The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

by Max Weber

  If we take the latter position as our starting point, as we must do, and ask what significance should be attributed to this dogma in terms of its effects on cultural history, then the answer is that it must undoubtedly be rated very highly. [68] The cultural struggle [Kulturkampf] fought by Oldenbarnevelt4 was defeated by it, the division within the English Church became irreparable under James I owing to differences between the Crown and Puritanism over this very doctrine, and indeed it was primarily this aspect of Calvinism which was felt to be a danger to the state and was attacked by the authorities. The great synods of the seventeenth century, especially those of Dordrecht5 and Westminster,6 as well as numerous other smaller ones, put the elevation of this doctrine to canonical status at the center of their work; it has served as a rock to hold fast to for innumerable heroes of the “Church Militant.” We cannot ignore it, and, since it can no longer be assumed that every educated person is familiar with it, we must first acquaint ourselves with its authentic contents from the articles of the “Westminster Confession” of 1647. Both the Independent and the Baptist confessions of faith follow it closely on this point. [69]

  CHAPTER IX (OF FREE WILL)

  No. 3. Man, by his fall into a state of sin, hath wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation; so as a natural man, being altogether averse from that good, and dead in sin, is not able, by his own strength, to convert himself, or to prepare himself thereunto.

  CHAPTER III (OF GOD’S ETERNAL DECREE)

  No. 3. By the decree of God, for the manifestation of His glory, some men . . . are predestinated unto everlasting life, and others foreordained to everlasting death.

  No. 5. Those of mankind that are predestinated unto life, God, before the foundation of the world was laid, according to His eternal and immutable purpose, and the secret counsel and good pleasure of His will, hath chosen in Christ unto everlasting glory, out of His mere free grace and love, without any foresight of faith or good works, or perseverance in either of them, or any other thing in the creature, as conditions, or causes moving Him thereunto; and all to the praise of His glorious grace.

  No. 7. The rest of mankind, God was pleased, according to the unsearchable counsel of His own will, whereby He extendeth or withholdeth mercy as He pleaseth, for the glory of His sovereign power over his creatures, to pass by, and to ordain them to dishonour and wrath for their sin, to the praise of His glorious justice.

  CHAPTER X (OF EFFECTUAL CALLING)

  No. 1. All those whom God hath predestinated unto life, and those only, He is pleased, in His appointed and accepted time, effectually to call, by His word and Spirit, . . . Taking away their heart of stone, and giving unto them an heart of flesh; renewing their wills, and by His almighty power determining them to that which is good. . . .

  CHAPTER V (OF PROVIDENCE)

  No. 6. As for those wicked and ungodly men, whom God as a righ-teous judge, for former sins, doth blind and harden, from them He not only withholdeth His grace, whereby they might have been enlightened in their understandings, and wrought upon in their hearts; but sometimes also withdraweth the gifts which they had, and exposeth them to such objects as their corruption makes occasion of sin; and withal, gives them over to their own lusts, the temptations of the world, and the power of Satan: whereby it comes to pass, that they harden themselves, even under those means which God useth for the softening of others.

  “May I go to hell, but such a God will never compel my respect” was Milton’s famous judgment on the doctrine. [70] But we are not concerned with a value judgment, but with the historical position of the dogma. We can only briefly pause to consider the question of how this doctrine arose and what place it occupied in the patterns of thought within Calvinist theology. Two separate paths led to it. For the most active and passionate of those great men of prayer, such as have been known at many times in the history of Christianity since Augustine, the phenomenon of the feeling of religious redemption was linked with the conviction that they owed everything to the exclusive efficacy of an objective power, and nothing whatsoever to their own merit. The powerful feeling of joyful assurance that followed the tremendous tension of the sense of sin seemed to break over them totally unexpectedly and destroy any idea that this un-imaginable gift of grace could be due to any of their own efforts or have anything to do with the qualities of their own faith and will.

  That time of Luther’s greatest religious genius, when he was able to write “Die Freiheit eines Christenmenschen,” was the time when he held most firmly to the “secret decree” of God, which was to him the absolutely sole and fathomless source of his religious state of grace. [71] Later, he did not formally give this up—but the idea not only did not attain a central position in his thinking, it also increasingly faded into the background, the more he came under pressure from “realpolitik” as a responsible church politician. Melanchthon deliberately avoided including the “dangerous and obscure” doctrine in the Augsburg Confession, and the church fathers of Lutheranism held it as firm dogma that grace can be lost (amissibilis) but can then be won back by humble repentance and believing trust in God’s word and the sacraments.

  In the case of Calvin [72], the process was precisely the contrary. The significance of the doctrine grew markedly in the course of his po-lemical arguments with doctrinal opponents. Not until the third edition of his “Institutio” was it fully developed, and it was only in the great Kulturkämpfe, which the synods of Dordrecht and Westminster attempted to bring to a conclusion, that it gained centrality. For Calvin the “decretum horrible” was not something experienced, as for Luther, but conceptualized [erdacht]; it therefore attained progressively greater significance with every further twist of the logic of his arguments, which related solely to God, not to man. [73] God was not there for the sake of men, but men were there for the sake of God, and the exclusive purpose of all that happened—thus also the fact (about which Calvin was in no doubt) that only a small proportion of humanity was called to salvation—was to glorify the majesty of God. To apply the yardstick of earthly “justice” to his sovereign decrees was pointless and an affront to his majesty [74], since he, and he alone, was free, that is, subject to no law, and his decrees could only be understood or known in any way to the extent that he had seen fit to reveal them to us. These fragments of the eternal truth were all we had to hold on to; everything else—the purpose of our individual fate—was surrounded by dark mysteries which it would be impossible and presumptuous to inquire into.

  For the reprobate, for example, to complain about their fate as undeserved would be like the animals complaining because they were not born as men. For every creature was separated from God by an unbridgeable gulf and deserved only eternal death except in so far as he, for the greater glory of his majesty, had willed differently. All we could know was that one section of humanity would be saved, and the rest damned. To assume that human merit or fault had any influence on one’s fate would be to regard God’s absolutely free decisions, which had stood for all eternity, as capable of being changed by human influence—an impossible idea. The humanly comprehensible “Father in Heaven” of the New Testament, who rejoiced at the return of the sinner like a woman who had found a lost coin, had here become a transcendent being remote from any human understanding, a being who had allotted to each individual his destiny according to his entirely unfathomable decrees, and who controlled the tiniest detail of the cosmos [75]. Since his decrees were immutably fixed, those on whom he bestowed his grace could never lose it, just as those to whom he denied it could never attain it.

  This doctrine, with all the pathos of its inhumanity, had one princi-pal consequence for the mood of a generation which yielded to its magnificent logic: it engendered, for each individual, a feeling of tre-mendous inner loneliness. [76] In what was for the people of the Reformation age the most crucial concern of life, their eternal salvation, man was obliged to tread his path alone, toward a destiny which had been decreed from all eternity. No one and
nothing could help him. Not the preacher—for only the elect could spiritually understand the word of God. Not the sacraments—for although the sacraments were decreed by God for his greater glory and were therefore to be steadfastly observed, they were not a means of attaining the grace of God but were only subjective “externa subsidia” of faith. Not the Church—for although the principle “extra ecclesiam nulla salus”7 still applied, in the sense that anyone who remained apart from the true Church could never be among the elect of God [77], the reprobate also belonged to the (outward) Church, indeed they must belong to it and be subject to its discipline, not in order to attain salvation through it—that was impossible—but because they too must be compelled to abide by God’s commandments for his glory. Finally—not even God, for Christ had died for the elect alone; God had determined from all eternity that Christ’s sacrificial death should be for their benefit alone.

  Linked with the harsh doctrine of the absolute worthlessness and remoteness from God of all mere creatures, this inner isolation of man contained, on the one hand, the basis for the absolutely negative attitude of Puritanism toward all sensual and emotional elements in culture and subjective religiosity—because they were of no use for salvation and they fostered sentimental illusions and superstitious idolatry. It thus formed the basis for a fundamental rejection of every kind of culture of the senses. [78] On the other hand, however, it formed one of the roots of that disillusioned and pessimistically tinted individualism [79] which is still discernible in the “national character” and the institutions of the peoples with a Puritan past—in such striking contrast to the quite different viewpoint from which the “Enlightenment” later regarded men. In the period with which we are concerned, we find clear traces of the influence of the doctrine of election by grace on fundamental elements of the conduct [Lebensführung] and philosophy of life [Lebensanschauung], even where the dogma itself was losing its hold. It was, quite simply, only the most extreme form of that exclusive trust in God that we are here concerned to analyze. An example is the striking frequency of the warnings, especially in English Puritan literature, against placing any trust in the help and friendship of men. Even the gentle Baxter8 advises profound suspicion even of one’s closest friend, and Bailey goes so far as to recommend trusting no one and saying nothing compromising to anyone: God alone should have our confidence. [80] In striking contrast to Lutheranism, private confession, which worried Calvin himself only on account of its possible sacramental interpretation, was quietly dropped in the areas where fully developed Calvinism held sway.

  The Calvinist’s relationship with his God was carried on in profound inner isolation, despite the need to belong to the true Church for salvation. [81] An impression of the specific effects of this peculiar atmosphere can be gained from reading, in Bunyan’s9 Pilgrim’s Progress [82], by far the most widely read book in the whole of Puritan literature, the account of Christian’s behavior when he becomes aware that he is dwelling in the City of Destruction, and he hears the call to commence his pilgrimage to the Celestial City forthwith. Wife and children cling to him—but, running across the fields with his fingers in his ears, crying “Life, eternal life,” he rushes away. No polished writing could depict better than the naive sentiments of the imprisoned tinker, soon to earn worldwide acclaim, the mood of the Puritan believer who was basically concerned only with himself, and had thoughts only for his own salvation. Thus we see him engaged in unctuous discourse as he journeys with his traveling companions who are treading the same path, in scenes uncomfortably reminiscent of Gottfried Keller’s “Gerechte Kammacher.”10 Not until he himself is safe does it occur to him that it would be nice to have his family with him. It is the same tormenting fear of death and the afterlife as that experienced constantly and overpoweringly by Alfons von Liguori, as described by Döllinger. [83] All this is worlds away from the spirit of pride in this world, to which Machiavelli gives expression in his praise of those Florentine burghers for whom—in the struggle against pope and interdict—“patriotism was stronger than fear for the salvation of their souls.”11

  It seems at first a mystery as to how this tendency to inwardly release the individual from the very close ties with which the world held him in its embrace could be linked with the undoubted superiority of the social organization of Calvinism. [84] But this is precisely what follows, strange though it may seen, from the particular characteristics which Christian “charity” was forced to assume under pressure from the inner isolation of the individual resulting from the Calvinist conception of God. The world was destined to serve the self-glorification of God, and the Christian existed to do his part to increase the praise of God in the world by obeying his commands. God willed the social achievement of the Christian, because it was his will that the social structure of life should accord with his commands and be organized in such a way as to achieve this purpose. The social [85] work of the Calvinist in the world was merely work “in majorem gloriam Dei.” Labor in a calling, in the service of the secular life of the community, also shared this character. Luther himself spoke of specialized work in a particular calling [arbeitsteiligen Berufsarbeit] deriving from “Christian charity.” But what had been for him a tentative suggestion became for the Calvinists a characteristic part of their ethical system. “Christian charity” [Nächstenliebe]—since, after all, it was to serve only the glory of God, not that of the creature [86]—expressed itself principally in the fulfillment of the duties of the calling given through the lex naturae, and in this it took on a peculiarly neutral and impersonal character—one which served the rational structuring of the surrounding social cosmos. The wonderfully purposeful structuring and organization of this cosmos, which, according to the biblical revelation and equally according to natural insight, is evidently designed to be of “use” to the human race, shows that labor in the service of this social usefulness furthers the divine glory and is willed by God. Later, we shall be analyzing the significance of these points for the light they shed on the political and economic rationalism of Calvinism: the source of the utilitarian character of Calvinistic ethics lies here; important peculiarities of the Calvinist concept of the calling also originate from it. Now, however, we return once again to a particular consideration of the doctrine of predestination.

  The decisive question for us is how this doctrine was endured [87] during a period in which the next life was not only more important but in many respects was also more certain than all earthly concerns. [88] One question inevitably very soon arose for every single believer, and forced all other interests into the background: “Am I one of the elect? And how can I be certain of my election?” [89] For Calvin himself, this posed no problem. He felt himself to be an “instrument” [Rüstzeug] and was certain of his state of grace. Accordingly, his only answer to the question of how the individual could be sure of his election was basically that we should be satisfied with the knowledge of God’s decree and with the trust in Christ which comes through true faith. He fundamentally rejects the assumption that one can tell from the behavior of others whether they are elect or reprobate, calling it a presumptuous attempt to penetrate the mysteries of God. In this life the elect are indistinguishable from the reprobate [90], and even the subjective experiences of the elect—as “ludibria spiritus sancti”12—are possible for the reprobate too, with the sole exception of that persevering, faithful trust, finaliter. So the elect are and remain God’s invisible church.

  It was quite different for the epigones—this was already true of Beza13—and especially for the broad category of ordinary people. For these the “certitudo salutis,” in the sense of the possibility of recognizing one’s state of grace, necessarily became elevated to absolutely overriding importance, and so it is that wherever the doctrine of predestination was established, the question continued to be asked as to whether there were definite distinguishing features by which membership of the “electi” could be recognized. In the development of Pietism (which grew out of the Reformed Church), this
question continued to be of central importance, indeed in a certain sense was part of its constitution. And outside Pietism as well as within it, when we come to consider the (politically and socially so far-reaching) significance of the reformed doctrine and practice of the Communion, we shall also be discussing the importance, throughout the seventeenth century, of establishing an individual’s state of grace. This was necessary, for example, when deciding whether someone should be admitted to Communion, that is, to the central ritual of the church, a matter which was crucial for the social standing of the participants.

  As far as the question of one’s own state of grace was concerned, at least, it was impossible to rest content with Calvin’s reliance [91] on the witness of persevering faith effected by grace working in men, a reliance never formally abandoned by orthodox doctrine. [92] In particular, the practice of pastoral care, which had to deal with the torments created by the doctrine at every stage, could not be satisfied with it. It came to terms with these difficulties in various ways. [93] In cases where the doctrine of election by grace was not reinterpreted, moderated, or simply dropped [94], two related types of pastoral counseling emerged as typical. On the one hand, people were taught that they simply had a duty to regard themselves as elect, and to dismiss any doubts as a temptation from the devil [95], since lack of assurance was a result of inadequate faith, in other words, of the inadequate working of grace. The exhortation of the apostle to “make one’s own calling sure” was interpreted as a duty to strive for the subjective certainty of one’s election and justification in daily struggle. Instead of humble sinners, to whom Luther promised grace if they entrusted themselves to God in penitent faith, those self-assured “saints” were bred who were embodied in the steely [stahlhart] Puritan merchants of that heroic age of capitalism and are occasionally found right up to the present day. And, on the other hand, tireless labor in a calling was urged as the best possible means of attaining this self-assurance. [96] This and this alone would drive away religious doubt and give assurance of one’s state of grace.