The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

by Max Weber

  “Only in this way (by the mystical union with God in the night before falling asleep) is the mind purified and the brain strengthened and all day long man is disposed in a more peaceful and godly state from the inward exercise of being truly united with God. Then all his works are ordered. And so when man has been forewarned of (i.e., prepared for) his work and has directed his thoughts to virtue, then the works will be virtuous and godly” (Predigten, folio 318).

  It is evident that mystical contemplation and rational asceticism in the calling are not mutually exclusive. They can only be so where religiosity assumes an obviously hysterical character, which was not the case for the mystics or even for all the Pietists.

  99) At this point Calvinism and Catholicism meet. But for Catholics the consequence is the necessity of the sacrament of penance, while for reformed Christians it is the necessity of practically proving oneself by working within the world.

  100) Thus, for example, Beza: [De praedestinationis doctrina et vero usu tractatio [ . . . ] ex [ . . . ] praelectionibus in nonum Epistolae ad Romanos caput, a Raphaele Eglino [ . . . ] excepta (Geneva 1582)], p. 133: “. . . sicut ex operibus vere bonis ad sanctificationis donum, a sanctificatione ad fidem . . . ascendimus: ita excertis illis effectis non quamvis vocationem et ex electione donum praedestinationis in Christo tam firmam quam immotus est Dei thronus certissima connexione effectorum et causarum colligimus. . . .” Only with regard to the signs of damnation must one be cautious, as this concerned the final condition. (In this matter only Puritanism held a different view.)

  See also the detailed comments of Schneckenburger, op. cit., who, however, quotes only a limited category of literature. This theme is common throughout Puritan literature. “It will not be said: Did you believe? but: Were you Doers, or Talkers only?” says Bunyan. According to Baxter (The Saints’ Everlasting Rest, chap. 12), who teaches the mildest form of predestination, faith is subjection to Christ in heart and deed. “Do what you are able first, and then complain of God for denying you grace if you have cause” is how he replied to the objection that the will was not free and that God was withholding the ability to obtain salvation (Works of the Puritan Divines, vol. 4, p. 155). Similarly, Howe, in the passage quoted elsewhere (note 132). Frequently, it is Catholic ascetic writings that led to “conversion” to Puritanism—thus for Baxter it was a Jesuit tract.

  101) Something has already been said [in this volume footnote on page 75.] about the significance of this for the material content of social ethics. For the moment, we are not concerned about the content, but about the motivation to moral action.

  102) It is easy to see how this idea encouraged the penetration of the Old Testament Jewish spirit into Puritanism.

  103) Charnock, “A Principle of Goodness” in the Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 175.

  104) Conversion, as Sedgwick occasionally expresses it, is an “identical copy of the decree of election by grace.” And Bailey teaches that “whoever is chosen is also called to obedience and enabled.” Hanserd Knolly’s (Baptist) Confession teaches that only those whom God has called to faith (a faith which is expressed in the manner of life) are true believers, rather than mere “temporary believers.”

  105) Compare, for example, the conclusion of Baxter’s Christian Directory.

  106) Thus, for example, in Charnock, Self-Examination, p. 183, to refute the Catholic doctrine of “dubitatio.”

  107) This argument is found (for example) again and again in J. Hoornbeek, Theologica practica, e.g., vol. 2, pp. 70, 72, 182, and vol. 1, p. 160.

  108) For example, the Confessio Helvetica 16 says “et improprie his (good works) salus adtribuitur.”

  109) On all the foregoing, see Schneckenburger, pp. 80f.

  110) Augustine is supposed to have said “Si non es praedestinatus fac ut praedestineris.”

  111) One is reminded of Goethe’s saying, which is essentially similar in meaning, “Wie kann man sich selbst kennen lernen? Durch Betrachten niemals, wohl aber durch Handeln. Versuche, deine Pflicht zu tun, und du weiβt gleich, was an dir ist. Was aber ist deine Pflicht? Die Forderung des Tages.” [“How can one know oneself? Never by contemplation, but through action. Try to do your duty and you will know at once what sort of man you are. But what is your duty? Whatever the day demands.”]

  112) For although Calvin states that “holiness” must make its appearance (Institutio, vol. 4, I, par. 2, 7, 9), the boundary between sanctified and unsanctified remains unfathomable for the human mind. We must believe that where the pure word of God is preached in a church organized and administered according to his law, some of the elect will be present—even if we cannot recognize them.

  113) Calvinist piety is an example of the relationship that exists between certain religious ideas and the consequences for practical religious conduct arising logically and psychologically from these ideas. Logically, of course, fatalism could be deduced as a consequence of predestination; but as a result of the idea of “proof” [Bewährung] coming into play, the psychological effect was precisely the opposite. Hoornbeek neatly expounds this—in the language of the period (Theologica practica, vol. 1, p. 159): The elect are, by virtue of their very election, invulnerable to fatalism. In fact, they prove themselves precisely in their rejection of fatalistic consequences, “quos ipsa electio sollicitos reddit et diligentes officiorum.” On the other hand, however, religious ideas—as Calvinism demonstrates particularly well—are of far greater significance than someone like William James (The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902, pp. 444f.) is inclined to admit. The significance of rationality in religious metaphysics is classically shown in the far-reaching effects which the idea of the reformed concept of God has exercised on life. If the God of the Puritans has had an effect in history like no other before or after him, this is thanks to the attributes with which the power of the idea has equipped him. James’s “pragmatic” evaluation of the significance of religious ideas according to the degree to which they have been “proved” in life, is, by the way, itself a true child of that Puritan set of ideas in which this outstanding scholar is at home.

  Religious experience as such is, of course, irrational, like every experience. In its highest, mystical, form it is indeed the experience κατ’ ὲξοχὴν and—in James’s fine description—is distinguished by its absolute incommunicability. It has a specific character and appears as knowledge, but cannot be adequately reproduced by means of our linguistic and conceptual apparatus. It is also true to say that every religious experience loses substance as soon as an attempt to formulate it rationally is made, the more so, the further the process of conceptual formulation has advanced. Herein lies the basis of the tragic conflicts of all rational theology, as the Baptists sects knew as early as the seventeenth century.

  This irrationality, however—which, by the way, is by no means exclusive to religious experience, but is common to every kind, although in different sense and degree—does not alter the fact that the nature of the system of ideas that, so to speak, seizes and directs the immediate religious “experience” in its own paths, is of the greatest practical significance. It is this that determines the majority of those important practical ethical differences in the various world religions.

  114) Baxter, The Saints’ Everlasting Rest, vol. 1, p. 6, replies to the question “Whether to make salvation our end be not mercenary or legal?” “It is properly mercenary when we expect it as wages for work done. . . . Otherwise it is only such a mercenarism as Christ commandeth . . . and if seeking Christ be mercenary, I desire to be so mercenary.” Furthermore, examples of a collapse into crass “justification by works” [Werkheiligkeit] can be found even among some Calvinists who were regarded as orthodox. According to Bailey, Praxis pietatis, p. 262, giving alms is a means of averting temporal punishment. Other theologians recommended good works to the reprobate on the grounds that damnation might be thereby rendered a little more bearable. They recommended them to the elect, however, because God would then no longer love them
for no reason, but ob causam, which would in some way be duly rewarded. Apologists had already made small concessions to those who argued that good works affected the degree of blessedness enjoyed (Schneckenburger, op. cit., p. 101).

  115) Here, too, in order to bring out the characteristic differences, we have to employ the concept of the “ideal type,” even though to some extent it does violence to the historical reality. Without it, the amount of qualification necessary would make any clear formulation impossible. The extent to which the antitheses, which have here been sharply drawn, are in fact only relative, will be discussed later.

  116) Compare, for example, Sedgwick, Buβ- und Gnadenlehre (German translation by Röscher, 1689): The penitent man has “a firm rule,” to which he strictly adheres, and according to which he organizes and lives his whole life (p. 591). He lives—wisely, watchfully and prudently,—according to the law (p. 596). Only a lasting transformation of the whole man, a consequence of election, can achieve this (p. 852).

  As Hoornbeek (among others) puts it (op. cit., vol. 9, chap. 2), the difference between works that are only “morally” good and “opera spiritualia” lies in the fact that the latter are the fruit of a regenerate life, and that (op. cit., vol. 1, p. 160) constant progress is observable which can only be achieved through the supernatural working of the grace of God (op. cit., p. 150). Sanctification is the transformation of the whole man through the grace of God (ibid., pp. 190f.). These ideas are, of course, common to the whole of Protestantism, but only reach their logical conclusion in the ascetic branches of the Church.

  117) The latter name is, however, according to Voët, derived from the life of the “fine ones” of Holland, which was led precisely according to the teachings of the Bible. The name of “Methodists” was also occasionally applied to the Puritans in the seventeenth century.

  118) For, as the Puritan preachers emphasize (e.g., Bunyan in “The Pharisee and the Publican,” Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 126): each individual sin destroys everything that might have been accumulated in the course of an entire life in the way of “merit” through “good works,” if (unthinkably) man were capable of achieving anything that God might account as worthy of merit, or indeed if he were to lead a perfect life. Unlike Catholicism, there is not some kind of current account with a credit and debit balance, but for one’s whole life there is just the stark “either or”: either a state of grace or damnation. On the other hand, see below, note 140.

  119) This is what distinguishes the saint from mere “Legality” and “Civility,” companions of Mr. “Worldly-Wiseman” in Bunyan’s allegory, who dwell in the city called “Morality.”

  120) Charnock, Self-Examination (Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 172): “Reflection and knowledge of self is a prerogative of a rational nature.” And the footnote to this: “Cogito ergo sum is the first principle of the new philosophy.”

  121) This is exactly how (for example) the article Ascese in the Catholic Kirchenlexikon defines it, in complete concordance with its highest historical manifestations. Similarly, Seeberg in the Realenzyklopädie für Protestantische Theologie und Kirche.

  122) So it is in the many reports of the interrogations of the Puritan heretics in Neal’s History of the Puritans and in Crosby’s English Baptists.

  123) Sanford, op. cit. (as well as many others before and afterward), traced the origin of the ideal of “reserve”3 back to Puritanism. Compare also, on this subject, the remarks of James Bryce on the American college in volume 2 of his American Commonwealth.

  The ascetic principle of “self-control” also gave Puritanism a claim to be the father of modern military discipline. (On Moritz of Orange as the creator of modern military institutions, see Roloff, Preuβische Jahrbücher, 1903, vol. 3, p. 255). If Cromwell’s “Ironsides,” their pistols cocked and held at the ready, but not fired, trotting toward the enemy at a brisk pace, were superior to the “Cavaliers,” this was not the result of any frenzied fanaticism, but rather of their sober self-control, thanks to which their leader was able to keep them in hand, while the gallant and fiery attacks of the Cavaliers always ended with their own troops being scattered to the four winds. More can be read on this in Firth, Cromwell’s Army.

  124) See especially Windelband, Über Willensfreiheit, pp. 77f.

  125) Only not in such undiluted form. Contemplation, occasionally linked to emotionality, is intermingled with these rational elements in various ways. On the other hand, however, contemplation is itself methodically regulated.

  126) According to Richard Baxter, everything that is against “reason,”4 with which God has endowed us to set a standard, is sinful—not just passions which are sinful in themselves, but all emotions as such which are in any way lacking in purpose or restraint, because they destroy the “countenance”5 and, as things of the flesh distract us from the rational reference of all our action and feeling to God, and insult him. Compare also what is said about the sinfulness of anger (Christian Directory, 2nd ed., 1678, vol. 1, p. 285. Tauler is quoted on p. 287). On the sinfulness of fear ibid. p. 287, col. 2. In ibid., vol. 1, p. 310, and p. 316, col. 1, and frequently elsewhere it is emphatically stated that it is idolatry when our appetite is the “rule and measure of eating.”6 In support, the Book of Proverbs is most often quoted, followed by Plutarch’s De tranquillitate animi, also not infrequently the medieval ascetic writings of Saint Bernardine, Saint Bonaventura et al. The contrast with “He who loves not wine, women and song . . .” could scarcely be more clearly expressed than by the extension of the concept of idolatry to all pleasures of the senses, unless they can be justified on hygienic grounds, in which case they are permitted (as is sport, within these limits, as well as other “recreations”). We shall have more to say about this below.

  127) See especially the article “Moralisten, englische,” by E. Troeltsch, Realenzyklopädie für Protestantische Theologie und Kirche, 3rd ed.

  128) The extent to which quite concrete religious elements, which appear to be “historical chance,” operated, is shown particularly clearly by the fact that, in the Pietist circles which arose on the basis of the Reformed Church, the absence of monasteries (for ex-ample) was sometimes actually regretted, and that the “communist” experiments of Labadie et. al. were merely a surrogate for monastic life.

  129) This was even done in some of the confessions of the reformation age itself. Ritschl, too (Pietismus, vol. 1, pp. 258f.), even though he regards the later development as a distortion of the reformed idea, does not deny (e.g., Conf. Gall. 25 and 26, Conf. Belg. 29, Conf. Helv. Post. 17) that, for example, “the Reformed Particular Church is defined by quite empirical characteristics, and that the faithful are not counted as belonging to this true Church unless they possess the characteristics of moral activity.” (See above note 91.)

  130) “Bless God that we are not of the many” (Thomas Adams, Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 138).

  131) The historically so important idea of the “birthright”8 was given a considerable boost by this: “The first born which are written in heaven. . . . As the first born is not to be defeated in his inheritance and the enrolled names are never to be obliterated, so certainly shall they inherit eternal life” (Thomas Adams, Works of the Puritan Divines, p. xiv).

  132) The Lutheran attitude of contrition and repentance is in practice (though not perhaps in theory) inwardly foreign and ethically worthless to Calvinism. Neither is it of any use to the reprobate. For the man who is sure of his election, the sin to which he himself may admit is a symptom of retarded development and incomplete sanctification, which, instead of repenting of, he hates and endeavors to overcome to the glory of God. Compare the thoughts of Howe (Cromwell’s chaplain 1656–58) in “Of men’s enmity against God and of reconciliation between God and Man,” Works of the English Puritan Divines, p. 237: “The carnal mind is enmity against God. It is the mind, therefore, not as speculative merely, but as practical and active, that must be renewed.” Ibid, p. 246: “Reconciliation . . . must begin in (1) a
deep conviction . . . of your former enmity. . . . I have been alienated from God . . . (2) (p. 251) a clear and lively apprehension . . . of the monstrous iniquity and wickedness thereof.” Here only hatred of the sin, not the sinner, is spoken of. But the celebrated letter of the Duchess Renata of Este (the mother of “Leonora”) to Calvin—in which she speaks, inter alia, of the hatred she would feel against her father and her husband if she were convinced that they were among the reprobate—illustrates how this can be transferred to the person, and is, at the same time, an example of what was said above [this volume p. 74ff.] about how the doctrine of election by grace can inwardly free the individual from the ties of community formed by “natural” feeling.