
“Belief in the virtues of work and of simple living accompanied the rise of capitalism, and this was centuries before Martin Luther was born,” writes Stark (p. 62). It was St. Benedict in the sixth century who said, “Idleness is the enemy of the soul” and that the clergy “should have specified periods of manual labor as well as prayerful reading. . . . When they live by the labor of their hands, as our fathers and the apostles did, then they are really monks,” he wrote.
What about today? Do we still hold to these early views of capitalism and work, or have we slipped back into a Greco-Roman view? When we use the word “capitalism,” what do we mean? Is our view rooted in the Scriptures? Do we really believe, as the thirteenth-century monks did, that all honest work, regardless of the type of work being accomplished, is intrinsically valuable and meaningful?
We’ll leave these questions for you to ponder and (with civility please) discuss with your colleagues.