23. And in a similar, though naturally less sharp, contrast to the later Catholic doctrine. The deep pessimism of Pascal, which also rests on the doctrine of predestination, is, on the other hand, of Jansenist origin, and the resulting individualism of renunciation by no means agrees with the official Catholic position. See the study by Honigsheim on the French Jansenists, referred to in Chap. III. note 10.
24. The same holds for the Jansenists.
25. Bailey, Praxis pietatis (German edition, Leipzig, 1724), p. 187. Also P. J. Spener in his Theologische Bedenken (according to third 222 Notes edition, Halle, 1712) adopts a similar standpoint. A friend seldom gives advice for the glory of God, but generally for mundane (though not necessarily egotistical) reasons. "He [the knowing man] is blind in no man's cause, but best sighted in his own. He confines himself to the circle of his own affairs and thrusts not his fingers into needless fires. He sees the falseness of it [the world] and therefore learns to trust himself ever, others so far as not to be damaged by their dis- appointment", is the philosophy of Thomas Adams {Works of the Puritan Divines, p. 11). Bailey {Praxis pietatis, p. 176) further recom- mends every morning before going out among people to imagine oneself going into a wild forest full of dangers, and to pray God for the "cloak of foresight and righteousness". This feeling is charac- teristic of all the ascetic denominations without exception, and in the case of many Pietists led directly to a sort of hermit's life within the world. Even Spangenberg in the (Moravian) Idea fides fratum, p. 382, calls attention with emphasis to Jer. xvii. 5: "Cursed is the man who trusteth in man." To grasp the peculiar misanthropy of this attitude, note also Hoombeek's remarks {Theologia practica, I, p. 882) on the duty to love one's enemy: "Denique hoc magis nos ulcisimur, quo proximum, inultum nobis, tradimus ultori Deo — Quo quis plus se ulscitur, eo minus id pro ipso agit Deus." It is the same transfer of vengeance that is found in the parts of the Old Testament written after the exile; a subtle intensification and refinement of the spirit of revenge compared to the older "eye for an eye". On brotherly love, see below, note 34.
26. Of course the confessional did not have only that effect. The explanations, for instance, of Muthmann, Z. f. Rel. Psych., I, Heft 2, p. 65, are too simple for such a highly complex psychological problem as the confessional.
27. This is a fact which is of especial importance for the inter- pretation of the psychological basis of Calvinistic social organizations. They all rest on spiritually individualistic, rational motives. The individual never enters emotionally into them. The glory of God and one's own salvation always remain above the threshold of conscious- ness. This accounts for certain characteristic features of the social organization of peoples with a Puritan past even to-day.
28. The fundamentally anti-authoritarian tendency of the doctrine, which at bottom undermined every responsibility for ethical conduct or spiritual salvation on the part of Church or State as useless, led again and again to its proscription, as, for instance, by the States- General of the Netherlands. The result was always the formation of conventicles (as after 16 14).
29. On Bunyan compare the biography of Froude in the English Men of Letters series, also Macaulay's superficial sketch {Miscel. Works, n, p. 227). Bunyan was indifferent to the denominational dis- tinctions within Calvinism, but was himself a strict Calvinistic Baptist.
223 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 30. It is tempting to refer to the undoubted importance for the social character of Reformed Christianity of the necessity for salva- tion, following from the Calvinistic idea of -'incorporation into the body of Christ" (Calvin, Instit. Christ, III, 11, 10), of reception into a community conforming to the divine prescriptions. From our point of view, however, the centre of the problem is somewhat different. That doctrinal tenet could have been developed in a Church of purely institutional character {anstaltsmässig), and, as is well known, this did happen. But in itself it did not possess the psychological force to awaken the initiative to form such communities nor to imbue them with the power which Calvinism possessed. Its tendency to form a community worked itself out very largely in the world outside the Church organizations ordained by God. Here the belief that the Christian proved (see below) his state of grace by action in majorem Dei gloriam was decisive; and the sharp condemnation of idolatry of the flesh and of all dependence on personal relations to other men was bound unperceived to direct this energy into the field of objective (impersonal) activity. The Christian who took the proof of his state of grace seriously acted in the service of God's ends, and these could only be impersonal. Every purely emotional, that is not rationally motivated, personal relation of man to man easily fell in the Puritan, as in every ascetic ethic, under the suspicion of idolatry of the flesh. In addition to what has already been said, this is clearly enough shown for the case of friendship by the following warning: "It is an irrational act and not fit for a rational creature to love any one farther than reason will allow us...It very often taketh up men's minds so as to hinder their love of God" (Baxter, Christian Directory, IV, p. 253). We shall meet such arguments again and again.
The Calvinist was fascinated by the idea that God in creating the world, including the order of society, must have willed things to be objectively purposeful as a means of adding to His glory; not the flesh for its own sake, but the organization of the things of the flesh under His will. The active energies of the elect, liberated by the doctrine of predestination, thus flowed into the struggle to rationalize the world. Especially the idea that the public welfare, or as Baxter (Christian Directory, IV, p. 262) puts it, quite in the sense of later liberal rationalism, "The good of the many" (with a somewhat forced reference to Rom. ix. 3), was to be preferred to any personal or private good of the individual, followed, although not in itself new, for Puritanism from tne repudiation of idolatry of the flesh. The traditional American objection to performing personal service is probably connected, besides the other important causes resulting from democratic feelings, at least indirectly with that tradition. Similarly, the relative immunity of formerly Puritan peoples to Caesarism, and, in general, the subjectively free attitude of the English to their great statesmen as compared with liftany things which we 224 Notes 224 Notes have experienced since 1878 in Germany positively and negatively. On the one hand, there is a greater w^illingness to give the great man his due, but, on the other, a repudiation of all hysterical idolization of him and of the naive idea that political obedience could be due anyone from thankfulness. On the sinfulness of the belief in authority, which is only permissible in the form of an impersonal authority, the Scriptures, as well as of an excessive devotion to even the most holy and virtuous of men, since that might interfere with obedience to God, see Baxter, Christian Directory (second edition, 1678), I, p. 56. The political consequences of the renunciation of idolatry of the flesh and the principle which was first applied only to the Church but later to life in general, that God alone should rule, do not belong in this investigation.
31. Of the relation between dogmatic and practical psychological consequence we shall often have to speak. That the two are not identical it is hardly necessary to remark.
'^2. Social, used of course without any of the implications attached to the modem sense of the word, meaning simply activity within the Church, politics, or any other social organization.
33. "Good works performed for any other purpose than the glory of God are sinful" {Hanserd Knolly's Confession, chap. xvi).
34. What such an impersonality of brotherly love, resulting from the orientation of life solely to God's will, means in the field of religious group life itself may be well illustrated by the attitude of the China Inland Mission and the International Missionaries Alliance (see Wameck, Gesch. d. prot. Missionären, pp. 99, 1 1 1). At tremendous expense an army of missionaries was fitted out, -for instance one thousand for China alone, in order by itinerant preaching to ofifer the Gospel to all the heathen in a strictly literal sense, since Christ had commanded it and made His second coming dependent on it. Whether these heathen should be converted to Christianity and thus attain salvation, even whether they could understand the language in which the missionary preached, was a matter of small importance and could be left to God, Who alone could control such things. According to Hudson Taylor (see Wameck, op. cit.), China has about fifty million families; one thousand missionaries could each reach fifty families per day (!) or the Gospel could be presented to all the Chinese in less than three years. It is precisely the same manner in which, for instance, Calvinism carried out its Church discipline. The end was not the salvation of those subject to it, which was the affair of God alone (in practice their own) and could not be in any way influenced by the means at the disposal of the Church, but simply the increase of God's glory. Calvinism as such is not responsible for those feats of missionary zeal, since they rest on an interdenominational basis. Calvin himself denied the duty of sending missions to the heathen since a further expansion of the 225 The Protestafit Ethic afid the Spirit of Capitalism Church is wiiits Dei opus. Nevertheless, they obviously originate in the ideas, running through the whole Puritan ethic, according to which the duty to love one's neighbour is satisfied by fulfilling God's commandments to increase His glory. The neighbour thereby receives all that is due him, and anything further is God's affair. Humanity in relation to one's neighbour has, so to speak, died out. That is indicated by the most various circumstances.
Thus, to mention a remnant of that atmosphere, in the field of charity of the Reformed Church, which in certain respects is justly famous, the Amsterdam orphans, with (in the twentieth century!) their coats and trousers divided vertically into a black and a red, or a red and a green half, a sort of fool's costume, and brought in parade formation to church, formed, for the feelings of the past, a highly uplifting spectacle. It served the glory of God precisely to the extent that all personal and human feelings were necessarily insulted by it. And so, as we shall see later, even in all the details of private life. Naturally all that signified only a tendency and we shall later ourselves have to make certain qualifications. But as one very important tendency of this ascetic faith, it was necessary to point it out here.
35. In all these respects the ethic of Port Royal, although pre- destinationist, takes quite a different standpoint on account of its mystical and otherworldly orientation, which is in so far Catholic (see Honigsheim, op. cit.).
36. Hundeshagen (Beitr. z. Kirchenverfassungsgesch. u. Kirchen- politik, 1864, I, p. 37) takes the view, since often repeated, that predestination was a dogma of the theologians, not a popular doctrine. But that is only true if the people is identified with the mass of the uneducated lower classes. Even then it has only limited validity. Köhler {op. cit) found that in the forties of the nineteenth century just those masses (meaning the petite bourgeoisie of Holland) were thoroughly imbued with predestination. Anyone who denied the double decree was to them a heretic and a condemned soul. He himself was asked about the time of his rebirth (in the sense of pre- destination). Da Costa and the separation of de Kock were greatly influenced by it. Not only Croniwell, in whose case Zeller {Das Theologische System Zwinglis, p. 17) has already shown the effects of the dogma most effectively, but also his army knew very well what it was about. Moreover, the canons of the synods of Dordrecht and Westminster- were national questions of the first importance. Crom- well's tryers and ejectors admitted only believers in predestination, and Baxter {Life, I, p. 72), although he was otherwise its opponent, considers its effect on the quality of the clergy to be important. That the Reformed Pietists, the- members of the English and Dutch con- venticles, should not have imderstood the doctrine is quite impossible. It was precisely what drove them together to seek the certitudo salutis.
226 Notes What significance the doctrine of predestination does or does not have when it remains a dogma of the theologians is shown by perfectly orthodox Catholicism, to which it was by no means strange as an esoteric doctrine under various forms. What is important is that the idea of the individual's obligation to consider himself of the elect and prove it to himself was always denied. Compare for the Catholic doctrine, for instance, A. Van Wyck, Tract, de prcedestinatione (Cologne, 1708). To what extent Pascal's doctrine of predestination was correct, we cannot inquire here.
Hundeshagen, who dislikes the doctrine, evidently gets his im- pressions primarily from German sources. His antipathy is based on the purely deductive opinion that it necessarily leads to moral fatalism and antinomianism. This opinion has already been refuted by Zeller, op. cit. That such a result was possible cannot, of course, be denied. Both Melanchthon and Wesley speak of it. But it is charac- teristic that in both cases it is combined with an emotional religion of faith. For them, lacking the rational idea of proof, this consequence was in fact not unnatural.
The same consequences appeared in Islam. But why? Because the Mohammedan idea was that of predetermination, not predestination, and was applied to fate in this world, not in the next. In consequence the most important thing, the proof of the believer in predestination, played no part in Islam. Thus only the fearlessness of the warrior (as in the case of moira) could result, but there were no consequences for rationalization of life; there was no religious sanction for them. See the (Heidelberg) theological dissertation of F. Ullrich, Die Vorherhestimmungslehre itn Islam u. Christenheit, 1900. The modifi- cations of the doctrine which came in practice, for instance Baxter, did not disturb it in essence so long as the idea that the election of God, and its proof, fell upon the concrete individual, was not shaken. Finally, and above all, all the great men of Puritanism (in the broadest sense) took their departure from this doctrine, whose terrible serious- ness deeply influenced their youthful development. Milton like, in declining order it is true, Baxter, and, still later, the free-thinker Franklin. Their later emancipation from its strict interpretation is directly parallel to the development which the religious movement as a whole underwent in the same direction. And all the great religious revivals, at least in Holland, and most of those in England, took it ua^again.
37. As is true in such a striking way of the basic atmosphere of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.
38. This question meant less to the later Lutheran, even apart from the doctrine of predestination, than to the Calvinist. Not because he was less interested in the salvation of his soul, but because, in the form which the Lutheran Church had taken, its character as an institution for salvation (Heilsanstalt) came to the fore. The individual 227 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism thus felt himself to be an object of its care and dependent on it. The problem was first raised within Lutheranism characteristically enough through the Pietist movement. The question of certitudo salutis itself has, however, for every non -sacramental religion of salvation, whether Buddhism, Jainism, or anything else, been abso- lutely fundamental; that must not be forgotten. It has been the origin of all psychological drives of a purely religious character.
39. Thus expressly in the letter to Bucer, Corp. Ref. 29, p. 883 f. Compare with that again Scheibe, op. cit., p. 30.
40. The Westminster Confession (XVIII, p. 2) also assures the elect of indubitable certainty of grace, although with all our activity we remain useless servants and the struggle against evil lasts one's whole life long. But even the chosen one often has to struggle long and hard to attain the certitudo which the consciousness of having done his duty gives him and of which a true believer will never entirely be deprived.
41. The orthodox Calvinistic doctrine referred to faith and the consciousness of community with God in the sacraments, and men- tioned the "other fruits of the Spirit" only incidentally. See the passages in Heppe, op. cit., p. 425. Calvin himself most emphatically denied that works were indications of favour before God, although he, like the Lutherans, considered them the fruits of belief {Instit. Christ, 111,2, 37, 38). The actual evolution to the proof of faith through works, which is characteristic of asceticism, is parallel to a gradual modification of the doctrines of Calvin. As with Luther, the true Church was first marked off primarily by purity of doctrine and sacraments, but later the disciplina came to be placed on an equal footing with the other two. This evolution may be followed in the passages given by Heppe, op. cit., pp. 194-5, as well as in the manner in which Church members were acquired in the Netherlands by the end of the sixteenth century (express subjection by agreement to Church discipline as the principal prerequisite).
42. For example, Olevian, De substantia fcederis gratuiti inter Deum et electos (1585), p. 257; Heidegger, Corpus Theologice, XXIV, p. 87; and other passages in Heppe, Dogmatik der ev. ref. Kirche (1861), p. 425- 43. On this point see the remarks of Schneckenburger, op. cit., p. 48.
44. Thus, for example, in Baxter the distinction between mortal and venial sin reappears in a truly Catholic sense. The former is a sign of the lack of grace which can only be attained by the conversion of one's whole life. The latter is not incompatible with grace.
45. As held in many difTerent shades by Baxter, Bailey, Sedgwick, Hoombeek. Further see examples given by Schneckenburger, op. cit., p. 262.
46. The conception of the state of grace as a sort of social estate (somewhat like that of the ascetics of the early Church) is very common.
228 Notes See for instance Schortinghuis, Het innige Christendom U740 proscribed by the States-General)!
47. Thus, as we shall see later, in countless passages, especially the conclusion, of Baxter's Christian Directory. This recommendation of worldly activity as a means of overcoming one's own feeling of moral inferiority is reminiscent of Pascal's psychological interpretation of the impulse of acquisition and ascetic activity as means to deceive oneself about one's own moral worthlessness. For him the belief in predestination and the conviction of the original sinfulness of every- thing pertaining to the flesh resulted only in renunciation of the world and the recommendation of contemplation as the sole means of lightening the burden of sin and attaining certainty of salvation. Of the orthodox Catholic and the Jansenist versions of the idea of calling an acute analysis has been made by Dr. Paul Honigsheim in the dissertation cited above (part of a larger study, which it is hoped will be continued). The Jansenists lacked every trace of a connection between certainty of salvation and worldly activity. Their concept of calling has, even more strongly than the Lutheran or even the orthodox Catholic, the sense of acceptance of the situation in life in which one finds oneself, sanctioned not only, as in Catholicism by the social order, but also by the voice of one's own conscience (Honigsheim, op. cit., pp. 139 ff.).
48. The very lucidly written sketch of Lobstein in the Festgabe für H. Holtzmann, which starts from his view-point, may also be compared with the following. It has been criticized for too sharp an emphasis on the certitudo salutis. But just at this point Calvin's theology must be distinguished from Calvinism, the theological system from the needs of religious practice. All the religious move- ments which have affected large masses have started from the question, "How can I become certain of my salvation?" As we have said, it not only plays a central part in this case but in the history of all religions, even in India. And could it well be otherwise?
49. Of course it cannot be denied that the full development of this conception did not take place until late Lutheran times (Prastorius, Nicolai, Meisner). It is present, however, even in Johannes Gerhard, quite in the sense meant here. Hence Ritschl in Book IV of his Geschichte des Pietismus (II, pp. 3 ff.) interprets the introduction of this concept into Lutheranism as a Renaissance or an adoption of Catholic elements. He does not deny (p. 10) that the problem of individual salvation was the same for Luther as for the Catholic Mystics, but he believes that the solution was precisely opposite in the t\Vo cases. I can, of course, have no competent opinion of my own. That the atmosphere of Die Freiheit eines Christenmenschen is different, on the one hand, from the sweet flirtation with the liebem Jesulein of the later writers, and on the other from Tauler's religious feeling, is naturally obvious to anyone. Similarly the retention of 229 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism the mystic-magical element in Luther's doctrines of the Communion certainly has different religious motives from the Bemhardine piety, the "Song of Songs feeling" to wliich Ritschl again and again returns as the source of the bridal relations with Christ. But might not, among other things, that doctrine of the Communion have favoured the revival of mystical religious emotions? Further, it is by no means accurate to say that (p. 1 1, op. cit.) the freedom of the mystic consisted entirely in isolation from the world. Especially Tauler has, in passages which from the point of view of the psychology of religion are very interesting, maintained that the order which is thereby brought into thoughts concerning worldly activities is one practical result of the nocturnal contemplation which he recommends, for instance, in case of insomnia. "Only thereby [the mystical union with God at night before going to sleep] is reason clarified and the brain strengthened, and man is the whole day the more peacefully and divinely guided by virtue of the inner discipline of having truly united himself with God: then all his works shall be set in order. And thus when a man has forewarned (= prepared) himself of his work, and has placed his trust in virtue; then if he comes into the world, his works shall be virtuous and divine" {Predigten, fol. 318). Thus we see, and we shall return to the point, that mystic con- templation and a rational attitude toward the calling are not in them- selves mutually contradictory. The opposite is only true when the religion takes on a directly hysterical character, which has not been the case with all mystics nor even all Pietists.
50. On this see the introduction to the following essays on the Wirt- schaftsethik der Weltreligionen (not included in this translation: German in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoi^iologie. — Translator's Note).
51". In this assumption Calvinism has a point of contact with official Catholicism. But for the Catholics there resulted the necessity of the sacrament of repentance; for the Reformed Church that of practical proof through activity in the world.