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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 4 Notes on Contributors Bruce Anderson Mark Jones is Assistant Master, at Eton College, Windsor and a priest of the Church of England. A Senior Scholar, and former Chaplain, of St. John’s College, Cambridge. Mark Jones is now working on a major study on the impact of latitudinarianism, an anticipation of which was published in Volume I of the Bulletin. Anna Sapir Abulafia FBA Sholto Byrnes The main focus of Anna Sapir Abulafia's research is medieval Christian-Jewish relations within the broad context of twelfth and thirteenth-century theological and ecclesiastical developments. She is a Professor of the Study of the Abrahamic Religions at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Bruce Andersons’s political journalism, extending over three decades has earned him an assured place in the republic of letters. His journalism, invariably informed by wide reading and historical reflection, has appeared in journals as diverse as the Sunday Telegraph, the Independent, and the Spectator. John Rogister Emeritus Professor of History at Universtiy of Durham. Elected to the Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiques in 2003, John Rogister has been much garlanded by the Fifth Republic and is a leading historian of eighteenth-century France. His study of Louis XV and the Parlement of Paris, 1737-1755 (C.U.P., 1995) broke new ground in our understanding of ancien régime institutions. Deirdre McCloskey is a Professor of History and Economics at the University of Illinois in Chicago and a Fellow of the Erasmus Forum. She has written sixteen books and around 400 scholarly articles on topics ranging from technical economics and statistics to transgender advocacy and the ethics of the bourgeois virtues. The final book in The Bourgeois Era trilogy, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World was published in 2016. Deirdre McCloskey Mark Jones Sholto Byrnes is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies Malaysia - which is effectively the country's national think tank, and is the lead coordinator for the ASEAN network of national think tanks. He is a weekly international affairs columnist for The National, Abu Dhabi.

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 5 Introduction by Hywel Williams The successive volumes of the Erasmus Forum Bulletin provide an opportunity to collate research essays, as well as extended commentaries, authored by scholars and writers associated with the Forum. The themes explored in Bulletin V, ‘Of Money, Fear and Power’, are placed in the context of their own times and cultures. Aspects of the human past, hitherto obscured or neglected, are revealed. These historical perspectives, and the information thereby gained, bring a greater sense of context and depth to our understanding of contemporary, public, issues. Debt, extension of credit, rates of interest and the cash nexus created by the invention of money are coterminous with settled, civilisational existence. Anna Sapir Abulafia’s essay brings out the political, religious and cultural dimension to these aspects of economic history during the European Middle Ages. The official Christian condemnation of usury in the twelfth century supplied the background to anti-Semitism whose history continues to the present day. The Russo-Ukrainian war of 2022 has aroused fears of a collapse of the international order established in the mid-twentieth century. Mutually Assured Destruction appalled all and kept the nuclear Armageddon at bay. But what of the role played by accident or mere ignorance, rather than calculation and design, in starting a war? Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan is a philosophy of fear founded on observation of anarchy in the civil wars that afflicted the British Isles in the 1640s. Bruce Anderson shows how ‘Hobbism’ speaks to our distempered times. ‘Liberalism’, together with its close allies market capitalism and democracy, seemed to be the ineluctable victor after the collapse of Marxist-Leninism in the 1980’s. That was a very ‘ Western’ view and something of a false comforter as early twenty first century developments have shown. Sholto Byrnes’s investigation into how the Philippines are run reminds us of the limited appeal of liberalism when viewed in a global perspective and why that should be so. Deirdre McCloskey’s powerful defence of free market liberalism is both philosophical and historical. ‘Freedom of the will’, an inalienable characteristic of human beings, has economic consequences since its exercise makes individuals, and the societies in which they live, richer and more contented. Institutional stability, democratic consent and the prospect of progress: these are the fruits of a liberal order which- as we see elsewhere in this volume- needs a lot of advocacy at the moment. Erasmus of Rotterdam, by Quentin Massys, oil on panel, transferred to canvas, 1517

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Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 6 Of all the philosophical traditions and theologies associated with Protestantism none has been more influential- or as long-lived- as Calvinism. A largely secular twentieth century, western European, perspective has lost sight of just how and why John Calvin’s credo mattered, and especially so in the United Sates from 1776 to today. Mark Jones’ s essay is a necessary corrective to such historical amnesia. Calvinist attitudes survive and in ways that have a capacity to surprise. In John Rogester, doyen among historians of eighteenth century France, the Marquise de Pompadour has found an eloquent advocate. The Pompadour of Nancy Mitford’s engagingly brittle 1954 biography is a society hostess, a knowledgeable patron of the rococo style and thoroughly Mitfordian in her pursuit of love. But there was much more to the Marquise. French, as well as English historians, have neglected her role in the politics of the court at Versailles. She was a friend and confidante of the Duc de Choiseul, Louis XV’s chief minister, and she was intimately involved in the government’s financial, tax-raising, policies as well as its diplomacy. The historiographical dimension to this essay in rehabilitation shows how the Marquise’s reputation has waxed and waned during different periods of French history from 1789 onwards. John Rogister’s dive into the surviving archives arouses the hope that we can soonlearn more about the woman who was so well versed in how money- and power operated in ancien régime France. Hywel Williams Director, Erasmus Forum Editor, Erasmus Forum Bulletin March 2022

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The Role of Money in medieval Christian-Jewish Relations by Anna Sapir Abulafia FBA Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 8 oney with its connotations of materialism and greed has played an integral part in medieval Christian-Jewish relations. The concept of materialism or carnality as a marker between those who followed the Law of Moses and those who followed the teaching of Christ can already be found in St Paul’s second letter to Corinthians (3:6) where he wrote that the letter killed, while the spirit quickened. Whatever Paul himself meant, from the time of the Fathers of the Church, Christian theologians such as Augustine, identified Jews and Judaism with material matters and Christians with matters of the spirit. As the economy of western Europe expanded from the eleventh century, Christian theologians, moralists and canon lawyers were ever more confronted with the realities of a profit economy and capital growth through transactions involving the charge of what we now call interest, but at that time was deemed to be usury. Notwithstanding the fact that Christian merchants and, increasingly, Christian bankers from Italy and Cahors were heavily involved in moneylending, it was the Jews who were stereotyped as usurers par excellence. This paper will examine how anti-Jewish stereotypes evolved in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries through the conflation of Christian theological conceptions about Judaism with the exigences of a developing profit economy from the 1150s. I hope to show that deeper understanding of these economically, inspired stereotypes can help us recognise some aspects of modern-day anti-Semitism. A striking example of the conflation of theology and money comes from a Parisian moralised Bible, Oxford MS Bodleian 270b from 1234/5.1 Moralised Bibles were picture books which summarised the Bible through paired images. One image told the tale; the other revealed its moral. The images were accompanied by short texts to guide readers in understanding the pictures as they were meant to be by the creators of the Bible. The story of Cain and Abel is presented in five paired roundels (fol. 7v-8r). The sequence starts with their birth with the non-biblical addition that Adam favoured Abel over Cain. The moral meaning of this is explained as Christ loving good Christians and separating Jews from holy Church on account of their disbelief. The image depicts two Jews holding money bags (fol. 7vd). The next image shows God accepting Abel’s offering of a lamb and rejecting Cain’s offering of mangy grains. This is interpreted as God rejecting the offerings of Jews ‘which they make of plunder (rapina) and usury (usura)’, represented by money bags. Abel’s offering of his best lambs signifies good Christians who make offerings of their souls to God through good deeds (fol. 8ra). This is followed by the depiction of Cain inviting Abel to go out with him to the field. The is seen as denoting Judas’ betrayal of Christ (fol. 8rb). Cain’s killing of Abel is explained as the Jews crucifying Christ. The image is not as M

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The Role of Money in medieval Christian-Jewish Relations by Anna Sapir Abulafia FBA Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 9 bloodthirsty as it could have been. The figure piercing Jesus’ side is bearded and wears a round soft hat and is probably meant to represent a Jew, but other figures in the sequence seem much more profoundly Jewish than he (fol. 8rc). The sequence closes with the image of the Lord cursing Cain which is interpreted as Christ cursing ‘the Jews and all infideles (‘unbelievers’) who like them hurry to eternal damnation’. Between them the depicted Jews hold a money pouch, a sacrificial lamb and a scroll held up as a banner. The final image would seem to sum up the sequence’s depiction of Jews as a people who crucified Christ and who combine a love of money with adherence to the Law and animal sacrifices, in short, those who embody the carnality of Cain. Juxtaposed to Jews are good Christians who walk in the footsteps of Abel. 2 Closely related to the Oxford manuscript are the two codices which lie at the heart of Sarah Lipton’s seminal study of the depiction of Jews in moralised Bibles: Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, codex 1179 and 2554, which date to the 1220s. Codex 1179 is in Latin, and it seems to have been created for King Louis VIII of France. The other one is in French and seems to have been made for someone at the royal court. Lipton has connected the fabrication of the Bibles with the activities of the Parisian schoolmen of the period whose sources would have included the Glossa Ordinaria, (the Ordinary Gloss), the widely disseminated commentary on the Bible which was produced in the course of the twelfth century. The Glossa Ordinaria provided its readers with a basic overview of commentaries on the Bible which had circulated for centuries and were mostly derived from patristic sources such as Ambrose, Augustine, and Jerome, transmitted through ninth-century collections. The comments were placed in the margins of the manuscript or between the lines of the biblical text. Lipton’s analysis of the moralised Bibles has shown how many of the anti-Jewish images identified all usurers with Jews, and all Jews as usurers. What we have here, in other words, is evidence of ideas about Jews and money circulating in the Parisian schools being disseminated to the king and members of the royal court through words and images. This was the Capetian court whose kings were expanding their influence, if not direct jurisdiction over the Jews in their kingdom throughout the thirteenth century.3 Comparing the Cain and Abel sequence we have just discussed with the ones in the Vienna manuscripts the following points are of interest. The Oxford manuscript aligned Cain’s miserable offering with Jews presenting offerings of plunder and usury. Plunder and usury are represented in the image as money bags. The Latin Vienna codex has Jews offering the ‘vanities of this world, greed and usuries rather than themselves’. The Jews are holding a money pouch.4 The French Vienna Codex speaks of ‘their confiscations (fraimture) and avarice (couvoitise)’.

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The Role of Money in medieval Christian-Jewish Relations by Anna Sapir Abulafia FBA Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 10 The Jewish offerings are pictured as a cracked bowl and a frog/toad.5 On folio 29r another frog/toad appears, and it is seen as representing: ‘the usurer who is swollen by usury and by covetousness’. The accompanying image is of a big bearded fellow with a puffed up chest and powerful arms with two money bags hanging from his shoulders and a third in his right hand. He is wearing a soft cap and is probably meant to imply a Jew without being one overtly.6 In the Latin Vienna Codex toads are likened to ‘great usurers’ (magni feneratores).7 In the accompanying image, one figure who could be a Jew is stuffing two money bags into a chest, another mean-faced usurer is brandishing a knife, the third is an arrogant figure sitting on a chair holding a money bag with one hand and a kind of sceptre raised in the other. The fourth is a pathetic figure bent over double in supplication at the foot of the armed usurer. To my mind, the four figures bring out four crucial aspects of the moralised Bible’s views on practising usury: the greed of the usurer, the equivocation between usury and plunder, the oppressive nature of exacting usury from borrowers, and the benefit drawn by grandees of usurious practices.8 We shall examine these aspects in the course of this paper. The connection between toads and usury was made by another source which has interesting things to say about usury and, indeed, Jews. This is the Dialogue of Miracles (1219-23), a teaching manual written by Abbot Caesarius of Heisterbach in the form of a dialogue between a novice and a monk. The monk’s instruction is delivered by way of pithy stories or exempla.9 In one exemplum, Caesarius told of a usurer of Metz who requested to be buried with a money pouch with coins. When intruders broke open the grave, they were horrified to see two toads in the coffin. The toad perched on the opening of the pouch was taking coins out of the purse and giving them to the second toad sitting on the corpse’s chest. That toad was putting the coins into the dead man’s heart.10 In another exemplum Caesarius related what happened when a contrite usurer in Cologne tried to gain God’s forgiveness by donating everything he had to the poor. The priest invited him to donate some of his loaves of bread and place them in a chest. The next day the loaves had turned into toads. This, according to his priest showed God’s displeasure with alms donated out of usurious gains. The similarity to Cain’s offering depicted as a toad in the French Vienna codex is striking. The usurer was told he had to lie in the chest with these creatures overnight if he wished to obtain salvation. At this point Caesarius used the word vermes [worms or maggots]. He appeared to be using the word as a general term for reptile, the word used by the English translators of the text, even though toads are amphibians. This would explain his interchanging of the word bufo (toad) with vermis. The next day only his bones remained; they were interred in the porch of the church and no living

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The Role of Money in medieval Christian-Jewish Relations by Anna Sapir Abulafia FBA Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 11 toad could make their way past them.11 As for Jews, Caesarius included a tale of Jews who rented a house from a knight to celebrate the Feasts of Tabernacles. At the start of the evening service they were confounded by an enormous toad which appeared beneath the drapes with which they had covered the altar(perhaps meant to denote the reading desk used in Jewish services?).12 As Lipton suggests, the toad in this case, was probably meant to imply something devilish in Jewish worship.13 At the same time, it was surely also meant to impugn Jews of worshipping money. A quick look at the Glossa ordinaria on the Cain and Abel narrative in Genesis chapter four shows us that the identification of Cain with Jews was commonplace. Jews were described as embracing worldly riches; the name Cain was interpreted as meaning possessio or acquisitio. Abel was identified with Christians and also with Christ. Abel’s murder was likened to the crucifixion of Christ by the Jews. ‘And the Lord set a mark on Cain, that whosoever found him would not kill him’ (Gen. 4:15)14 is provided with an interlinear gloss which refers to Psalm 58(9):12: ‘slay them not lest at any time my people forget’. Augustine used this line to argue that Jews should not be killed; they had a place in Christian society because they carried the books of the Old Testament for Christians. Their ritual of circumcision and their observance of the Sabbath and Passover constituted the sign which safeguarded them just as the mark of Cain protected him from being killed.15 Alleged Jewish carnality in both its spiritual and material guises was amply represented in the Glossa ordinaria, but not, usury which was foregrounded in the Parisian moralised Bibles. Gilbert Dahan has done an extensive study of twelfth to fourteenth-century commentaries on the Cain and Abel narrative.16 Usury does not appear in his analysis, but rapina (plunder) does in the exegesis of Peter Comestor (d. 1187), who had studied and taught at Paris and was the author of the highly influential Historica Scholastica, an interpretive summary of the Bible.17 It also featured in commentaries by Stephen Langton, who was influenced by Comestor’s exegesis and connected to the circle of Peter the Chanter (d. 1197). Langton was consecrated as archbishop of Canterbury in 1207 by Pope Innocent III, but conflict with King John meant that it took many long years before he was able to settle into his see.18 The Oxford MS described Cain’s offering in terms of rapina (plunder) and usury; by the twelfth century it was a commonplace to liken usury to plunder and theft. We shall see why in a moment. Peter Comestor quoted Josephus in relating how Cain built his city (Genesis 4: 17): ‘And Josephus says that he gathered riches through plunder (rapinis) and violence and encouraged his people to theft, and exchanged the simplicity of human life for invention and

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The Role of Money in medieval Christian-Jewish Relations by Anna Sapir Abulafia FBA Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 12 inequality of measures and weights and produced shrewdness and corruption.’19 This is, of course, Augustine’s earthly city. Stephen Langton used rapina in his reading of the moral meaning of God refusing Cain’s offering. This was aimed against those in mortal sin who believed they could appease God through plunder (rapina).20 That usury was tantamount to plunder to Peter Comestor’s mind is clear from what he said about the sacrament of penance in his sentences on the sacraments. There he makes it plain that for a plunderer or an usurer (raptor vel fenerator) who has acquired much unjustly, it is not enough to desist from further theft he usury. He must restore or make restitution for what he has stolen through theft or usury.21 So what was so terribly wrong with charging borrowers for their loans and why was the charge likened to plunder and theft? Who was stealing from whom? A good way into this is to return to Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogue of Miracles, where he expounded on the sinfulness of usury. In response to the novice’s observation that ‘usury seems […] a very grievous sin, and one most difficult to cure’, the monk has this to say: You are right. Every other sin has its periods of intermission; usury never rests from sin. Though its master be asleep, it never sleeps, but always grows and climbs. It is difficult to heal, for God does not forgive the guilt of theft unless the thing stolen be restored. The fornicator, the adulterer, the murderer, the perjurer, the blasphemer, all receive forgiveness from God, as soon as they show contrition for their sin; but the usurer, although he may be sorry for his sin, does not obtain pardon, so long as he keeps the fruit of the usury, when he might restore it. When the novice asks what would happen if the usurer spent what he had earned in usury or if he had given his usurious earnings to his children and all that remained were lawful possessions, the monks responds: These he must sell and return the plunder (rapinam reddere) […] usury and violent exactions are nothing else than robbery and plunder (praedationes et rapinae).22 The first thing we need to do is to understand what usury was understood to be.23 For that we can turn to Gratian’s Decretum, the seminal collection of canon law which became the basic textbook of canon law in the Middle Ages. The first iteration of the Decretum was completed by 1139; by the 1150s a much fuller version was circulating throughout Christendom.24 Gratian listed three canons containing statements by Augustine, Jerome, and Ambrose explaining that usury occurred when lenders demanded a return which exceeded the

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The Role of Money in medieval Christian-Jewish Relations by Anna Sapir Abulafia FBA Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 13 loan which they had given. This led Gratian to sum up with the words; ‘behold it is evidently shown that whatever is demanded beyond the principle is usury’.25 The definition of usury applied specifically to a loan contract, known in Roman law as a mutuum, through which a lender loans any kind of fungibles to a borrower. Money was considered a fungible just like wheat or wine. Through the loan possession (dominium) was handed over from the lender to the borrower. Whatever profit the borrower was to make while he possessed the fungible in question was his and his alone to keep. It did not belong to the lender. The only onus on the borrower was to return the value of the fungible, not the fungible itself, he had borrowed to the lender at the stipulated time. If the lender charged anything for the loan, he was considered to be stealing not just from the borrower but also from God because in effect what he was selling was time, and time belonged to God.26 Thomas Chobham produced the widely disseminated Summa confessorum, a handbook for confessors in 1216 in which he included many of the things he had learned about usury in his studies under Peter the Chanter in Paris. After stating that usury was one of the two most detestable forms of greed – the other one was simony – he explained why a mutuum was the only contract from which one was forbidden to expect or receive a profit. He did this by explaining the difference between a rental loan (commodatum) in which what was hired or leased remained the property of the lessor while it was used by the lesee, and a loan in which what was lent transferred to the ownership of the borrower during the period of the loan. If what was lent remained the property of the lender/lessor, then the lender/lessor was entitled to charge the borrower for his use of the lender’s property. In Thomas’ own words: […] in a rental type of loan [commodatum] there is no transferral of dominium (property), but it always remains with the lender. This means that if I will have lent you my horse or anything else in a rental type loan [commodatum] and for your use, I may licitly receive payment because the thing is mine. But in the case of a mutuum, there is transfer of dominium, whence the term mutuum, as it were, de meo tuum. So if I will have lent you pennies or even wheat or wine, the pennies are immediately yours, and the wheat is yours, and the wine is yours. That means that if I would receive payment thence, I would have your profit, not mine. It follows that a usurer sells nothing to the debtor which is his but only time which belongs to God. And it follows that because he sells something that does not belong to him, he should not derive any profit from it. In addition, an usurer is set to make a profit without doing any work even while he is asleep, which is against the Lord’s precept that man should eat bread in labour and by the sweat of his brow (Gen. 3:17,19).27

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The Role of Money in medieval Christian-Jewish Relations by Anna Sapir Abulafia FBA Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 14 Thomas’ words echo the explanations given by another member of Peter the Chanter’s Parisian circle, Robert Courson, in his treatment of usury as part of his Summa de sacramentis. Courson distinguished between a mutuum and a locatio, a lease. Courson was a passionate campaigner against usury, and many biblical arguments were brought forward by him and others condemning the making of profits from loans.28 Core texts from the Old and New Testament forbidding usury were Exodus 22:25: (If thou lend money [pecuniam mutuam] to any of my people that is poor, that dwelleth with thee, thou shalt not be hard upon them as an extortioner, nor oppress them with usuries.); Leviticus 25:37 (Take not usury of him nor more than you gave: fear your God, that your brother may live with you. You shall not give him your money upon usury, nor exact of him any increase of fruits.); Deuteronomy 23:19-20 (You shall not lend to your brother money to usury, nor corn, nor any other thing: But to the stranger. To your brother you shall lend that which he wants, without usury: that the Lord thy God may bless you in all your works in the land, which you will go in to possess.); Psalm 14(15):1, 5 (Lord, who shall dwell in your Tabernacle? … He that has not put out his money to usury, nor taken bribes against the innocent …); Ezechiel 18:8 (has not lent upon usury, nor taken any increase: has withdrawn his hand from iniquity, and has executed true judgment between man and man) and Luke 6:34-5 (And if you lend [mutuum dederitis] to them of whom you hope to receive, what thanks are to you? … But love ye your enemies: do good, and lend [mutuum date], hoping for nothing thereby.). The biblical texts combined with Roman law traditions concerning the nature of a mutuum and classical and patristic prejudices against merchants and profit seeking contributed to the visceral antagonism with which medieval Christian thinkers regarded usury. Because usury was deemed to constitute theft, restitution became a fundamental requirement for usurers who wished to repent and be forgiven for their economic sin. Usurious gains could not be given away as alms. Both the Decretum and Gregory IX’s Decretals which were promulgated in 1234 contain many canons to that effect.29 We have already seen how Caesarius of Heisterbach viewed an usurer’s attempt to gain forgiveness by giving away his ill-gotten fortune. Another one of his exempla points to the tensions which could arise concerning the appropriateness of alms giving between high-minded theologians and bishops engaged in building projects. Caesarius relates how a certain wealthy usurer by the name of Theobald was struck by remorse and consulted Bishop Maurice of Paris on

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The Role of Money in medieval Christian-Jewish Relations by Anna Sapir Abulafia FBA Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 15 what he should do. Maurice was building Notre Dame at the time and told him to donate his wealth to the construction work. Theobald, however, had his doubts, and went to get a second opinion from Peter the Chanter. “I do not think that he has given good advice this time; go rather and tell the crier to proclaim throughout the city that you are prepared to make restitution to all from whom you have taken any more than was due.” And so it was done. Then he went back to the [Chanter] and said: “To all who came to me I have restored everything that I have taken from them, my conscience bearing witness, and still there is an abundance left.” Then said the other: “Now you may give alms without fear.”30 The accusation of suppressing the poor was another line of attack against usurers. In another of Caesarius’ exempla a fiery chair in hell is prepared for a usurer. ‘And rightly is that chair a chair of fire, because as the fire consumes the stubble, so does usury devour the substance of the poor.’31 Related to this is the idea that usurers forced needy borrowers to pay them usury. Thomas Chobham explained that even if the borrower agreed to the charge, this was conditional consent, not absolute, conditional because otherwise the loan would not be forthcoming. Odd Langholm has made the important link between the concept of compulsion and the Roman legal definition of theft. In a theft property is removed from its owner against the owner’s will.32 Equating usury with theft because what the usurer sold was time which belonged to God was closely linked to the idea that unlike a field or a vineyard, money by its nature was sterile. Aristotle had expressed this clearly in the Politics, where he talked about money as being ‘the necessary medium of exchange’. He condemned usury because it used money in a way which was contrary to its nature, which was for exchange. He went on to say that this explained the term tokos (the Greek for usury), ‘Offspring are similar to those who give birth to them, and interest is money born of money. So of the sorts of goods-getting this is the most contrary to nature’.33 Langholm has pointed out that even before The Politics became readily available in the West, late twelfth and early thirteenth-century ecclesiastics would have found similar sentiments in the Decretum in D. 88 c. 11, a so-called palea, the term used for an addition inserted into the later iteration of the collection. The canon is ascribed to John Chrysostom (d. 407) and is a commentary on Matthew 21 in which Jesus cast out the sellers and buyers in the Temple and overturned the tables of the money-changers, saying: ‘My house shall be called the house of prayer;

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The Role of Money in medieval Christian-Jewish Relations by Anna Sapir Abulafia FBA Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 16 but you have made it a den of thieves’ (Matt. 21:11-13). The canon is scathing about merchants and describes usurers as the worst among them. Why? ‘Because they sell something given by God and subsequently take back usury as if it belongs to them and put what does not belong to them with what does.’ And why is it so very different to receive a return on renting out a field or a house from receiving usury for lending out money? In the first place, money was not meant for any other use than buying. In the second place, a field yields a crop when it is tilled; a house provides accommodation to the person who has it. That is why the lessor may receive payment for the use the lessee gets of the land or house. But one gets no use out of stored money. Finally, a field or a house age through use. Money on the other hand, which has been lent does not diminish or age.34 We are, indeed, worlds away from modern ideas about money and the economy.35 Distrust of merchants and concerns about usury encouraged our Parisian theologians to investigate whether financial instruments and arrangements such as credit sales, mortgages, money-changing, and partnerships did not incorporate hidden forms of usury. Credit sales and foreign exchange featured prominently in the workings of the international fairs in Champagne where merchants from all parts of Europe would come with their particular currencies seeking to do business, and accounts were more often than not not settled until the end of the proceedings. The mechanics of changing one species of coin into another and the regulation of delayed payments for goods sold at the fairs were instrumental to the inception of what we would call banking. In their consideration whether transactions such as these involved usury ecclesiastics foregrounded the criterion of risk. Where the presence of risk was clear-cut there was far less cause for concern about the presence of usury. The clearest example of this was the commenda contracts in which a so-called sleeping partner put in the money while an active partner set out on the business venture. If the venture failed the investor lost his money; of any profits arising from the venture the investor received three-quarter; the active merchant a quarter. Where the active partner was co-investor in the venture, profits were equally divided between him and the sleeping partner. These kinds of contracts helped make Genoa a major trading city in which ordinary people could join in by investing small capital sums. The uncertainties of undertaking business expeditions in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries meant that the risk of loss of investment and/or loss of labour was great for all concerned. These kinds of partnerships were not deemed to be usurious. Important too was the attention theologians and canonists paid to the instances in which lenders might make a loss if their debtors did not repay them at the stipulated time. A lender might not, for example, be able to cover his rent if

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The Role of Money in medieval Christian-Jewish Relations by Anna Sapir Abulafia FBA Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 17 the loan was not repaid. Peter the Chanter and Thomas Chobham thought that in some cases compensation would be due to the lender. The name for this kind of compensation in Roman Law is interesse; in the Digest (XVII.2.60 pr.) it is invoked in connection with a partnership. Interesse means ‘to lie between’, and canonists applied the term to loans to denote the gap between the situation the lender would have been in before he granted the loan and the state of affairs he now found himself in having extended the loan. Interesse was deemed to be something very different from usury. Interesse, that is to say what we call interest, came into play when there was a question of suffering damages (damnum emergens) or loss of profit (lucrum cessans). From the middle of the thirteenth century both concepts proved to be instrumental in taking forward thinking about possible ways in which lenders might lawfully receive recompense for extending credit.36 An additional factor which eased lending was the concept of a service charge, that is to say a charge which might be made to compensate the lender for the service given in supplying the loan. The legitimacy of a service charge was invoked in the founding of the Monte di Pièta, in the fifteenth century in a host of Italian cities. The Monte were pawn shops run by the Franciscans in aid of the poor. They claimed that the interest charged was not usury but a payment to cover the costs of running the shops.37 One might have thought that developing ideas concerning interest and service charges would have benefited Jewish money lenders. It did not. In fact, the Monte di Pièta were established in order to drive Jewish pawn brokers out of business. Why was this the case? By the end of the twelfth century the presence of Jews in England and northern France was contingent on their usefulness which hinged on the payments exacted upon them by their princely lords. Because by this time moneylending activities were the primary economic activity open to Jews in these lands, these payments would have derived predominantly from what was considered to be usurious gains. Apart from that, in Angevin England tallies on Jews constituted a system of indirect taxation through which kings used to finance their wars and castle building. This led to deep-rooted antipathy among borrowers who were put under increased pressure as their Jewish lenders had to pay the king what he demanded of them. In many cases this meant that loans made by Jews or collaterals supporting loans from Jewish money lenders ended up falling into the hands of the crown. In this way the question of Jewish moneylending became a sideshow in political battles between the English crown and the Christian magnates and gentry.38 As far as Capetian France was concerned, William Chester Jordan has argued persuasively that jurisdiction over Jews constituted a lynch pin in the

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The Role of Money in medieval Christian-Jewish Relations by Anna Sapir Abulafia FBA Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 18 continued attempts by Capetian kings to consolidate their powerbase in Ile-de-France and extend it over the other principalities of their kingdom.39 The specific role which Jews played in economic life in England and Northern France and to a much lesser extent Germany, Southern France and Iberia led to Jews to being stereotyped as usurers.40 We already see this happening, for example, in the letter which Bernard of Clairvaux wrote in 1146 calling one of his Cistercian monks to order who had been stoking violence against the Jews in Germany in the run-up to the Second Crusade. One of the reasons Bernard gave for protecting Jews was that in the absence of Jews there would be more Christian moneylenders. He signified Christian money lenders as baptised Jews; the word he used for moneylending was judaise (judaisare).41 The fact that Jews were openly engaged in moneylending at the behest of princes,42 drew condemnation from ecclesiastics. These strands were intertwined in Peter the Chanter’s words on usurers. In the section of his handbook on morals (Verbum Abbreviatum) of 1191-2 concerning usury,43 Peter bemoaned the fact that whereas in the ancient city there had hardly been any usurers and such as there were, did not do so openly. They were shunned by their neighbours. He contrasted this with the present in which usury was conducted openly and with approval. Usurers had become the bedfellows of princes and prelates. They were the princes’ leeches. What they sucked they spewed into the royal treasury. He then went on to say that they were like Jews because princes protected them by saying that they were their Jews. Peter considered them even worse than Jews because Mosaic law forbade Jews from charging their brothers usury but allowed them to charge usury of strangers. Christian usurers exacted usury from their fellow Christians.44 Thomas Chobham deeply regretted that the Church did nothing to prevent the English crown from deriving income from taxes raised on the gains Jews had made from moneylending.45 The biblical text Peter was referring to was Deuteronomy 23:19-20: ‘You shall not lend to your brother money to usury […]: But to the stranger’. Gratian had included Ambrose’s interpretation of this in the Decretum (C. 14 q. 4. C. 12).46 According to Ambrose this meant that Christians were permitted to exact usury from enemies they were permitted to fight and kill. It would constitute another way of conquering legitimate foes. Unsurprisingly, the canon invited extensive glossing from canonists. Opinions were divided whether this meant that Christians could take usury from heretics and Saracens. Some argued that Christ’s teaching to love one’s enemies meant that even they should not be burdened with usury. As far as Jews were concerned, the consensus was that the canon did not give Christians licence to charge Jews usury. The reason was linked to the canon in Gratian protecting Jews, Dispar Nimirum

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The Role of Money in medieval Christian-Jewish Relations by Anna Sapir Abulafia FBA Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 19 (C.23 q. 8 c. 11), which stated that Jews should not be attacked because they were willing to serve everywhere. But were Jews allowed to exact usury from Christians? On this there was a wide range of views among theologians and canonists, popes and princes. Some said that Mosaic law had permitted Jews to exact usury from their enemies as a concession to a greedy people in order to keep them from doing this to their brothers. Others averred that ‘stranger’ did not apply to Christians and that Jews should not be allowed to charge them usury. Still others argued that the passages in the Psalms and Ezekiel made plain that Jews should refrain from exacting usury altogether.47 The first papal ruling addressing Jewish moneylending was the 1198 bull Post miserabilem from Innocent III to the Archbishop of Narbonne. The bull concerned Crusaders who had borrowed money from Jews to go on crusade. The Pope demanded that they should not have to pay any more usury on their loans. Innocent repeated this point in the final canon (71) of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) which preached the Fifth Crusade. In canon 67 of that Council Innocent castigated Jews for charging immoderate usury on their loans to Christians and in so doing draining Christian resources. The canon ruled that such Jews should be boycotted by Christians; any Christian who sustained contact with these Jews would be excommunicated. And Jews should be made to repay the excessive charges they had levied. This canon was included in the Gregorian Decretals (X. 5. 19. 18) and was much commented on. Did this mean that Jews were allowed to charge Christians moderate usury? Or did it mean that all usury was immoderate?48 The evolving canonical position seems to have been that Jews should not be permitted to charge usury. The text of the version of Post miserabilem in the Decretals (X. 5. 19. 12) appeared to apply to all Christians, not just crusaders. Popes remained more pragmatic than the canonists, choosing to forbid Jews from charging immoderate usury rather than usury altogether.49 Theologians held more stringent views. In the 1230s, Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, categorically advised the Countess of Westminster against deriving any income from taxing the Jews who had recently come under her jurisdiction. Grosseteste condemned usury as a cruel practice which hurt the vulnerable in society. In his view, Jews should be made to labour on the land rather than living a life of luxury by burdening Christians with usury. In 1270, Aquinas, too, condemned princes acquiring income by taxing Jews on money they had earned through moneylending.50 Jewish responses to attacks on Jewish involvement in moneylending can be gauged from Jewish disputational literature. Joseph Kimhi (d. c. 1170) included the issue of usury in his Sefer ha-Brit (Book of the Covenant). To accusations that Jews were breaking their own law

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The Role of Money in medieval Christian-Jewish Relations by Anna Sapir Abulafia FBA Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 20 by lending money with usury because of the condemnation of usury in Psalm 14(15):5, Kimhi argued that the Psalm text concerned taking usury from fellow Jews. Lending to non-Jews with interest was permitted by Moses in Deuteronomy. As for intra-Jewish lending, Kimhi averred that Jews were much more scrupulous in avoiding that than Christians were in lending to other Christians.51 Meir ben Simeon of Narbonne spoke against the outlawing of moneylending by Louis IX in his Milhemet Mitzvah (Obligatory War) on which he worked between 1245 and 1270. Addressing the King, he averred that Louis would do better to allow Jewish moneylending than to create a situation in which more Christians turned to moneylending, Christians for whose wellbeing he was responsible. He argued that society could not exist without moneylending and that since Louis had outlawed Jews from being moneylenders, Christians had stepped into the breach and were charging far harsher borrowing rates than Jews ever had.52 It is fascinating how Meir’s reference to an increase in Christian moneylending on account of pressure on Jewish moneylending echoed what Bernard of Clairvaux had surmised a century before. As for Jewish moneylenders being easier on borrowers than Christians, even Grosseteste admitted as much when he compared Jewish rates with the rates charged by Christian moneylenders hailing from Cahors.53 The Nizzahon Vetus (Old Polemic) was a late-thirteenth/early fourteenth-century handbook which assembled a great many arguments Jews could use to combat Christian attacks on Judaism. It was written in Germany but contained much French material as well. In dealing with possible Christian claims that they were brothers of and not strangers to Jews because Esau, also known as Edom, was a brother to Jacob, the Nizzahon Vetus claimed that Christians were disqualified from being brothers because Edom had joined foreigners in attacking Jacob, i.e. Jerusalem in the period of the first Temple (Obadiah 1:11). Psalm 137(6):7 expressed this in the strongest of terms: ‘Remember, O Lord, for the sons of Edom, the day of Jerusalem, those who say, "Raze it, raze it, down to its foundation!"’. This verse follows the passionate words of ‘May my tongue cling to my palate, if I do not remember you, if I do not bring up Jerusalem at the beginning of my joy (Psalm 137[6]:6).’54 And by refusing circumcision Christians had set themselves apart from Jews (cf. Exodus 12:43-48).55 Even more cutting in its simplicity is the anonymous retort found in a Hebrew manuscript wondering how Christians could claim being brothers of Jews when it came to moneylending when they were wont to refer to Jews as dogs.56 The increasing intensity of Jewish polemical responses shows that for Jews these arguments concerned the livelihood they needed to maintain to feed their families. A sense of Jewish desperation about the impossible situation they found themselves in in thirteenth-century England just before the expulsion in

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The Role of Money in medieval Christian-Jewish Relations by Anna Sapir Abulafia FBA Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 21 1290 can be gleaned from the poem by the Norwich poet Meir ben Elijah, ‘Put a curse on my enemy’ where he wrote: ‘The land exhausts us by demanding payments, and the people’s disgust is heard’.57 Louis IX’s outlawing of Jewish moneylending was meant to impoverish the Jews to such an extent that they might succumb more readily to the pressure to convert.58 Jewish polemical arguments concerning moneylending were built on principals of Jewish law. As Haym Soloveitchik has explained, halachists generally agreed that the Deuteronomic text gave Jews permission to charge an increment on the principal when they made loans to Gentiles. In the geographical areas under discussion this meant Christians. True, there was a reference in the Talmud (Bava Metzia 70b-71a) banning Jews from doing so, unless they had no other means to make a living, but it was refuted by another text. Rabbenu Tam (Jacob ben Meir [c. 1100-1171]), the grandson of the great rabbinical scholar, Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac, known as Rashi, spelled out clearly that this kind of moneylending was permitted because it was the only way Jews could meet the demands of their lords and provide for their families.59 The Jewish legal position on the permissibility of charging non-Jews interest and, indeed, the legal contortions rabbis went through to ease intra-communal Jewish lending is better understood if one takes into account that internal Jewish discussions on usury did not, according to Soloveitchik, mirror the venomous manner in which Christian patristic and medieval thinkers condemned usury as an innate evil. Making an honest profit from moneylending was not construed as something intrinsically wicked. It was simply a matter of divine diktat that the Law of Moses forbade Jews from charging each other interest.60 Diktat or not, the prohibition posed a major challenge for medieval rabbis. Why? Because economic viability for Jews depended on the availability of intra-communal credit. And in most cases, credit was only available at a cost to the borrower, whether they be Jews or Christians.61 The intricacies of the halachic solutions these rabbis came up with to deal with different ways in which credit (by way of money or pledges) moved within Jewish communities go well beyond the remit of this paper. Let us concentrate on the work Rashi set in train and R. Tam fully developed to facilitate credit. Their work concerned what is referred to in halachic discussions on usury as le-chumra (according to strictness), i.e. a ruling which is more restrictive than strictly necessary. What follows is based on Soloveitchik’s assessment of the material. The Talmud states categorically that Jews cannot be agents of Gentiles and vice-versa. This means that anything a Jewish agent does on behalf of a Gentile is legally reckoned as the Jewish agent’s own action. And anything a Jew asks a Gentile to do is regarded as the Gentile’s action and not the Jew’s. In the matter of moneylending it would then seem it would be legally

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The Role of Money in medieval Christian-Jewish Relations by Anna Sapir Abulafia FBA Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 22 permissible for a Jew to task a Christian to borrow money on his behalf from another Jew because according to the principle of non-agency the transaction would legally not be one between two Jews but a bifurcated transaction in which the Christian acted in turn with one of the two Jews and then the other. Without explaining precisely why the Talmud (Bava Metzia 71b) stated that this was not allowed le-chumra, i.e. as a matter of greater stringency.62 Rashi led the way in discounting le-chumra. This gave rise to the legal fiction of the Gentile middleman or strawman in intra-communal Jewish borrowing.63 To counter rabbinic opposition to the leniency (which was so very badly needed in Jewish communities heavily dependent on moneylending to survive), Rabbi Tam not only set le-chumra aside; he backed it up with other legal measures to make it more palatable for those who felt uneasy about doing so.64 Rabbi Isaac ben Samuel of Dampierre (Ri d. 1189) introduced other measures to strengthen the position against le-chumra.65 German rabbis, however, remained unimpressed and continued to uphold le-chumra. Their contribution to ease Jewish economic life was to facilitate the activities of Jewish financiers of Christians. For despite all kinds of ecclesiastical rules and regulations, many Jews continued to be employed by Christians to oversee their affairs which included raising money from Jewish moneylenders. According to the Talmudic rule that Jews could not be the agents of Gentiles, these Jewish financiers were legally held to be engaged in usurious transactions with fellow-Jews, involving the request of a loan and repayment with interest. Rabbenu Gershom Me’or ha-Golah of Mainz (Gershom ben Judah, the Light of the Exile, d. 1028) had already ruled in the eleventh century that such a transaction should not be regarded as the Jewish financier requesting a loan from a Jewish creditor (which was forbidden) but as the Jewish financier acting as the Jewish creditor’s behalf in facilitating the loan. In other words, the Jewish financier became the Jewish creditor’s agent rather than the Gentile’s whose loan he was, in fact, raising. Despite some reservations, R. Gershom’s ruling was widely accepted and applied in Germany.66 Broadly speaking German and French rabbis seem to have had different approaches to the problem of intra-communal borrowing. This must have had something to do with the fact that Jews enjoyed a measure of economic diversity for so much longer in Germany than in northern France.67 Our discussion has shown how important a role money played in medieval Christian-Jewish relations. At its most basic level money was how Jews secured the protection of the lords in whose lands they settled. Protection was bought through taxes, tallies and the like.

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The Role of Money in medieval Christian-Jewish Relations by Anna Sapir Abulafia FBA Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 23 Jews living in the medieval West faced constant exposure to their lords demands which were dictated by innumerable political and economic factors. At another level, money lay at the basis of many of the day-to-day social interactions between Christians and Jews who lived in each other’s vicinities, met at local markets, did business with each other and extended each other much needed credit. At another level money acted as a catalyst for theologians to use Jews, whom they had traditionally identified with material concerns, to express their distrust of wealth and profit making and condemnation of usury. Making use of Jews in this way paralleled the manner in which Christian theologians and preachers were wont to employ Jews as foils to lambast any types of moral failings among their own flock. And so, usurers were stereotyped as Jews; Jews as usurers; usurers who oppressed the poor and threatened the good of society.68 The economic abuse heaped on Jews by ecclesiastics tells us far more about Christian ratiocinations about the morality of wealth and profitmaking than actual Jewish participation in the economy. But these ideas did affect reality. They permeated to those who had jurisdiction over Jews – the moralised Bibles were one of the possible routes of dissemination69 - and they became part of a rich mesh of political and socio-economic considerations which eventually led to the expulsion of the Jews from many places from the end of the thirteenth century, including England in 1290 and France in 1306. The material we have discussed in this paper may well seem lightyears away from present realities. Yet, one only needs to thinks of the 2012 mural using Jewish caricatures to depict ‘fat cats’ who are playing a game of monopoly on the backs of the poor, the mural which Jeremy Corbyn did not at first recognise as anti-Semitic,70 to realise that knowledge of the role of money in medieval Christian-Jewish relations can be useful to appreciate some of the twists and turns of modern anti-Semitism. Anna Sapir Abulafia Lady Margaret Hall Oxford 1 A. de Laborde, A (ed.), La Bible Moralisée illustrée: conservée à Oxford, Paris et Londres. Société française de reproduction de manuscrits à peintures, Paris: Pour les membres de la Société, 1911-27; Hellemans, Babette, La Bible Moralisée: une oeuvre à part entire. Temporalité, sémiotique et creation au XIIIe siècle (Turnhout, 2010), 219-21, 226-7. 2 Bodleian Library, Oxford MS Bodl. 270b, 7v and 8r at https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/inquire/Discover/Search/#/?p=c+0,t+,rsrs+0,rsps+10,fa+,so+ox%3Asort%5Easc,scids+,pid+4cf7e9d2-c06e-4029-a3b1-152736320897,vi+c5e2eaf3-f229-4584-9a5c-51ff8abe0056 and https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/inquire/Discover/Search/#/?p=c+0,t+,rsrs+0,rsps+10,fa+,so+ox%3Asort%5Easc,scids+,pid+4cf7e9d2-c06e-4029-a3b1-152736320897,vi+798c4a89-99d1-42b0-9633-0630265227ef (accessed on 29 August 2019). See also Mellinkoff, Ruth, ‘Cain and the Jews’, Journal of Jewish Art 6 (1979), 19-23. On the imagery of the scroll see Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance. The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible Moralisée (Berkeley, 1999), 65-6. 3 Lipton, Images of Intolerance; Codex Vindobonensis 2554, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Commentary and translation of biblical texts by Gerald B. Guest, English edn (London, 1995), 4-5. On the Glossa Ordinaria see Lesley Smith, The Glossa ordinaria. The Making of a Medieval Bible Commentary, Leiden, 2009; on the Capetians, see William Chester Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews. From Philip Augustus to the last Capetians, Philadelphia, PA, 1989.

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The Role of Money in medieval Christian-Jewish Relations by Anna Sapir Abulafia FBA Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 24 4 Lipton, 39; Vienna 1179, fol. 5b: vanitates huius mundi, cupiditates et usuras. MS available at: http://digital.onb.ac.at/RepViewer/viewer.faces?doc=DTL_5955097&order=1&view=SINGLE, image 9 (accessed on 7 May 2020). 5 Lipton, 39, 44, 171, n. 57; Guest, 55; Vienna 2554, fol. 2vb, available at http://digital.onb.ac.at/RepViewer/viewer.faces?doc=DTL_2246547&order=1&view=SINGLE, image 10 (accessed on 7 May 2020). 6 Vienna 2554, 29rb, available at http://digital.onb.ac.at/RepViewer/viewer.faces?doc=DTL_2246547&order=1&view=SINGLE, image 61 (accessed on 7 May 2020); Lipton, 44-5; Guest, 86 (referring to Lev. 11:41-42). 7 Lipton, 44. 8 Vienna 1179, 47vc, available at http://digital.onb.ac.at/RepViewer/viewer.faces?doc=DTL_5955097&order=1&view=SINGLE, image 51 (accessed on 7 May 2020); I am very grateful to Sara Lipton for helping me make sense of the grainy black and white web image during the Covod-19 lockdown in May 2020. Any errors are my responsibility. 9 Lipton, 44-45; F. Wagner, ‘Caesarius von Heisterbach’, in: Lexikon des Mittelaletrs 2.7 (Munich and Zurich, 1983), col. 1364. 10 Caesarius of Heisterbach, The Dialogue of Miracles, 11.39, transl. H. Von E. Scott and C.C. Swinton Bland, vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 1919), 270-1; ed. J. Strange (1851) in: Caesarius von Heisterbach, Dialogi miraculorum, Dialog über die Wunder, trans. Nikolaus Nösges and Horst Schneider, Fontes Christiani 86/5 (Turnhout, 2009), 2132. 11 Dialogue of Miracles 2.32, transl., 118-9; ed. Fontes Christiani 86/1, 486-8, see note 283 on p. 486 for the medieval use of the term vermis. 12 Dialogue of Miracles 10.69, transl., 227; ed. Fontes Christiani 86/4, 2026. 13 Lipton, 44-45. 14 Translations are based on the Douay-Rheims version of the Bible. 15 Biblia Latina cum Glossa ordinaria: facsimile reprint of the edition princeps: Adolph Rusch of Strassburg 1480/81, ed. K. Froehlich and M.T. Gibson, vol. 1, Brepols 1992, Gen. 4: 15: ut non] [interlinear] ne occidas eos nequando obli [for obliviscantur] populi mei, accessible at https://archive.thulb.uni-jena.de/ufb/rsc/viewer/ufb_derivate_00000064/Inc_83_1_00036.tif, made available on line by the Digitale Historische Bibliothek Erfurt/Gotha; Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christian-Jewish relations, 1000-1300. Jews in the service of medieval Christendom (Harlow, 2011), 6-7. 16 Gilbert Dahan, ‘L’Exégèse de l’histoire de Caïn et Abel, du XIIe au XIVe siècle en Occident’, Recherches de Théologie ancienne et médiévale 49 (1982) 21-89 and 50 (1983) 5-68. 17 R. Quinto, ‘P. Comestor’, Lexikon des Mittelalters 6.9 (1993), coll. 1967-1968. 18 John W. Baldwin, Master, Princes and Merchants. The social views of Peter the Chanter & his Circle, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ, 1970), 18; 25-31. 19 Petri Comestoris Scolastica Historia, Liber Genesis, ed. Agneta Sylwan, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, 191 (Turnhout, 2005), 53: Et ait Iosephus quia rapinis et violentia opes congregans suos ad latrocinia invitabat, et simplicitatem vite hominum ad inventionem mensurarum et ponderum permutavit, et ad calliditatem et corruptionem produxit; Dahan, ‘L’Exégèse’, Recherches de Théologie ancienne et médiévale 49 (1982) 30. 20 Factum est autem etc. {Gen. 4:3} Nota quod glossa “offert Cayn”, que moralis est, est contra illos qui existentes in mortali [peccato?] putant Deum placare per rapinam, contra quos dicit Ysaias: “Cum multiplicaueritis orationem, non exaudiam. Manus uestre sanguine plene sunt” […], ed. in Dahan, ‘L’Exégèse de l’histoire de Caïn et Abel, Recherches de Théologie ancienne et médiévale 50 (1983) 19. 21 Petrus Comestor, Sententiae de Sacramentis, ed. Raymond M. Martin, Pierre le Mangeur, De sacramentis, in Spicilegium sacrum Lovaniense 17 (1937), 71*: raptor vel fenerator multa quesivit iniuste, abstinet a rapina vel fenore; non tamen vult aliquid restituere […]. 22 Quotations from Dialogue of Miracles 2.8, transl., 79-80; ed. Fontes Christiani 86/1, 390-2. 23 Apart from the works cited in the following footnotes, see also excellent coverage of usury in John T. Noonan, The Scholastic Analysis of Usury, Cambridge, MA, 1937). 24 Winroth, Anders, The Making of Gratian’s Decretum, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000; idem, “Recent Work on the making of Gratian’s Decretum”, Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law, 26 (2004-6), 4–8, 23. 25 Causa 14 q. 3 cc. 1-3 and d.p.c. 4 (canon 4 belongs to the later iteration of the Decretum, see Winroth, The making of Gratian’s Decretum, 214); Winroth, Decretum Gratiani, first recension, version: 5 October 2019. Available on-line: http://gratian.org/ (accessed 22 October 2019); Corpus Iuris Canonici. Vol. 1, Decretum magistri Gratiani, ed. by Emil Friedberg (Leipzig 1879), coll 734-5 available at http://geschichte.digitale-sammlungen.de/decretum-gratiani/online/angebot. 26 Baldwin, 271, 286-7; Odd Langholm, Economics in the Medieval Schools. Wealth, Exchange, Value, Money and Usury according to the Paris Theological Tradition 1200-1350 (Leiden, 1992), 47-50; T.P. McLaughlin, ‘The Teaching of the Canonists on Usury (XII, XIII and XIV Centuries)’, Mediaeval Studies 1 (1939), 100-2. 27 Baldwin, 18, 34-6, 287; Thomas Chobham, Summa confessorum, Art. 7, Dist. 6, Q. 11, cap. 1, in F. Broomfield (ed.), Analecta Mediaevalia Namurcensia, 25 (Louvain, 1968), 504-5. 28 Baldwin, 19-24,287; Langholm, 48; Georges Lefèvre (ed.), Le Traité “De Usura” de Robert de Courson, in Travaux et Mémoires de l’Université de Lille, Tome 10, mémoire no. 30 (Lille, 1902), 15. 29 Baldwin, 302-311; in Decretum: C. 14 q. 5 and q. 6; X. 5. 19; in the Decretals: X. 5. 19, cc. 3, 5, 9, 11, 13, 14, 17, in Emil Friedberg (ed.), Corpus Iuris Canonici. Vol. 2, (Leipzig, 1881; reprint, 1959), coll 812-16, available at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/digital/collections/cul/texts/ldpd_6029936_002/index.html. 30 Dialogue of Miracles 2.33, transl., 119-21, quotation from p. 120 ed. Fontes Christiani 86/1, 490-2; see also Baldwin, 308-9.

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The Role of Money in medieval Christian-Jewish Relations by Anna Sapir Abulafia FBA Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 25 31 Dialogue of Miracles 2.7, transl., 76-9, quotation from p. 79 ed. Fontes Christiani 86/1, 382-90. 32 Odd Langholm, The Merchant and the Confessional. Trade and Price in the pre-Reformation penitential handbooks (Leiden, 2003), 28; Summa Confessorum, De Penitentis, Q. XIa, cap. Iiii, p. 508; Justinian, Institutes, 4.1.6 and 4.2. pr, available at https://droitromain.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/, (accessed on 22 October 2019). 33 Translation from: Aristotle, Politics, I.10, 1258a-b, trans. Carnes Lord, second edition (Chicago, 2013), 18. 34 Langholm, Economics, 58; D 88 c. 11, ed. Friedberg, vol. 1, col. 308-9; translation and summary of text my own. 35 See also Langholm, Economics, 49. 36 Baldwin, 273-295; McLaughlin, ‘The Teaching of the Canonists on Usury’, 141; https://droitromain.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/ (accessed on 30 April 2020). 37 Benjamin Nelson, The idea of usury. From tribal brotherhood to universal otherhood. 2nd edition enlarged (Chicago and London, 1969), 19-22. 38 The literature includes Robin Mundill, England’s Jewish Solution. Experiment and Expulsion, 1262-1290, Cambridge, 1998 and Robert Stacey, ‘Jewish Lending and the Medieval Economy’, in: R.H. Britnell and B.M.S. Campbell (eds), A Commercialising Economy. England 1086 to c. 1300, (Manchester, 1995), 78-101; see also Baldwin, 298-9. 39 See Jordan, The French Monarchy. 40 See also Lester K. Little, Poverty and the Profit Economy (London, 1978), 54-7. Julie L. Mell, The Myth of the Medieval Jewish Moneylender, 2 vols, Basingstoke, 2017 came to my attention after I had completed this paper. Mell downplays the role of Jewish moneylending in the Middle Ages. 41 Bernard of Clairvaux, Epistola 365, in Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. Jean Leclercq and Henri Rochais, vol. 8 (Rome, 1977), 320-2; Sapir Abulafia, Christian-Jewish Relations, 158. 42 On the preoccupation of the canonists with open or manifest usury see J. Gilchrist, The Church and Economic Activity in the Middle Ages (New York, 1969), 66 as well as Kenneth R. Stow, ‘Papal and Royal Attitudes toward Jewish Lending in the Thirteenth Century’, Association for Jewish Studies Review 6 (1981), 173. 43 Baldwin, 13-16. 44 Peter the Chanter, Summa quae dicitur Verbum adbreuiatum (textus prior), ed. M. Boutry, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, 196A (Turnhout, 2012), 289-92; Baldwin, 298-301. 45 Thomas of Chobham, Summa Confessorum, Art. 7 Dist. 6 Q. 11. Cap. 4 ed. Broomfield, 510; John A. Watt, ‘Grosseteste and the Jews: A Commentary on Letter V’, in M. O’Carroll (ed.), Robert Grosseteste and the Beginning of a British Theological Tradition. Papers delivered at the Grosseteste Colloquium held at Greyfriars, Oxford on 3rd July 2002 (Rome, 2003), 214. 46 The canon is contained in the first iteration of the Decretum, Winroth edition at: http://gratian.org/ (accessed 22 October 2019); ed. Friedberg, vol. 1, col. 738; Ambrosius, De Tobia 15.51, ed. C. Schenkl, Corpus Christianorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 32.2 (Vienna, 1897), p. 547. 47 Baldwin, 274-80; Nelson, 3-18; Huguccio, Summa, Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Ms Clm 10247, fol. 182v: […] Set non a Iudeis quia contra eos non iuste pugnatut ut 23 q. 8 Dispar […]. The MS is available on line by the Münchener DigtalisieringsZentrum at https://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/0008/bsb00085241/images/index.html?id=00085241&groesser=150%&fip=193.174.98.30&no=&seite=372; I am very grateful to Prof. Kenneth Pennington for making me aware of this MS; Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge MS 283/676, fol. 127r, gloss on C. 14 q. 4 c. 12: […] non autem a Iudeis quia 23 q. 8 Dispar. On the late-twelfth century Anglo-Norman gloss in this manuscript see Anna Sapir Abulafia, ‘Gratian and the Jews’, Jaarboek Thomas Instituut te Utrecht 36 (2017), 9-39. 48 Sapir Abulafia, ‘The Fourth Lateran Council through the lens of Jewish service’, in Jews and Muslims under the Fourth Lateran Council. Papers commemorating the octocentenary of the Fourth Lateran Council (2015), ed. Marie-Thérèse Champagne and Irven M. Resnick, Religion and Law in Medieval Christian and Muslim Societies, 10 (Turnhout, 2018), 88-90; Norman P. Tanner (ed.), Decrees of the Ecumenical councils (London, 1990), 265, 269. 49 Stow, ‘Papal and Royal Attitudes’, 161-83; X. 5. 19. 12, ed. Friedberg, vol. 2, coll 814-5; see also the Roman edition of the Decretals Corpus juris canonici emendatum et notis illustratum. Gregorii XIII. pont. max. iussu editum. Romae: In aedibus Populi Romani, 1582, Part II, column 1740, made available at UCLA Digital Library Program. Corpus Juris Canonici (1582) at http://digital.library.ucla.edu/canonlaw (accessed 5 May 2020). 50 Sapir Abulafia, Christian-Jewish relations, 214; Watt, ‘Grosseteste and the Jews’ 201-16; Christoph Cluse, Studien zur Geschichte der Juden in den Nierderlanden (Hannover, 2000), 174-85. 51 Talmage 9, 33-35; Trautner-Kromann, 49, 65-66. 52 Trautner-Kromann, 73—82; Robert Chazan, Church, State and Jew in the Middle Ages (New York, 1980), 199. 53 Robert Chazan, Fashioning Jewish Identity in Medieval Western Christendom (Cambridge, 2004), 105-6; Joseph Shatzmiller, Shylock reconsidered. Jews, Moneylending and Medieval Society (Berkeley, CA, 1990), 80-1, 97-8. 54 Trautner-Kromann, 106 on the intensification of arguments. 55 David Berger (ed. and trans), Nizzahon Vetus. The Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages (Philadelphis, PA, 1979), no. 123, pp. 133, 291-2, 81-2 (Hebrew) and Trautner-Kromann, 105-6. Joseph ben Nathan Official writing around 1280 in Northern France had said much the same, see Trautner-Kromann, 95-6. 56 Berger, 291, citing Rome MS 83; see also Haym Soloveitchik, ’The Jewish Attitude to Usury in the High and Late Middle Ages (1000-1500’) in: idem, Collected Essays, vol. 1, 50. See also Trautner-Kromann, 96 on the intricacy of Jewish exegetical arguments. 57 Translation by Susan L. Einbinder, ‘Meir b. Elijah of Norwich: Persecution and Poetry among Medieval Jews’, Journal of Medieval History 26 (2000), line 10, p. 157 (Hebrew on p. 160). 58 Jordan, 148-50. 59 Soloveitchik, ‘Jewish attitudes’, 45-46.

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The Role of Money in medieval Christian-Jewish Relations by Anna Sapir Abulafia FBA Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 26 60 Soloveitchik, ‘Jewish attitudes’, 45-53; idem, ‘Pawnbroking. A Study of Ribbit and of the Halakhah in Exile’, in: idem, Collected Essay,’, 101, 122. 61 Soloveitchik, ’Pawnbroking’, 69-71. 62 Soloveitchik, ’Pawnbroking’, 71-2 and 106; Bava Metzia 71b, in the Soncino translation of the Talmud the phrase is rendered as: ‘Now, the second clause is well, for there the ruling is in the direction of greater stringency’, at http://www.halakhah.com/babamezia/babamezia_71.html#PARTb accessed on 14 October 2019; The Talmud. The Steinsaltz Edition, vol. 4: Tractate Bava Metzia, part 4 (New York, 1991), p. 193 translates the phrase as ‘Granted the last clause is towards stringency’. 63 Soloveitchik, ’Pawnbroking’, 99-109. 64 Soloveitchik, ’Pawnbroking’,129-36. 65 Soloveitchik, ’Pawnbroking’, 136-9. 66 Soloveitchik, ’Pawnbroking’, 109-113, 124. 67 Taking fully account of Soloveitchik cautionary words on this matter (Pawnbroking, 130, and, indeed comment on p. 125). 68 Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christians and Jews in the Twelfth-century Renaissance (London, 1995), 107-22, eadem, Christian-Jewish Relations, 217-8; Lipton, 30-53. 69 Lipton, 50-3. 70 https://www.timesofisrael.com/corbyn-regrets-defending-london-mural-he-now-says-is-anti-semitic/, accessed 13 October 2019.

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The Politics of Fear by Bruce Anderson Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 28 uring the great lockdown of early 2020, David Runciman, Professor of Politics at Cambridge University, found that he had time on his hands, plus a theme to hand. Throughout the world, hundreds of millions of people were being coerced for their own safety: compelled to sacrifice freedoms in order to save lives. Not since war-time had there been such an arrogation of power by Western states, thus bringing their relationship with their citizens into sharp focus. Although modern heads of government may not know much Latin, they almost all seem to believe in 'salus populi suprema lex'. The ensuing laws were imposed not only with little discussion, but often with outrage against those who sought to question them: 'don't you know there's a pandemic on?' All this stimulated Professor Runciman to revisit some earlier debates, in lively podcasts which became this book. It is easy to be sceptical about politics as an academic subject, especially when it pushes its pretensions further and calls itself 'political science'. That is surely an oxymoron. 'Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.' The troubles of our proud and angry dust, as manifested in a public sphere regularly menaced by chaos, cannot be reduced to a science, any more than politics itself can be abstracted from its historical context. Sir John Seeley, sometime Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, is said to have stated that 'History is past politics and politics present history'. That conclusion rests on a sound bottom of common sense. In the view of Nigel Lawson, one of the most economically literate Chancellors of all time, the same is true of economics. Instead of trying to create theories out of crooked timber, people should study economic history: what actually happened. Scepticism has been encouraged by experience. No Prime Minister was more economically equipped than Harold Wilson. He promised to use his knowledge to upgrade the quality of government in Britain. He delivered an opportunistic shambles. 'A week is a long time in politics,' he told us. It was certainly long enough for him to make up everything as he went along. Wilson was an alumnus of the Oxford PPE faculty. That has not discouraged those that who argue that in the public interest, it should be closed down. It must also be remembered that the academic discipline of politics was virtually invented in the LSE. That institution is not all bad. How could it be, when its luminaries include Hayek, Oakeshott and Popper? But it has a reputation for Leftism, dating from the era when Graham Wallas, Harold Laski and other members of the Fabian society believed that the purpose of political studies was to steer the world in the direction of socialism. In low-grade politics departments around the country, as well as capitulating to wokery, humourless Fabian epigoni are still preaching social salvation to bemused and bewildered audiences. This is not true of David Runciman. Although he may be a man of the moderate Left, he is anything but a humourless doctrinaire. He is not afraid of the big questions, and he does not pretend that he has all the answers. As one might expect from the title, the book starts and ends with Hobbes, and much of the text takes the form of replies to Hobbes's arguments. This makes sense, for he asked the biggest D

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The Politics of Fear by Bruce Anderson Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 29 question of all. How can we construct a state to enable men live together in peace? Hobbes could never be abstracted from the history of his time. He was born in 1588, the year of the Armada. Later, he claimed that his mother went into labour when she heard that the Spanish fleet was sailing up the Channel. and that she gave birth to twins: him, and fear. A turbulent beginning was followed by a long life on the fringes of violence. The English Reformation could also be described as a revolution, which went on intermittently until the early Eighteenth Century, and for much longer in Scotland. In Ireland, it is not yet over. Throughout Hobbes's 91 years, it was a regular source of political instability. On the continent of Europe, in another confessional conflict, the Dutch had been fighting the Spaniards for decades. After a brief cessation, that contest became part of the Thirty Years War, a brutal, ravaging assault on humanity which would have encouraged any wise Englishman to pay thanks for divine providence in the form of the English Channel. It was usually a good moat. Hobbes was very much a wise Englishman, entirely immune from martial ardour. When the English Civil War broke out, he took refuge in Paris. Every week would have brought him fresh news of bloodshed in apparently endless conflicts. Some of Hobbes's contemporaries accused him of atheism, a charge which he made no strenuous efforts to rebut. Even so, had he found himself in a church when the clergyman was saying 'give peace in our time, o Lord' he might had added a sotto voce Halleluiah. The experiences of his entire life led him to value peace and its concomitant, political order. The beheading of Charles I outside the Banqueting Hall of Whitehall, engraving with etching David Runciman is fascinated by Hobbes. He points out a delicious contrast. This man, who happily described himself as twinned with fear, a leitmotif in his personal life, was also

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The Politics of Fear by Bruce Anderson Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 30 intellectually fearless, especially in Leviathan: 'an amazing piece of writing...inspired both by Euclidean geometry and biblical imagery.' Hobbes wrote as well, and as lucidly, as the development of English prose permitted in the mid-Seventeenth Century.' Two hundred years later, he might have emulated Macaulay's brisk light infantry pace. Hobbes is frequently misunderstood. There are no noble savages for him. His unsentimental description of pre-social human life as 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short' and his construction of Leviathan as a means of preventing 'bellum omnium contra omnes' have led to a misconception. He is assumed to be a natural authoritarian. Not so: whether or not he was a closet atheist, Hobbes was certainly a closet liberal. He believed that only a strong sovereign - Leviathan - could save man from himself and thus permit freedom. Anticipating Isaiah Berlin by three centuries, he drew an implicit distinction between positive and negative concepts of liberty, and came down heavily in favour of negativity. He wanted to be as free as possible from constraint and had no interest in constraining others. Under the rule of Leviathan, politics would have a very limited role. The portrait by John Michael Wright in the National Portrait Gallery encourages one to find the mind's construction in the face. In it, Hobbes comes across as a wise and deep character, a rationalist with a subtle sense of humour and an acute capacity for observation. There is a sense that this man knew how to enjoy life, and wanted others to have the same privilege. This supposed apologist for dictatorship could be classified as an accidental man. A mixture of fictional and actual characters - Boethius, Erasmus, Hamlet, Prince Andrei and Turgenev are examples - these are men who aspire to a level of civilisation that circumstances prevent them from achieving. 'The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right.' Hence Leviathan, Hobbes's attempt to repair the joint and amend the time. Men agree to submit themselves to an all-powerful ruler in a social contract, exchanging anarchy for good government. Contemporary Singapore is a good example of a Hobbesian state. But there is an obvious problem. Hobbes did not believe in original sin, but he did have faith in science and in reason. He also assumed that Seventeenth Century communications would limit the power of central government to interfere with its subjects. So he was an optimist as well as a liberal. Was the optimism justified? David Runciman does not regard Hobbes as a liberal and nor does Benjamin Constant. There is clearly a danger of anachronism when one applies a modern political term to an earlier epoch: the clocks striking in Caesar's Rome. But Hobbes was a liberal by temperament and certainly by the standards of the Seventeenth Century. Benjamin Constant, an unalloyed liberal, devoted a lot of thought to Hobbes but could not share either his enthusiasm for Leviathan or his disregard for politics. Constant too had lived through bloody times: the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. He had observed the power of the modern state and had no faith in the moderating influence of science and reason any more than in the beneficence of Leviathan. Negative freedom was not enough. Although It is not clear who actually wrote that; 'The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing', Constant would have agreed. If you want to be free, you cannot leave politics to Leviathan. As Runciman puts it, for

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The Politics of Fear by Bruce Anderson Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 31 Constant: 'That is the paradox of modern life. If you genuinely don't want to take part in politics, you need to take part in politics to protect your right not to take part in politics.' Portrait of Benjamin Constant, oil on canvas, 1820, Hercule de Roche That brings our author to Tocqueville. No-one has so brilliantly harnessed political philosophy to hustings-level politics as he did in Democracy in America. Tocqueville too knew that a modern state could descend into barbarism. He had lost several relatives during the Jacobin Terror. He too sought to combine liberty and order, awhile taking account of the new Leviathan that would increasingly dominate politics: democracy. There was also a second Leviathan-like state: the United States, which had also gone further in the direction of democracy than any other nation. Tocqueville foresaw an epoch of American dominance, so he thought that he had better cross the Atlantic to study this new phenomenon. At first, he was impressed, but that gave way to complexity and ambivalence. Had he visited America in the age of the Virginian gentlemen - Jefferson, Madison and Monroe - he might have been easier in his mind. But by the time he arrived, General Jackson and his camp followers had arrived from the frontier, bringing spittoons to the White House. Tocqueville had no instinctive respect for a vulgar democracy which elected raucous leaders. There was a paradox at the heart of Tocqueville's assessment of America. He was worried about the dangers of majority tyranny. He also feared that the triumph of populist politics could induce conformity and thus suppress the creative excitement which was essential to America's success. He was equally aware of the tensions arising from the American original sin, slavery. which were creating instability. He died before the Civil War. It would have horrified him, but

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The Politics of Fear by Bruce Anderson Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 32 not surprised him. So he did not believe that vox populi was necessarily and at all times vox dei, but he did acknowledge the primacy of democracy. 'To wish to stop democracy would ...appear to be a struggle against God himself.' He could be said to have anticipated Churchill: 'Democracy is the worst form of government - apart from all the others.' Other chapters in this book broaden the agenda. Max Weber emerges as a confused melange of Hobbesianism and Twentieth Century liberalism, trying to make sense of German politics after 1918. He did not live long enough to be convincing. There is an interesting account of Mary Wollstonecraft and a powerful reading of Hannah Arendt, an agonistic liberal, in Isaiah Berlin's phrase. We move beyond Europe with Gandhi and Franz Fanon and beyond liberalism with Marx and Engels. Hayek, a 24 carat liberal rather than an agonistic one, is equally sceptical about Leviathan and democracy. He feared the encroachment of the modern state. Hannah Arendt, c.1963, Jewish Chronicle Archive/Heritage-Images via Britannica The great Salisbury wrote that enfranchising the poor would be like leaving the cat in charge of the cream jug. Hayek would have agreed. Unscrupulous demagogues would reduce economic life to confiscatory taxation and a debauched currency: The Road to Serfdom, to quote his most famous title. David Runciman 's final chapter is devoted to Francis Fukuyama, who has been much misunderstood because of another famous title. In 'The End of History' Fukuyama was not arguing that history would come to an end, merely that the apparent triumph of liberal democracy would create a new set of problems. In 1848, it was a case of la France s'ennuie. Now it could be l'humanite s'ennuie. After more than two millennia of experiments. regularly ending in bloodshed, it could be argued that men have learned how to live in society. The rule of law, some form of democracy,

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The Politics of Fear by Bruce Anderson Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 33 free markets plus, in especially favoured nations, a monarchy: that will provide a perfect framework for freedom and prosperity. It would have been enough for Hobbes, Constant and Tocqueville. It is not enough to assuage the discontents of the human condition. In many cases, that appears to require some form of religion: these days, usually a secular religion. There are benign forms, such as football, and less benign ones: wokery and Extinction Rebellion. They are disruptive, which would have been anathema to Hobbes. But there seems no end to the disruption. When Francis Fukuyama published his book, the West's predominance seemed assured, despite internal discontents. Now, nothing is assured. If Tocqueville could see the products of modern democracy, he might be less certain that it walked with divinity. History is not done with mankind yet. Nor is political philosophy. David Runciman has produced a lively and stimulating book which anyone interested in such questions will enjoy. Peter Utley, whom the late Frank Johnson described as an itinerant jobbing Tory philosopher and who ought to be better known, wrote that political philosophy is action recollected in tranquility. That is a charming description, even if the tranquility is more elusive than either Peter or Thomas Hobbes would have wished. How to think about Germany: lessons in contemporary histor

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The Politics of Fear by Bruce Anderson Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 35 ext year will mark the 50th anniversary of martial law being declared in the Philippines, a move that turned Ferdinand Marcos from an elected president into a one-man ruler with dictatorial powers; and a kleptocrat who is estimated to have amassed $10 billion in ill-gotten gains while committing grave human rights abuses over the following 14 years, until he was ousted in the People Power Revolution of 1986. If there is some irony in the fact that 2022 is also the year when his son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, may run for the presidency, there is also, with hindsight, an air of inevitability about it. “Bongbong”, as Mr Marcos Jr is universally known, came very close to winning the vice presidency in 2016. His mother Imelda, once infamous for her opulent shoe collection, won four terms in the Philippines House of Representatives after returning from exile in 1991. His sister Imee is currently a senator, having previously been governor of the Marcos home province of Ilocos Norte and a representative for the same area. Despite his undoubted crimes, meanwhile, Marcos Sr was accorded the honour of a burial in the National Heroes’ Cemetery in 2016. With many now talking of the country enjoying a “golden age” under the rule of a man who was once reviled, the whitewashing of the Marcos era seems near complete. Former Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos, centre, ruled with an iron grip between 1972 and 1986. AFP N Why are so many in the Philippines wary of 'liberal' ideas? by Sholto Byrnes

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The Politics of Fear by Bruce Anderson Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 36 But the Philippines is far from alone in displaying what many would consider bewildering nostalgia in a democracy for an authoritarian past. In neighbouring Indonesia, Defence Minister Prabowo Subianto appears little harmed by having been the son-in-law of the late dictator Suharto (who may have looted as much as $30bn from his country); indeed, Mr Prabowo is one of the frontrunners in surveys for Indonesia’s 2024 presidential election. In August, I wrote about the re-emergence of Saif Al Islam Qaddafi, whose presidential ambitions in Libya appear to have solid support according to the limited polling available. There have been many reports about nostalgia for Saddam Hussein in Iraq, even though his brutality, his extensive use of the most appalling torture, and his killing of maybe hundreds of thousands of his own people is well known. Other continents have not escaped this phenomenon. Hywel Williams, director of the Erasmus Historical and Cultural Research Forum in London, points out to me that “Europe has a big East-West divide” on this. There is fond looking back, for instance, at the regency of Miklos Horthy in Hungary, even though Horthy was an open anti-Semite who allied with Germany in the Second World War. It's the same in the case of the conservative, militarily dominated governments in Poland during the inter-war period. Even France is not immune, as became clear when 20 retired generals recently published a letter warning that the military might need to take action if “those who run our country” did not “end the growing chaos”, as they put it. Saif Al Islam Qaddafi could lead Libya one day, even though his father was overthrown 10 years ago. EPA Why are so many in the Philippines wary of 'liberal' ideas? by Sholto Byrnes

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The Politics of Fear by Bruce Anderson Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 37 Mr Williams thinks that these instances of weakening attachments to the liberal democratic order are “directly related to the failure of capitalism to produce goods for the masses. That’s a very 1930s phenomenon, which now comes with a global outsourcing twist". It is certainly true that if the leaders of relatively new democracies fail to deliver the basic needs of the populace – adequate food, accommodation, education, health care and the realistic hope for a better life – then what may be a novel form of government may easily lose its lustre. In this case, its supposed advantages can appear hollow. Bobby Benedicto of McGill University in Canada wrote in an astute essay earlier this year: “Formal institutions of representation often fail to sate the sense of impotence that marks the lives of those who, in principle, come to possess freedom and autonomy.” A yearning for the stability countries enjoyed under authoritarian regimes is also understandable if the democratic present is chaotic and dangerous. But there is also the issue of young people who never knew the past failing to be aware of its often very considerable downsides. “Because they have not experienced authoritarianism, they are likely to have both higher expectations of democracy and less information about the costs of authoritarianism,” wrote MIT researcher Marsin Alshamary in 2018. “By contrast, generations who lived their formative years under authoritarian rule are more forgiving towards democracies, despite their flaws.” This is something of which Bongbong Marcos is very aware. Asked about his father’s rule in 2015, he was combative – and seductively selective – about the elder Marcos’s record: “Will I say sorry for the thousands and thousands of kilometers [of roads] that were built? Will I say sorry for the agricultural policy that brought us to self-sufficiency in rice? Will I say sorry for the power generation? Will I say sorry for the highest literacy rate in Asia? What am I to say sorry about?” This has a clear appeal, not least because it is based on the truth, however partial. And when democratic politicians can be cast as elites who serve their own interests, not those of the people, a strong leader – who may also, perversely, be a child of privilege – can manage to present himself as the true voice of the masses. “Authoritarian power," Mr Benedicto wrote, "is only experienced as unfreedom if one does not see oneself in the figure that wields it. For those who do, it affords an opportunity to partake in the subjective freedom of a figure who appears as an agent of history rather than a slave to its forces.” Agency: that word is key. If voters feel they are mere servants of an uncaring and capricious market, they may be open to the lure of a self-styled “fighter for the little folks” through whom real “people power” can be exercised on their behalf. If Bongbong Marcos and others can harness that, they may not just win power. They will also prove the truth of the old Soviet saying: “The future is certain; it’s the past which is unpredictable.”Why are so many in the Philippines wary of 'liberal' ideas? by Sholto Byrnes

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The Long Reach of John Calvin!!by Mark Jones! Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 39 n December 1541, in a small town in western France, Saint-Seurin d’Uzet, Jean Frèrejean told his father to stop arranging the usual Christmas mass to pray for family members who had died. Interrogated by the Church authorities, he was fined 100 livres for his refusal to believe in Purgatory. Looking back, he remembered how this intimidating event persuaded him and his family to conform with Roman Catholic practice “ … until the year 1560, when the church of God began to establish itself and reform the present land of Saintonge.” (1) So what was it that happened in that part of France from about 1560? By then, in parts of Germany and Switzerland, even in the earliest phases of the Reformation, people were acting in much more extreme ways to bring about what they saw as a kind of cleansing of the Church. They were destroying altar-pieces, smashing statues and reliquaries, and burning paintings, books and vestments; and there was clearly some kind of crowd psychology at work. In 1517, Martin Luther (1483-1546), a professor of Theology at the recently founded university of Wittenberg, began to oppose publicly the late medieval Church’s practice of the sale of indulgences; and openly to state his doubts about the theological underpinning for such practices. As is well known, by 1521, this had created a major crisis in both church and state. Luther was formally excommunicated by the pope on 3 January 1521, and was declared an outlaw in the spring of that year at the Imperial Diet which met at Worms. He went into hiding; so the destruction ofecclesiastical images, which started in Wittenberg in early 1522, and resulted from an irresistible popular movement, happened without his approval. Portrait of Pope Leo X with Cardinals Giulio de' Medici and Luigi de' Rossi, Raphael, oil on panel, c.1518 I

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The Long Reach of John Calvin!!by Mark Jones! Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 40 A rather different form of Reformation, though with comparable motives and similar aims, had already broken out in Zürich, spear-headed by another prominent humanist reformer, Ulrich Zwingli (1483-1531). As a vignette of Protestant wrangles still to come, a row broke out there when sausages were eaten by some prominent citizens during Lent, 1522. Much more significantly, in September 1523 a crowd of people pulled down a crucifix, and image breaking spread quickly from then on. For example, in 1524, some of the inhabitants of the Thurgau region, north of Zürich, effectively a mob, cut down and burned a statue of St Annewhich had stood for centuries at a deeply venerated place of pilgrimage in their rural community. This iconoclastic spirit, even rage, persisted throughout the Reformation period, though, often, complex local factors fuelled the outbreaks. Another example is the desecration of the exquisite Lady Chapel at Ely Cathedral which began in 1539, the effects of which are visible to this day. Similar events took place in Antwerp and other towns and cities in the Low Countries in August 1566, as a period of Reformation, partly inspired by Calvinist preaching, exploded into life in the region . Portrait of Ulrich Zwingli, Hans Asper, oil on parchment, c.1531 In our secular age, it is perhaps difficult to grasp the way in which, in previous generations, religious ideas could have such an electrifying effect upon communities and indeed whole populations; and even harder to do so sympathetically. The Reformation was a period of intense ideological and social upheaval. To understand the consequences of John Calvin’s writings and career, we need to consider why men and women across early modern Europe quite suddenly abandoned the symbols, images, prayers, rituals, festivals and stories that had

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The Long Reach of John Calvin!!by Mark Jones! Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 41 sustained their ancestors for hundreds of years. Why did people across Europe destroy so many previously precious and much-loved objects and transform the rich interiors of their church buildings? There was no diminution of the depth and intensity of their devotion, so what made them change so drastically the expressions of their faith, the religious language and imagery they used, both in and out of church? The Lady Chapel, Ely Cathedral, its stained glass and statues removed, a monument to iconoclasm. Courtesy of Wikicommons, 2014 Two significant developments in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries prepared the way for the Reformation. The invention of the printing press facilitated the production of multiple copies of the Bible (in Hebrew, Greek and Latin, and then, where permitted, the vernacular languages) just as Renaissance Humanism was changing habits of reading. In 1516 the influential humanist scholar, Erasmus, (1466-1536), published a Greek text of the New Testament with a new Latin translation. Within a generation, this direct access to its source texts had revolutionised Christianity. Like many of their scholarly contemporaries all over Europe, Luther and the other leading reformers of the first generation were seeking a new kind of connection with God. This quickly led some of them to question, and others to condemn, the whole apparatus of late medieval piety; and some of them decided that the Christian believer could now lead the life of faith without recourse to the superstructure of the Church. In addition, many of central theological positions of the Roman Church now seemed to the more

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The Long Reach of John Calvin!!by Mark Jones! Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 42 thorough-going reformers, such as Luther and Zwingli, to be positively antagonistic to a true apprehension of Christian faith. Traditional beliefs and practices needed to be swept away. From the early 1520s, starting in Zürich and in Wittenberg, this started to happen. Early modern states struggled to meet the threat posed by a hitherto unparalleled, and unimaginable, level of religious division and disunity. It takes a prodigious act of imagination to recreate the religious mentalité of the sixteenth century. In the intense early phases of the Reformation, Protestantism in its various forms spread among populations who believed that some kind of eschatological crisis was imminent. It would be preceded, they thought, by a period of stress and strain that would herald the destruction of the world order and bring in the divine judgement that would settle the eternal fate of each human soul. This explains why the first reformed communities practised their faith with such extreme ardour and astonishing courage. By the time that Luther died, Lutheranism had captured many parts of the Holy Roman Empire and spread into Scandinavia. The Reformed tradition begun by Zwingli, had been taken forward by other great reformers such as Martin Bucer (1491-1551) in Strasbourg and Zwingli’s successor in Zürich, Heinrich Bullinger (1504-1575). There was a wide range of practice, and divisions soon started to emerge. Luther, Calvin, and other Reformers who wanted to win over the governing authorities had to defend the reputation of the Reformation against the excesses (as they seemed to them) of the more radical reformers. As the new Protestant churches consolidated their territorial gains and settled down, they cultivated the virtues associated with stability and permanence. They developed new liturgies, new moral sensibilities, and new patterns of local government and social control. It was the genius of Calvin to show how this might be done. Like the other reformers of the second generation, he inherited the main theological positions of Luther and did not greatly modify them: but he showed how Reformation principles could provide the foundation for a new kind of polity. Geneva was the model. In very different ways, and over different time scales, as will be shown below, Calvin’s system came to be the inspiration for new political and ecclesiastical structures across large swathes of Europe and in the nascent colonial communities along North America’s eastern seaboard.

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The Long Reach of John Calvin!!by Mark Jones! Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 43 Map of Europe at the beginning of the Reformation around 1520 (from Spamers Illustrierte Weltgeschichte, 1894, 5[1], 128/129) The Rise of John Calvin Jean Cauvin (1509-64), whom we know as Calvin, had a conventional upbringing in Noyon, a provincial town in northern France. His family were ambitious for him and he passed through the universities of Paris, Orléans and Bourges, gaining a doctorate in law. As a young scholar, he won acclaim for his prowess as a Renaissance humanist when, in 1532, he published an edition of Seneca’s de Clementia. But, perhaps as early as 1530, the direction of his career changed completely when he embraced the principles of the Reformation. In 1534, after the Affair of the Placards, when leaflets attacking the Mass were distributed by Protestant agitators, François I inaugurated the first systematic persecution of French protestants, and Calvin fled to Basel. When he passed through Geneva in 1536, the leader of the Reformation party there, Guillaume Farel (1489-1565), urged him to stay. Except for a period of exile from 1538 to 1541, (spent mostly in Strasbourg where he married a local widow, Idelette Stordeur), Calvin lived for the rest of his life in Geneva. There, by adapting ideas developed in the earlier phase of the Reformation by Luther, Zwingli, and other first generation reformers, Calvin worked out one of the most powerful accounts of Protestant theology ever to be formulated. He also oversaw the implementation in Geneva of an entirely new ecclesiastical constitution, the model of Church governance which we know as Presbyterianism. By the late 1540s Calvin was identified as a leading reformer with a

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The Long Reach of John Calvin!!by Mark Jones! Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 44 recognisable set of ideas, (particularly in relation to controversies about the Eucharist) and the notion of Calvinism was born. Calvin’s régime of work was punishing. When he died exhausted in 1564, he left a huge corpus of writings. In addition to the Institutes, he wrote commentaries on almost every book in the Bible, sermons on almost every Christian theme, a horde of letters and an extensive cache of occasional papers. He also attracted influential disciples who carried the flame, particularly Théodore de Bèze (1519-1605) in France, William Perkins (1558-1602) in England, and Franciscus Gomarus (1563-1641) in the Dutch Republic. Herein lies the first problem with defining ‘Calvinism’, for some of his devoted followers adapted, summarised and, inevitably, changed and even distorted Calvin’s ideas. Calvin was only one of the Protestant theologians whose work gave rise to the Reformed Tradition of theology and political thought; though he can be said, (with a degree of hindsight, it is true), to have been its leading light. However, because of his French heritage, and his mastery of style, Calvin’s ideas spread quickly into his native France and took root there. They also inspired powerful new religious movements in those parts of the Low Countries which split from the Habsburg Empire during the Dutch Revolt; in England; in Scotland; in some (but relatively few) territories of the Holy Roman Empire (notably the Palatinate); and in areas of Central Europe such as Bohemia, Transylvania and Hungary. Many of the early European (primarily English) colonists on the Atlantic seaboard of North America adhered enthusiastically to Calvinist principles, though, as Perry Miller has pointed out, they did not necessarily read Calvin. The New England Puritans, wrote Miller, “did not think of (Calvin) as the fountain head of their thought, nor of themselves as members of a faction of which he was founder.” They picked up their ideas from later systematisers and commentators such as David Pareus (1548-1622). (2) Here, therefore, a second problem emerges. We must ascribe to Calvin the ideas that properly belong to him and bear in mind that ‘Calvinism’ is often used loosely as a ragbag term for reformed and/or puritanical forms of Christianity. In the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a period of vigorous debate gave rise to two new movements or tendencies within Calvinism, both of which were abominated by pure Calvinists, and seen by them as a dangerous dilution of the original message; but which showed that Calvinism was a living theological tradition with a capacity for self-criticism and development. These were Arminianism, derived from theological positions worked out by Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609), of which more below, and Amyraldism, worked out by Moïse Amyrault (1596-1664). By the mid-seventeenth century, both in Europe and North America, orthodox Calvinism had been systematised by a succession of writers, one of the most effective of whom was François Turretini (1623-1687), professor of theology in Geneva from 1653. Since then, at different times and in different places, Calvinism has regained its intellectual energy. For example, in the early eighteenth century, Jonathan Edwards (1703-58), having entered the recently founded Yale College at the age of fifteen, brought a piercing intellect to bear on theological problems, and drew together Calvinism and the teaching of the earlier phases of the Enlightenment. He was an important catalyst for the First Great

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The Long Reach of John Calvin!!by Mark Jones! Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 45 Awakening of the 1730s and 40s in North America, and the corpus of his works has been a significant resource for American Calvinists. Portrait of James Arminius, David Bailly, oil on panel, c.1620 Calvinism as a system of belief Calvin’s treatment of the eternal themes of Christian theology is powerful and thought-provoking; and it is conveniently distilled in his great work, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, the first version of which was written in Latin during the course of the unsettled period in Calvin’s life after 1534. Dedicated to the king of France, it was published in Basel in 1536, and quickly came to the notice of reforming theologians as a powerful summary and defence of protestant beliefs: a fact all the more remarkable because Calvin had received no formal theological education. He went on refining it until the final magisterial edition of 1559, and it was soon translated into many vernacular languages. No other Reformation thinker laid out his ideas so clearly. Calvin regarded himself as a faithful interpreter of the Christian scriptures, of St. Augustine, whom he quotes extensively, and also of Luther, whom he greatly admired. Calvin envisages the believer in a relationship with God which is characterised by delight in the grace, mercy

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The Long Reach of John Calvin!!by Mark Jones! Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 46 and beauty of God, and which is conducted through the medium of prayer (see particularly chapter xx of Book III of the Institutes). The set of answers he gave to the questions posed by the ‘Christ Event’, such as how we come to know God, to what extent we possess free will, and the interplay between determinism, election and grace, have been the subject of unending controversy: but they are serious and substantial. Above all, Calvin insists on recognition of the sovereignty of God and the creaturely nature of humankind. The idea with which he is inescapably associated is that of ‘double predestination’. However, Calvin’s formulation of his views about election, foreknowledge and predestination is theologically subtle, and these theological issues are far from central for Calvin; though it is true that he returned to them in successive editions of the Institutes and steadily amplified his teaching about them. When reflecting on the sovereignty of God, Calvin develops a theoretical understanding of God’s foreknowledge in relation to humankind’s power of choice: an understanding rooted in Augustine, and already sharply expressed by Luther in his controversy with Erasmus about the freedom or bondage of the will during the 1520s. Calvin expressed his view in the 1559 Institutes (III. xxi. 5) as follows: “We call predestination God’s eternal decree, by which he compacted with himself what he willed to become of each man. For all are not created in equal condition; rather, eternal life is foreordained for some, eternal damnation for others. Therefore, as every man has been created to one or other of these ends, we speak of him as predestined to life and death.” (3) It is important to recall the historical context here, for Calvin (following Luther) was engaged in bitter polemical strife with Roman Catholic theologians about the wellsprings of faith, and the extent to which the believer can collaborate with God’s grace in the act of achieving faith, or is so hindered by sin that he or she can only be a passive recipient of the gift of faith. This is a highly contested aspect of Christian theology, and it is complicated at the best of times. The sixteenth century theological battles were prefigured by those between Augustine and Pelagius in the fifth century. A brief but lucid summary of Calvin’s position has been provided by Professor Diarmaid McCullough, who navigates through these stormy seas with both historical acumen and theological perspicacity. (4) What is clear is that Calvin’s mode of expression of these particular theological points led, ultimately, to a parting of the ways. Orthodox Calvinists, such as Gomarus in Holland, stuck rigidly to what they viewed as Calvin’s path. Others, though loyal to the Reformed position overall, felt that Calvin had overstated the case and were impressed by the more moderate position on election laid out by the highly respected scholar, also friend and close associate of Luther, Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560). A significant challenge within the fold of Calvinism came from Jacobus Arminius, who had studied under de Bèze in Geneva, and was apparently a pillar of orthodoxy in the Amsterdam church until he started to ask questions, during the 1590s and through the 1600s, about the Calvinist theological position on predestination. His slight changes of emphasis created alarm in a church and population who had achieved a degree of prosperity and political security after living through a period of savage persecution. The resulting divisions had longstanding consequences. They would have a significant effect on the history of the English church during the seventeenth century; and, in

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The Long Reach of John Calvin!!by Mark Jones! Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 47 the eighteenth century, John Wesley (1703-91) would opt for the Arminian way, rather than adhering to the strict Calvinist theology espoused by his earlier colleague, the other great founder of Methodism, George Whitefield (1714-70), and by Jonathan Edwards. Calvin’s followers extracted five principle points from his works. Together they constitute what has come to be known in the English-speaking world as TULIP Calvinism. The points can be expressed as follows: Total depravity - a person cannot save himself; Unconditional election - God chooses whom He will save, salvation has nothing to do with our own efforts; Limited atonement - Jesus’s death on the cross provides atonement for the saved only; Irresistible grace - a person cannot reject the gift of faith; Perseverance of the saints - those chosen for salvation will never fall from faith. TULIP Calvinism developed from definitions published after the Synod of Dort, 1618-19, which was convened by the Dutch Calvinists in order to secure the condemnation of the Arminian party in the United Provinces: so the question remains whether Calvin would ever have accepted such a crude distillation of theological positions which he worked out with as much subtlety as clarity. L'Escalade à Genève, 1602, The catholic forces of the Duchy of Savoy attempt to breach the city walls, Matthias Quad, aquarelle, 1603

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The Long Reach of John Calvin!!by Mark Jones! Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 48 ‘The Most Perfect School of Christ’ Geneva Calvin’s teaching certainly had far-reaching consequences for the citizens of Geneva. He laid the foundations for Geneva’s later idiosyncratic history. In fewer than thirty years, he transformed the city by sheer dogged hard work, by the power of his rhetoric, and the adamantine strength of his personality. The population grew (in 1536 it was 10,000, but by 1560 it was 21,000) and its demography changed beyond all recognition as religious refugees flocked in. (During the 1550s as many as 233 of them, with their families, were exiles from Marian England.) These incomers brought new crafts and trades, and settled to their work with the enthusiasm and diligence which Calvinist ethics engendered. The political history of early sixteenth century Geneva was complicated. The city was a bishopric, but the Counts of Savoy also had rights over it, and saw it as a valuable possession. Many of its inhabitants favoured the establishment of a self-governing republic in alliance with the towns and states of the Swiss Confederation, and they achieved this status in 1536. A new constitution, drafted by Calvin, was agreed in 1541. It brought in a complex administrative system with interlocking committees and councils, sufficiently close to the system it replaced to be acceptable to Geneva’s long term residents. Geneva, being neither too small a polity nor too big, then acted as a kind of Petri Dish for ecclesiastical experimentation: though developments in late medieval (or early Renaissance) humanism brought with them a wave of interest in republicanism and self-rule for great cities. In Geneva, Calvin grew a new culture of church government, though he had witnessed something similar in Strasbourg. In 1541, his Ecclesiastical Ordinances abolished the historic three-fold pattern of ministry (bishops, priests and deacons), and brought in a four-fold structure comprising elders (or presbyters) who were the principal magistrates; pastors, who were the parish clergy (almost all of them incomers); deacons (effectively the city’s old civil service which oversaw welfare provision); and teachers, who staffed a sophisticated public education system (which pre-dated the Reformation). Calvin’s particular achievement (though not to everyone’s satisfaction in Geneva) was the reformation of morals. While in exile in Strasbourg, he watched developments there with great interest, and learned how a population could be persuaded to adopt and then enforce a strict Christian moral code. In Geneva, he established the Consistory: effectively a court that could try any case in which a citizen had offended against Christian moral standards, and apply what were seenas appropriate penalties, though he could never have achieved this without support from significant groups of the citizenry. It was John Knox (1514-1572) who referred to Geneva as “the most perfect school of Christ that was ever on earth since the days of the apostles.” In 1559, the year in which he was finally granted a form of legal citizenship, Calvin founded the Geneva Academy. The city had been a nursery for protestant scholars and pastors for many years, but it was from the Academy that scholars who were steeped in Reformed theology fanned out all over Europe to strengthen and inspire Protestant congregations.

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The Long Reach of John Calvin!!by Mark Jones! Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 49 Portrait of John Knox, maker of modern Scotland, anonymous, engraving, 1572 Diffusion and Connection: The Calvinist Internationale Calvin’s teachings spread quickly. According to Philip Benedict, the esteemed historian of Calvinism as a social phenomenon, there may have been as many as ten million Calvinists by 1600, and this in spite of vigorous persecution across much of its range. Geneva sat on long established trade routes and was well connected with other urban centres. Partly because of Calvin’s ascendancy in the city, printers of the highest skill and quality, such as Robert Estienne (1503-59) and Jean Crespin (c.1520-72), settled there: and the printed word was easily exported. From the 1580s onwards, Calvinists had high hopes of achieving an international nexus that would carry Protestantism forward in its struggle with Habsburg Spain, in spite of its stupendous resources; but by 1660 a series of defeats of the Thirty Years’ War saw a significant diminution of the territorial power, of Calvinism. At the same time, the revitalisation of the Roman Catholic Church in the post-Tridentine era brought about a similar loss of Calvinist influence and prestige. It can nevertheless be said without exaggeration that Calvinist principles have had an incalculable impact on the history of Europe, North America and other parts of the world. Luther’s ideas, expressed in his pungent German, set the Holy Roman Empire alight, and his books travelled far and wide; but, though they admired Luther for the stand he had taken, many of the clergy and theologians who wanted to change the Church in the sixteenth century found aspects of his theology difficult, particularly his fierce insistence (while repudiating trans-substantiation) on retaining a belief that Christ was truly present in the bread and wine consecrated at communion. (One of Calvin’s great achievements was to forge an agreement about the Eucharist between the theologians of the two very different Reformed traditions of

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The Long Reach of John Calvin!!by Mark Jones! Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 50 Geneva and Zürich in the Consensus Tigurinus of 1549; but, try as he might, he could not get the Lutherans to join in.) Calvin’s writings, on the other hand, were far more accessible, ordered and stylish. His own French translation of the 1539 version of the Institutes was published in 1541, and the sharpness and clarity of his prose provided a fine model for later writers of French. Reformation ideas were being promulgated in France from the early 1520s, and by the 1550s, they had taken root in large parts of the country, though under persecution. It was Calvin’s particular ambition to create a Protestant state in France, and the opportunity for this appeared to present itself during a period of extreme political instability in 1559 after the death of Henry II from an injury sustained while jousting. Calvin’s Company of Pastors began supplying pastors to French congregations from 1555, and at least two hundred missionaries had crossed the border by 1562. In that year, a massacre of Protestants at Vassy sparked the French Wars of Religion, which lasted until 1598 when an uneasy truce between Catholic and Protestant was declared under the terms of the Edict of Nantes. Prominent aristocrats such as Louis, Prince of Condé, and Gaspard de Coligny converted to Calvin’s form of Protestantism, and became the leaders of the movement until the disaster of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572, when thousands of Protestants were slaughtered in Paris and across provincial France - a setback from which French Protestantism never recovered. France remained a Catholic nation, though its distinctive Protestant minority tenaciously resisted successive waves of persecution up to the period of the French Revolution. St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, François Dubois, oil on panel,1572-1584 Calvin’s writings profoundly affected the development of theology and ecclesiology in sixteenth and seventeenth century England and Wales. After the death of Henry VIII in 1547,

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The Long Reach of John Calvin!!by Mark Jones! Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 51 the English reformers seized their chance, and the Reformation proceeded at pace. They had closer ties with Bullinger’s Zürich than with Calvin’s Geneva. Archbishop Cranmer also corresponded with Bucer and brought other notable and well connected Reformers such as Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499-1562) and John à Lasco (1499-1560) across to Oxford. Nevertheless, Calvin took a close interest in developments in England, and began dedicating works to English princes and grandees from 1548. (Elizabeth I refused hers because of Calvin’s association with Knox, whose First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, published in Geneva, so incensed her.) Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer of 1552 (significantly revising the first English prayer book of 1549) set the Church of England in a Reformed rather than a Lutheran direction. It was this prayer book that was largely re-adopted in 1562, and again, after the Restoration, in 1662. Many of its elements conform closely with Calvinist theology. The Calvinist influence on Cranmer’s ecclesiastical settlement has been significantbecause, in both style and content, it shaped the inner architecture of liturgy, homily and doctrinal summary that created what later became Anglicanism. At much the same time, the Scottish Reformation took place. Its rapid success, with virtually all of the constitutional work achieved during the single year of 1560, can be attributed to John Knox’s close understanding of the Genevan model. On his return from exile, he brought an ‘oven ready’ pattern with him for how to reform a state; and, of course, the presbyterian organisation of the Kirk endures to this day. It was in England that some Calvinists began to experiment with new ways of organising their Church life, and the Congregational strand of Calvinism began to break away from the Presbyterian strand. The publication in 1582 of A Treatise of Reformation without tarrying for anie by Robert Browne (1540-1633) is seen as a key moment in the development of the Congregational way, though the earliest history of these ‘separatists’ is difficult to uncover because they were persecuted so effectively. Famously, John Milton (1608-1674), who was as radical in his politics as he was gifted as a poet, would declare in the next century that “new presbyter is but old priest writ large”, expressing what became a widespread concern in some circles that presbyterian church government on Calvin’s model was just as repressive and un-Christian as episcopalian. It is a matter of great interest that the Mayflower ‘pilgrims’ of 1620 were separatists, who had themselves migrated to the Dutch Republic to escape persecution in England. It was Calvinism of a congregational character that first took root in New England.

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The Long Reach of John Calvin!!by Mark Jones! Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 52 Portrait of John Milton, anonymous, oil on canvas, c.1629 The English and Scottish rebels who brought about the Civil Wars of the 1640s and 50s were sympathetic towards Calvinism, though some also drew on more radical theological sources. Chapter three of the Westminster Confession of 1647, the official expression of faith of the English Church from then until the Restoration, has an explicitly Calvinist summary of the doctrine of predestination. At the Restoration, the Book of Common Prayer was re-published and the Thirty-Nine Articles were retained, even though the churchmen who championed them had by then departed from rigid Calvinist orthodoxy. Many English and Welsh ministers preferred, however, to remain outside the episcopalian structures of the English Church. Their number included impressive and influential pastors such as Richard Baxter (1615-91), a moderate Calvinist with Arminian leanings, and John Owen (1616-83), a traditional Calvinist, though a Congregationalist; and they left a rich legacy of Non-Conformity in England and Wales. In 1685, Louis XIV of France revoked the Edict of Nantes, thereby completing a long process by which the privileges won by French Protestants in the sixteenth century were stripped from them. England became the refuge for thousands of French Calvinists, the so-called Huguenots, who were forced by the threat of extreme persecution to migrate to those parts of Europe that would accept them.

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The Long Reach of John Calvin!!by Mark Jones! Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 53 Louis Ier de Bourbon, 1er prince de Condé, a study in aristocratic Calvinism anonymous, oil on panel, c.1550s Calvinism has stamped an indelible mark on the history of the British Isles and Ireland, and also on many of those parts of the world that have embraced Christianity because of British colonial and imperial expansion. In addition, Calvinism played a vital role in the Dutch Reformation, which entered its critical phase from 1568 when William, Prince of Orange, (1533-84) began the war of rebellion in the Low Countries against the ruling Spanish Empire which resulted in the formation of a new state, the United Provinces. This new political entity comprised the seven northern provinces, and iteventually emerged as a powerful force for (largely) Calvinist Protestantism. Though the spread of Calvinism was limited within the bounds of the Holy Roman Empire, the rulers of the Rhineland Palatinate embraced the Genevan teachings. The Palatinate was a significant territory because its princes held one of the imperial Electorships. For a hundred years or so, the university at Heidelberg, one of Germany’s great seats of learning, became an intellectual powerhouse of Calvinism. Varying Protestant traditions took root in Central Europe, but, from the 1560s onwards, many noble families in Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, Transylvania and Lithuania followed Calvin. In 1613, the marriage of Elizabeth (1596-1662), the daughter of James I of England, (and older sister to Prince Charleswho succeeded him) to Frederick V (1596-1632), the Elector Palatine, was heralded as one of the great triumphs of International Calvinism; and great were the celebrations when he was called in 1619 by the Bohemian Confederacy to be their king. However, imperial forces swept the Protestants aside in the following year, and the effect

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The Long Reach of John Calvin!!by Mark Jones! Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 54 of the Thirty Years’ War was to return most of Central Europe to the Roman allegiance, as also, after a longer elapse of time, the Palatinate. That long period of warfare had causes and consequences too complex to discuss here; but it was, in part, a re-balancing of European power blocs along new confessional lines. Portrait of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, the "Winter Queen”, workshop of Michiel Jansz.van Miereveldt, oil on panel, c.1623 In spite of the threats that might have brought them together, it became clear in the later sixteenth century that there were significant obstacles to Protestant unity because of the rift between the Lutheran and the Reformed traditions. However, from the 1570s onwards, states that had embraced Reformed theology realised their common interest. Calvinists also shared an eschatological sense of the importance of their struggle. Many of the Reformed church leaders had experience of exile, and were used to crossing international borders. Many had been trained in Geneva, and they corresponded from their colleges and universities, and exchanged information. Menna Prestwich notes how: “ When La Rochelle was besieged in 1572 the magistrates requested and obtained a loan from the city of London. When Geneva was threatened by the duke of Savoy in 1589, 1590, and again in 1602, the Swiss Protestant cantons, the Count Palatine, the states of Holland and Frisia, all responded with loans …” (5) In spite of the losses sustained during the period of the Counter-Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War, the terms of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 provided diplomatic recognition of

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The Long Reach of John Calvin!!by Mark Jones! Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 55 and protection for the Protestant states formed during the previous century. But by then, Europe was about to embark on a very different set of intellectual adventures. The Battle on the White Mountain, a celebrated victory for the imperial Catholic forces at the outset of the Thirty Years War, Peter Snayers, oil on canvas, 1620 The Power of Principle and the Right to Resist Reformation thinkers knew well that their theological ideas would have political consequences. They were also acutely aware of St Paul’s admonitions in Romans 13, “Be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.” In the monarchies and city states of pre-Reformation Europe, obedience to the Roman Church underpinned loyalty not so much to ruling dynasties or oligarchies (who could be challenged) as to the set of spiritual principles and assumptions that provided the keystone of social and political stability. The obligation of the secular authority to enforce religious uniformity was formally written into Canon Law at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, and, from then on, attempts to unsettle this obedience were ferociously resisted. In 1415, the Bohemian reformer, Jan Hus, was burned at the stake at the Council of Constance; and this eventstayed in the memory. Luther was acutely aware of the danger posed to his movement by those most powerful opponents, the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire; and, complex though the reasons were for the sympathetic reception of his ideas, the success of his religious rebellion in its early phases depended entirely on the patronage and protection of successive Electors of Saxony. Luther himself was firmly opposed to armed rebellion against a lawfully constituted authority. Though it took him a long time to arrange the chess pieces into a winning position,

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The Long Reach of John Calvin!!by Mark Jones! Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 56 in the 1540s the Emperor Charles V was at last able to make a concentrated military response to the threat that the Protestants posed within the Empire. It was during this period that Lutheran apologists began to work out their theories of resistance to the state, which appear in summary form in the Magdeburg Confession of 1550. Luther’s death in 1546 removed a significant obstacle to this process. Calvinists in France, the Low Countries, England and Scotland, at first lacking support from the ruling regime, and at times experiencing vigorous persecution, also had to justify their opposition to the governing authorities. Later on, this also became necessary in Bohemia and Hungary. For this reason, Calvinist thinkers took up the Lutheran torch and made a significant contributions to post-Reformation debates about liberty of conscience and the right of civil disobedience - themes that loom large in the development of modern sovereign states. They did so notably in their response to the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572. A series of influential texts by Francois Hotman, Francogallia (1574), Theodore de Bèze De Jure Magistratum (1574), and Philippe du Plessis Mornay and his circle Vindiciae contra Tyrannos (1579), reflected on the limits that could lawfully be imposed upon an absolute monarch. These ideas would resurface in England during the 1640s and thereafter. At a greater distance, they underpin the secession of the British colonies in North America, 1775-83, and the Declaration of Independence of 1776. Here it is worth noting Diarmaid McCullough’s judgement that “Calvin’s early saturation in law rather than theology has left its mark on the Institutes … (for) …the 1536 Institutes makes a systematic attempt to integrate a discussion of civil government with doctrine, and it does so in notably humanist and frequently non-scriptural terms.” (6) Right at the end of the Institutes, Book 4, xx, 31, Calvin reflects on civil disobedience as follows: “For if there are now any magistrates of the people, appointed to restrain the wilfulness of kings (as in the ancient times the ephors were set against the Spartankings, or the tribunes of the people against the Roman consuls, or demarchs against the senate of the Athenians; and perhaps, as things now are, such power as the three estates exercise in every realm when they hold their chief assemblies) I am so far from forbidding them to withstand, in accordance with their duty, the fierce licentiousness of kings …” (7) Here Calvin is anxious to reassure rulers that there is nothing inherently seditious about Reformed theology: however, he is also determined to allow that, where constitutionally appropriate, resistance may be offered to the tyrant. During this period, Roman Catholic theorists were also busy developing theories of resistance; for, once a state turned Protestant, what were the rights and obligations of those who remained Catholic? Quentin Skinner has justly pointed out that the Huguenot political theorists also “… turned to the scholastic and Roman Law traditions of radical constitutionalism.” (8) Calvinism made a major contribution to the development of political thought in Early Modern Europe and North America, though we must be wary of presenting Calvinism as being more influential than it actually was.

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The Long Reach of John Calvin!!by Mark Jones! Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 57 Engraving of Petrus Ramus, anonymous, engraving, c.1575 Calvinist Modernity: A Bridge to Enlightenment? Many of the thinkers who helped bring about the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century and the emergence of modes of thinking associated with the Enlightenment had grown up under the influence of Calvinism. In the wake of the Renaissance and Reformation, Calvinism was a powerful tool in the hands of many thinkers who wished to break up the intellectual and religious soil of Europe in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It could not be ignored, not least because it was a new, and revolutionary, system of ecclesiastical organisation and administration as well as a set of theological ideas. Less clear, however, is the extent to which Calvinist ways of thinking functioned as a bridge into the period of the Enlightenment. Not all Calvinists challenged scholastic modes of doing theology, or abandoned Aristotelianism. Pierre de la Ramée (1515-72), known as Ramus, is the most prominent example of those who did. A humanist scholar, determined to replace Aristotelianism with a new scheme of logic, he converted to Protestantism in 1561 and was murdered in the wake of the St Bartholomew’s Massacre. The worldviews shared and disputed across early modern Europe and North America were fed by many significant intellectual tributaries, some flowing from late-medieval Scholasticism and Aristotelianism, others from Renaissance Humanism (also its fascination for the esoteric, for Neo-Platonism and Hermeticism), also Ramism (as above), and Pyrrhonism. Innovative philosophers such as Descartes and Spinoza were not (and never had been) Calvinists and, from as early as about 1600, Calvinist orthodoxy was becoming exclusive and intellectually restrictive. However, the intellectual climate of the seventeenth century was created in part by

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The Long Reach of John Calvin!!by Mark Jones! Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 58 thinkers such as Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and John Locke (1632-1704), who were shaped by Puritan theology in their younger lives (though they modified their thinking as they grew older), and by other writers who knew about, but rejected, Calvinism. For example, Francis Bacon grew up in a strongly Calvinist milieu. His mother, Lady Ann Bacon, was a highly educated and immensely learned Calvinist. (It was she who translated Jewel’s Apology from Latin into English in 1564.) As Richard Popkin has decisively shown, the intellectual temperature of the early and mid-seventeenth century was set by Pyrrhonism. (9) Hugh Trevor Roper has offered this neat description of the effects of Pyrrhonian scepticism: “It began as a religious crisis, but soon became a crisis of knowledge. By the early seventeenth century the mutually destructive criticism of the religious parties had undermined, on each side, the foundations of belief, and intellectuals looked desperately for a solid base on which to rebuild it.” (10) Arguably, the great thinkers of the period that begins with Montaigne, notably Hugo Grotius, were asking questions about religious epistemology that Calvinism was not able to answer; and they were developing modes of enquiry that would open up new worlds of thought that shaped modernity until its greatest crisis during the period of the First World War. Frontispiece to Francis Bacon, 'Instauratio Magna' (London, J.Bill, 1620), etching and engraving. Courtesy of the British Museum

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The Long Reach of John Calvin!!by Mark Jones! Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 59 Right on the Money? In his famous and influential essay published in 1904, Die Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, Max Weber (1875-1920) developed his view that Calvinism (as opposed to Lutheranism) moulded the inner moral dispositions of its adherents in such a way that they developed new approaches to business and commerce. This was a powerful and original contribution to the wider debate about the origins of Capitalism that had been started by Marx. R.H.Tawney brought Weber’s ideas to the notice of English readers in his book Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926). However, Tawney (and Weber’s other critics) quickly pointed out that, for example, banking flourished in late medieval Italy and city states like Augsburg in the Holy Roman Empire long before the Reformation. They drew attention to the counter-example of Scotland, where economic conditions stagnated in the hundred years after the nation’s conversion to Calvinism, and they argued that there had been no notable development of capitalism in the central European areas of Calvinist influence. Tawney thought that the embryonic capitalism of the seventeenth century, as it emerged in England and Holland, was driven more by the extraordinary amplification of economic opportunity created by the success of colonial and imperial adventures from the late fifteenth century onwards. R. H. Tawney writing at his desk, anonymous photograph, c.1958 What cannot be doubted is that Calvinism introduced a new set of theological emphases into Christian life and experience. Calvin’s theory of double predestination could, perhaps, have had the kind of influence that Weber claimed. This is much disputed territory, but Calvin’s view of usury was every bit as strict and disapproving as that of the medieval moralists who preceded him. In the Bible, usury is vehemently condemned because of the supposition (entirely reasonable at the time of writing) that it would always be the rich who would lend to the poor, and that, if they demanded any interest at all on the loan, this would inevitably both oppress the poor and further aggrandize the rich. Usury seemed utterly indefensible. But, once again, Calvin the humanist and lawyer used new forms of expression in the minutiae of his ethical expositions. Writing in the context of the commercial expansion of the mid-sixteenth century, in his tract de Usuris, while powerfully restating the traditional Christian teaching that

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The Long Reach of John Calvin!!by Mark Jones! Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 60 lending at interest to the poor is morally wrong, Calvin declared that there is no harm per se in mercantile profit. The key point for Weber, however, was that Calvinism adds a new level of anxiety to the life of faith. Under Calvin’s scheme of double predestination, how might a person know whether he or she is destined for salvation or damnation? Calvin suggested that those who are predestined for salvation will prove this to themselves and the world by living out a life that truly reflects their inner beliefs. They will discover that they are ‘called’ by God to live their lives in a new way. Mainstream religious ideas, once disseminated, shape, (often unconsciously), the myriad transactions of daily life. This idea of calling, argued Weber, was transmuted over time into the notion of usefulness. A person must work hard and conscientiously. Life must be ordered and routine must be steady. The person who works in this way is likely to be successful. They will find their industry rewarded with prosperity. Tawney looks at the writings of some of the creators of the English banking system of the late seventeenth century. For example, he focuses on the career and outlook of Dr Nicholas Barbon, author of a Discourse of Trade, a pamphlet which appeared in 1690. He describes Barbon as a “currency expert, pioneer of insurance, and enthusiast for land banks”. (How curiously modern. And we will return to this.) Then Tawney comments further: “In their emphasis on the moral duty of untiring activity, on work as an end in itself, on the evils of luxury and extravagance, on foresight and thrift, on moderation and self-discipline and rational calculation, (the Puritan moralists) had created an ideal of Christian conduct, which canonized as an ethical principle the efficiency which economic theorists were preaching as specific for social disorders. It was as captivating as it was novel … Not sufficiency to the needs of daily life, but limitless increase and expansion, became the goal of the Christian’s efforts.” (11) The Weber-Tawney thesis remains controversial. But it continues to provoke argument and reflection. As with the perplexing conundrum of predestination, the interpreters of Calvin dig deep into his works to try to discover precisely what he said, and how his phraseology might have given rise to the far-reaching social and ideological changes which, it is supposed, he has somehow caused – but none of his interpreters have quite resolved the questions yet. Johnston’s view of Yale College, the first Yale College building in New Haven, Connecticut, built 1718, John Greenwood, etching and engraving, c.1742-1745

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The Long Reach of John Calvin!!by Mark Jones! Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 61 The Further Shore The USA is diverse, regionally, ethnically and culturally, and has been shaped by multiple waves of immigration. However, aspects of its national myth have certainly descended from the story told about themselves by the settlers who first colonized New England, the ideas that animated them and the values by which they lived. As noted above, many of these Puritan settlers espoused religious principles that derived from Calvin, and one of them was John Winthrop. Here are the oft-quoted words from his manifesto, A Modell of Christian Charity (1630): “For wee must consider that wee shall be as a citty upon a hill. The eies of all people are uppon us. Soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our God in this worke wee haue undertaken, and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.” Here we can only pose the question: To what extent did Calvinism contribute to the creation of a specifically American outlook and way of life, to American Exceptionalism and the concept of the ‘Elect’ Nation? Many commentators have thought that it did so, at least since Alexis de Tocqueville, when he wrote in his introduction to Democracy in America (1835), that “The immigrants settling in America at the start of the seventeenth century somehow unlocked the democratic from all those other principles it had to contend with in the old communities of Europe and they translated that alone to the New World.” (12) Calvinism Today Few thinkers have exercised greater influence on those who came after them than John Calvin - though often enough he influences by contradiction as much as by persuasion. For half a millennium, Calvin’s version of Christianity has won hearts and minds, repelled others, but forced all those who have engaged seriously with his ideas to think about the world in new ways. Calvinism is far from spent as an intellectual force. Indeed, after a resurgence of Calvinism in the mid-twentieth century, perhaps as a reaction to the crisis and disaster of the two World Wars, we are now living through another period during which Calvinism of a fairly traditional kind has recovered much of its confidence. Calvinism profoundly influenced Christian Theology in the twentieth century as a result of the work of, among others, Karl Barth (perhaps the greatest of the twentieth century theologians of any tradition or church) and Paul Ricoeur (one of its finest philosophical minds of the last generation). Over the last forty years, Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff have been major influences in the development of what is termed Reformed Epistemology, which in their hands is a powerful (and widely respected) restatement of Calvinist theological principles, and a theistic contribution to philosophy during a period when theism has largely been supposed to be in decline. A full treatment of Calvinism’s ecclesiastical and social influence would also need to cover Dutch Neo-Calvinism, the history of the Dutch Reformed Church in the Republic of South Africa and the legacy of Apartheid, and the existence of vigorous Reformed Churches in

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The Long Reach of John Calvin!!by Mark Jones! Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 62 Indonesia, Korea, Australia and Canada: but it is worth finishing this introductory paper with the thought that, though the influence of Calvinism has greatly abated (Marilynne Robinson’s reflections upon this phenomenon are of great interest), Calvinism has not evaporated into thin air in the USA. In fact, it has recently come back into view as a particular matter of interest. Michael Sandel’s latest book, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? (September 2020), elaborates on Michael Young’s prescient parable The Rise of the Meritocracy, published in 1958. In a significant passage, Sandel swallows the Weber thesis whole, and puts forward the view that Calvinist theology provided the seedbed for the early development of Capitalism, and that aspects of this theology continue to cast a long shadow which underlies the heartlessness of wealthy and successful (i.e. meritocratic) Americans today. In their book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton University Press, February 2020), Anne Case and Angus Deaton also suggest that Calvinism lurks beneath the surface of our modern discontents. Reviewing their work in the TLS (18 September 2020) Anne Nelson commented on the ‘tragic landscape’ of the welfare scene in the USA where “ … income inequality has reached its highest level in fifty years …” She continued “Case and Deaton call this situation the dark side of meritocracy, in which ‘the less educated are devalued and disrespected’. In this view, the collapse of social constructs, including marriage, institutional religion and trade unions, leaves people unmoored and their interests undefended. And while the elites of the past often regarded noblesse oblige and charity as the obligations of privilege and faith, modern American meritocracy, rooted in the founding religion of Calvinism, suggests that the happy “elect” are deserving of their good fortune, and that the “losers” are simply reaping what they sow.” Can Calvinism really be blamed, even in part, for the malaise that currently seems to afflict the USA and perhaps the West in general? If so, that would be a grave charge indeed. Is it not more likely that the theological foundations (such as they are) of current popular thinking about personal wealth and communal wellbeing in the USA and some other Western nations, are to be found in religious expressions that are closer to some forms of Pentecostalism, with their contemporary emphasis on prosperity, than to traditional Calvinism? And, as Adrian Wooldridge has recently tried to argue, in his book The Aristocracy of Talent, perhaps any other form of oligarchy is, in the end, even more distasteful. On the worldwide scene, Calvinism has long been superseded by Pentecostalism as an engine of Church growth, and its strongly ethical, indeed communitarian, instincts have been shouldered out by decades of secular hedonism and utilitarianism. In the last century, Karl Barth recalled all believers and all the Churches to a greater sense of scepticism about the glories of the achievements of humankind and a deeper sense of humility in the face of the divine. If that is Barth's enduring legacy, then Calvin, speaking to us with characteristic clarity and force through his great twentieth century interpreter, may still have something important to say to us today. ========================================================== 1. Benedict, Philip, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A social history of Calvinism (Yale University Press, 2002), p.133 2. Miller, Perry, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939; reprinted Boston: Beacon Press, 1963) 3. Ed. J.T.McNeill, translated into English, F.L.Battles, Calvin : Institutes of the Christian Religion2 vols. (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960), Vol.2, p.926 4. McCullough, Diarmaid, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490 – 1700 (London: Allen Lane, 2003), pp.243-4

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The Long Reach of John Calvin!!by Mark Jones! Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 63 5. Prestwich, Menna, ed., International Calvinism 1541-1715 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), p.5 6. McCullough, Diarmaid, All Things Made New: Writings on the Reformation (Allen Lane, 2016), p.57; from his essay ‘John Calvin’, originally published in I.Backus and P.Benedict eds. Calvin and his Influence, 1509-2009 (Oxford University Press, 2011) 7. Ed. J.T.McNeill, translated into English, F.L.Battles, Calvin : Institutes of the Christian Religion2 vols. (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960), Vol.2, p.1519 8. Skinner, Quentin, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought Vol.2 (Cambridge University Press, 1978), p.320 9. Popkin, Richard, The History of Scepticism: from Savonarola to Bayle (revised and expanded edition,Oxford University Press, 2003) 10. Trevor Roper, Hugh, ‘Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon’ commemorative lecture, 1974 (republished in From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution, London: Secker and Warburg, 1992), p.175 11. Tawney, R.H., Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (revised and augmented edition, with a new preface, Penguin, 1937) p.246 12. de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America (1835) (English translation by Gerald E. Bevan, Penguin Books, 2003)

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The Liberty of the Will in Theology Permits the Liberated Markets of Liberalism by Deirdre McCloskey Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 65 Recent theology criticizes liberalism1 here is an intimate, and perhaps desirable, connection between liberty of the human will under Abrahamic theology and the liberty of human action under liberal economic ideology. The theology does not require a liberal economy, but a Christian conviction allows it. The proposal is not original. After all, a specifically Christian conviction about the efficacy of works of a liberated will coexisted in, say, the Italian city states with a specifically ‘capitalist’ conviction about the efficacy of liberated markets. Not all the businessmen of Florence ended up in one of Dante’s circles of hell. But in the past century or so liberal ideology has been under suspicion in theological circles. In 1919 Paul Tillich, then a 33-year old Protestant pastor in Germany, wrote with Carl Richard Wegener an Answer to an Inquiry of the Protestant Consistory of Brandenburg: The spirit of Christian love accuses a social order which consciously and in principle is built upon economic and political egoism, and it demands a new order in which the feeling of community is the foundation of the social structure. It accuses the deliberate egoism of an economy ... in which each is the enemy of the other, because his advantage is conditioned by the disadvantage or ruin of the other, and it demands an economy of solidarity of all, and of joy in work rather than in profit (Tillich and Wegener 1971 [1919]). “Egoism” is a mischaracterization of “capitalism,” as Max Weber had argued in 1905. Greed, he wrote, is “not in the least identical with capitalism, and still less with its spirit. ... It should be taught in the kindergarten of cultural history that this naïve idea of capitalism must be given up once and for all” (Weber 1930 [1904-1905], 17).2 The lust for sacred gold “has been common to all sorts and conditions of men at all times and in all countries of the earth.” Love is in fact the foundation of a market economy, as even some recent economists have argued, and as old Adam Smith (1976a [1759]) certainly did. And an “economy of solidarity” and top-down propaganda for a “feeling of community”—as communism and then fascism were about to show—yielded evil fruit. Yet economic theories similar to those of the two pastors, sweetly intended but decidedly non-liberal, are increasingly common. By ‘liberal’ I do not mean the use of the term in the United States since about 1933, namely, “advocating a tentative democratic socialism.” Nor do I mean the cruelty of what the political left has come to call ‘neo-liberalism,’ as in many of Margaret Thatcher’s policies. I mean its use internationally, as on the Continent of Europe now, and its use originally, when in the late 18th century the word was coined—that is, a society of adults liberated from coercive hierarchies. Liberals admitted excerptions for great externalities such as a plague, which cannot be solved any other way than by state action, though they recommended it be exercised with temperance and humility, not with the envy and anger of state-sponsored solidarity. Otherwise, no one was to impose on another a religious faith or way of life. As a sober proposal for a non-policy of policy, laissez nous faire, it was a new idea, though with a long if somewhat thin tradition of radical egalitarianism behind it. Spartacus died in 1 The paper was given at the conference on Democracy, Religion, and the Market, University of Virginia, Charlottesville in 2019 and then at the virtual follow-up conference in June 2020. I thank the participants, in particular Roger Finke, for their comments, and two anonymous referees for the new Journal of Economics, Theology and Religion. 2 In his General Economic History (1981 [1923], 355), he writes, “the notion that our rationalistic and capitalistic age is characterized by a stronger economic interest than other periods is childish.” T

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Bourgeois Dignity: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World by Deirdre McCloskey Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 66 battle for it in 71 BCE, and in 1381 CE the defrocked priest John Ball was drawn and quartered for asking, “When Adam delved and Eve span, / Who was then the gentleman?” In 1685 the Leveller Richard Rumbold, facing his hanging, declared, “I am sure there was no man born marked of God above another; for none comes into the world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him” (1961 [1685], 624). Few in the crowd gathered for the entertainment would have agreed with such anti-hierarchical sentiments. A century later, many more would have. By 1985 virtually everyone would, at any rate in official theory. In the Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (OED) , “Liberalism 5a. Supporting or advocating individual rights, civil liberties, and political and social reform tending towards individual freedom or democracy with little state intervention” is first recorded in 1761 in David Hume’s History of England to Henry VIII. Under the phrase “at liberty,” the earliest quotation in the OED is from 1503, “That euery freman be at liberte to bye and selle eueri wt other,” which is the point here—that liberalism is the permission to participate at liberty in, say, the economy, as in the polity or in the church, equally if a “freeman.” The novelty in the 18th century and beyond was that everyone was to be equally at liberty. The priesthood of all believers anticipated a governorship of all citizens. An old idea in many theologies, of course, such as the Christian one, was that souls are created equal in dignity. But the secular extension in liberalism, peculiar at first to north western Europe, was an equality in permissions of all sorts, from religious to economic. The case is sometimes made that Western Christianity had been long preparing for such liberty, but it is weak (McCloskey 2020). The extension came rather suddenly in the 18th century, without anticipation in a decidedly illiberal Europe. The OED again, speaks of liberty, sense 3a: “Freedom to do a specified thing; permission, leave” (my italics). In the opinion of radical liberals in the late 18th century such as Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, the lord-and-servant and priest-and-parishioner hierarchies natural to an agricultural society were to be overturned, to make the world anew. They imagined a liberal utopia, with no slaves or serfs, no beaten wives, no beaten protestors, no select permission granted in a special charter to petitioners following on a humble appeal to the noble lord, or to the bishop, or to a state functionary. Harmless permissions for the generality were to be laid on in all directions. The extreme of the theory was literal anarchism, an-archos, no ruler, a theory animating among the Russians Count Tolstoy in traditional Christian form and Prince Kropotkin in secular evolutionary form, and among southern Europeans the numberless Italian and Spanish anarchists. But a broad-church liberalism can admit that some limited coercion and hierarchy in the form of laws against force and fraud, and taxes for a few common purposes, are desirable. It says merely that the realm of human coercion should be small, and the realm of human autonomy large. On liberty sense 3, the OED quotes John Stuart Mill (who admittedly had a hint of social democracy about him), in 1841: “The modern spirit of liberty is the love of individual independence.”3 Note the word “individual,” Kant’s “autotomy” of a rational being. The social cooperation that supplies our daily bread is to be achieved not mainly by coercive commands from human lords 3On Mill’s double role, as the height of liberalism and the beginnings of social democracy, see Persky (2016).

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Bourgeois Dignity: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World by Deirdre McCloskey Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 67 but mainly by voluntary agreements among equal souls. The cooperation is individual, not collective. It contrasts with “ancient liberty” as defined in 1819 by the Swiss philosopher Benjamin Constant (1988 [1819]), namely, the right to have a voice, to carry a shield in the phalanx. Modern liberty was the right to be left alone by a coercive state. The turn in England in the late 19th century to a “New Liberalism” re-focused on ancient liberty and its coercions. You are privileged to carry the shield, said philosophers such as T. H. Green and subsequently politicians such as David Lloyd George and Theodore Roosevelt, and you must. Such an anti-liberal and coercive “liberalism” is what most modern leftists recommend. Social liberalism and then democratic socialism is usually seen as a natural evolution, the obvious next step. It will unify us in collective projects, projects for which the majority of us, after all, have voted. But a society of non-slaves able to pursue their varied individual projects without approval by a majority seems to liberals to be a better end of history, more suited to humans (Fukuyama 1992; and McCloskey 2019). In medieval English the plural ‘liberties’ meant inequality of permissions, as in the English Magna Carta of Liberatum (liberties) in 1215 affirming baronial privileges against the king. Compare the southern Dutch Groot Privilegie in 1477 affirming local privileges against Burgundian centralization.4 This person or that city was to have certain named and limited privileges, to run a market with specified frequency or to be exempted from specified taxes. The OED speaks of liberty sense 2c, “chiefly in plural, the entitlement of all members of a community.” The lexicographers note that in such a plural form it is “in early use not always distinguishable from sense 6a, now chiefly historical,” as in “the liberty” of the City of London granted to a specified person, and not at all to hoi polloi. The liberal turn in the 18th century was so to speak from ‘liberties’ to ‘liberty,’ from unequal privileges to equal ones, ideally for all (though in fact at first only for free males with property). The core of modern liberalism, in other words, is equality of permissions. And so is the core of Christian theology, the equal permission granted to all to sin or not. In the early church and in the Radical Reformation bent on re-establishing the early church the equality was extended to all believers—though not in the Magisterial Reformation that came to dominate northern Europe. Such a liberalism promised an equality, note, of permissions. It is not an equality of initial opportunity or of final outcome, to be expressed in material command over goods and services, which has been the socialist utopia since 1762 and Rousseau. The OED, in the entry on liberalism, quotes H. G. Wells in 1920 offering liberalism’s epitaph, at a time when the British Liberal Party was dying, and collectivisms such as Wells supported were beginning to seem lovely: “The dominant liberal ideas were freedom and a certain vague equalitarianism.” By ‘vague’ he means that it did not legislate equality of outcome. But equal permission to worship or to trade is not ‘vague.’ To be at liberty to gather as two or three in Christ’s name, or to be at liberty to buy or sell with every other, are as concrete as can be, and related. Liberalism is a society of non-slaves True, a socialist utopia of equality of outcome echoed the early Christian one of equality in the face of an imminent eskhaton. But in its modern and secular form, especially in a society larger than a family or a monastery, such an equality entails subordination to a human master elevated 4 Thus, sense 6a in the OED’s entry on ‘liberty’: “Chiefly in plural. A privilege, immunity, or right enjoyed by prescription or grant. ... Now chiefly historical.”

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Bourgeois Dignity: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World by Deirdre McCloskey Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 68 in a hierarchy. If we are to rob Peter to pay Paul, in order to achieve end-state equality of goods, some lordly coercion is necessarily involved, whether aristocratic or democratic. And needless to say even families and monasteries have not usually been equal in permissions, not really. The pater familias, or the abbot, or the mother superior, was tempted, as recorded in numberless complaints in ancient and medieval literature and folklore, to take selfish advantage of superiority. Agamemnon took Briseis from Achilles, with known results. Equality of permissions by contrast opposes any coerced hierarchy of gender or status or race or office. It, too, of course, has an early Christian lineage: “there can be neither Judaean nor Greek, there can be neither slave nor freeman, there cannot be male and female, for you are all one in the Anointed One Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).5 Coerced end-state equality in goods and services, from Rousseau to central planning communism, an economist would note, distorts the messages we send by demand and supply to each other about our material priorities. To be sure, before God the souls of master and slave are equal. The liberal democrats of the 19th century extended such an equality to political dignities, the franchise and the assurance of equality before the law, to achieve a nation of the people, by the people, for the people. Yet we should, the liberal economist says, pay a brain surgeon more than a waiter, because (to give the usual utilitarian reasoning, as in John Rawls) in that case both of them in the end will be better off, putting aside in the short run any indulging of the sin of envy. If they were paid the same the services of surgeons would be grossly under-supplied, the services of waiters over-supplied. Forcing an equality of wages leads to lower income in total. The argument for such a justified differential in pay is not so much the incentive to effort, though for learning to do brain surgery as against learning to wait tables it is a part of the story (a quite small part for Jeff Bezos incentivized to earn another billion). It is much more about sending the correct signals as to what in this vale of tears needs urgent augmentation. The economy is saying, “More brain surgeons, please. More re-inventions of the mail-order consolidators of a century ago in Sears, Roebuck or Montgomery Ward, please.” Comprehensive equality of opportunity or of outcome is, anyway, not achievable. We are diverse in graces, and can benefit from accepting them so to speak gracefully, and then exchanging them: “There are differences in the graces bestowed. ... To each is given the Spirit’s manifestation for some benefit. ... [To one] realizations of deeds of power, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits” (1 Corinthians 12:4, 7, 10). Shakespeare lamented that he could not be “like to one more rich in hope, / Featured like him, like him with friends possessed, / [Having] this man’s art and that man’s scope.”6 The equality in goods and services imagined by Rousseau and the rest of the European socialist tradition does not make us equal in the God- given graces of height or beauty or intelligence or natural optimism or entrepreneurship or skill with a scalpel or luck of birth or length of life. By denying what the economists call ‘comparative advantage,’ a coerced equality of wages diminishes even the material riches of us all. A coerced equality of human heights or intelligence, likewise, would reduce the collective gains from such graces, by a Procrustean trimming of feet or by pounding nails into the heads of the gifted, to bring all to full equality. Coerced equality makes the poor poorer, thus violating Rawls’ (1971) collectivist concession to liberalism: that a further enrichment of 5I will use throughout David Bentley Hart’s (2017) translation. Hart makes a persuasive case in his Postscript that the New Testament leans socialist. Using his translation therefore will not bias the case in a liberal direction. 6 Sonnet 29. “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes.” At www.poetryfoundation.org/poems, accessed December 10, 2020.

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Bourgeois Dignity: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World by Deirdre McCloskey Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 69 the rich can be justified if the poor are thereby also enriched. For social policy, then, the pursuit of equality of opportunity or of outcome, as against comprehensive permission to work as a lawyer or to braid hair for a living, is a mistake. For a Christian, further, equality of wages, at the beginning or at the denouement, seems oddly materialistic. Trying to achieve end-state equality of wages tempts us to the sins of envy and then anger against the brain surgeon, envying this man’s art and that man’s scope, as in the recent wave of populism. And in fact, contrary to the zero-sum ethic of the world in which Jesus and St. Paul lived, and contrary to its secular echo in recent claims about inequality, liberalism and its economic ideology of ‘innovism’ (a more economically and historically accurate word than the misleading ‘capitalism’) has resulted in fact in massive equalizing of real human comforts, materialistically speaking.7 The American economist John Bates Clark predicted in 1901 that “the typical laborer will increase his wages [in real terms, allowing for inflation] from one dollar a day to two, from two to four and from four to eight. Such gains will mean infinitely more to him than any possible increase of capital can mean to the rich. ... This very change will bring with it a continual approach to equality of genuine comfort” (Clark 1901). The prediction was accurate. It is the illiberal hierarchies of coercion, not uncoerced exchanges—or so the Christian liberal claims—that tempt fallen humans to arrange unfair advantages in order to overturn the core equality of permissions. The American state enforces monopolies of doctors and electricians, by licensure preventing a free entry that would make the rest of us better off. The Dutch state keeps out new pharmacies that would reduce drug prices in the neighbourhood. All states prevent consumers from being at liberty to buy and sell, everyone with another. States choose winners (though in fact regularly losers) in pursuit of industrial and innovation policy. In most places, with the exception of a handful of Swedens and New Zealands and Minnesotas, the state regularly takes from poor Peter to subsidize rich Paul. Most states are in this respect like China or Russia or, at best, the United States in Illinois and Louisiana. Illiberalism re-establishes the hierarchy that once upon a time liberalism proposed to overturn. The fictional pig/commissar in Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945, last page) declared that all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. The literary critic Tzvetan Todorov reports that Margarete Buber-Neumann (Martin Buber’s daughter-in-law), “a sharp-eyed observer of Soviet realities in the 1930s, was astonished to discover that the holiday resorts for ministry employees were divided into no less than five different levels of ‘luxury’ for the different ranks of the communist hierarchy. A few years later she found the same stratification in her prison camp” (Todorov 2003 [2000], 83). The very word ‘liberalism’ contains the program. ‘Liberal’ is of course from classical Latin liber, understood by the slave-holding Romans as (in the words of the Oxford Latin Dictionary) “possessing the social and legal status of a free man (as opp. to slave),” and then libertas as “the civil status of a free man, freedom” (Glare 2012, 1023-5). 7 Two economists report on the basis of detailed study of the individual distribution of income—as against comparing distributions nation-by-nation—that “world poverty is falling. Between 1970 and 2006, the global poverty rate [defined in absolute, not relative, terms] has been cut by nearly three quarters. The percentage of the world population living on less than $1 a day (in PPP-adjusted 2000 dollars) went from 26.8% in 1970 to 5.4% in 2006” (Sala-i-Martin and Pinkovsky 2010; Sala-i-Martin 2006). “PPP-adjusted” means allowing for the actual purchasing power of local prices compared with, say, United States prices. It has become the standard, an improvement over using exchange rates (which are largely influenced by financial markets).

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Bourgeois Dignity: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World by Deirdre McCloskey Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 70 As is so often the case in English, however, there are paired words, the Latin-origin ‘liberty’ and the Germanic-origin ‘freedom.’ The two have relatively recently acquired slightly different connotations, and it is desirable to distinguish them if we are not to become muddled. ‘Liberty’ retains the political connotation of all people being non-slaves to other humans. ‘Freedom’ in English, though, has increasingly come to mean not subject to constraint by physics or, in particular, by wages. Thus Franklin Roosevelt (1941) in his Four Freedoms speech numbered as third a freedom from want, and the economist Amartya Sen (1999) wrote of economic development as freedom. The trouble is that we already have words for such lack of want, or for economic development, namely, income, wealth, riches, capabilities, adequacies. To push together, as the modern English usage of ‘freedom’ does, the politics-word of non-enslavement to others (liberty) and the wage-word of ability to buy things from others (wages, wealth) leads only to confusion. The liberal claim, to be sure, is that liberty does result in an increased ability to buy things—and so it has done over the past two centuries. But for the claim to be meaningful its alleged truth needs to come from the evidence, not from a mis-definition of development as being freedom, simpliciter. Classical Latin does not conceive of liberty as the choice to do what is morally good. Such is a Christian concept, and may be seen in Medieval Latin, as a step to somehow making human liberty consistent with obedience to God’s will. It is the issue between liberty of the will and determinism. But the issue is not to be resolved by merely redefining the will of humans to be exactly the will of God, as tempting as such a resolution is in the less liberal Christian traditions. Nor is Latin libertas simply ‘choice,’ as modern economists see it, arbitrium, the license to follow one’s impulses, be they good or evil (Glare 2012, 160). It is the condition of non-slavery, which is the point in liberalism—celebrating even poor people being, as illiberal early moderns in England put it (terrified by the very thought), ‘masterless.’ The slave societies in which Christianity grew up did not admire masterlessness, and waxed eloquent in favor of everyone having a master. St. Paul appears to have thought that slavery was unavoidable, even natural—for God made some slaves and other free. In the Letter to Philemon he sends a fugitive slave back to his master, though asking the master to liberate him, considering the services (he uses commercial language) that the slave had rendered to Paul. In the long run, as it were, God values both slave and master equally. But the modern liberal message is that the here and now also matters. Nowhere does the Apostle reflect on literal slavery, except when he says, repeatedly, that we are all, slaves and masters, one in Christ. Yet that is the point. People didn’t object to the system of secular slavery, right up to the liberal abolition movements of the late 18th and especially the early 19th century. The Pope in 1537 deemed native Americans to have human souls, and therefore, when converted to Christianity, were not to be directly enslaved; yet Africans were another matter. It is not true that Christians early or late were opposed slavery as a system (which is one among many reasons it does not make sense to attribute liberalism itself to Western Christianity). A slave did not have the moral luck to be virtuous. He was coerced to good, at any rate ‘good’ in the eyes of his master. (Thomas Carlyle in 1849 called economics the “dismal science” because his friend John Stuart Mill, among other liberals, dared to oppose slavery—which, like medieval serfdom, Carlyle reckoned was a good, un-dismal discipline for the numerous people slavish by nature; Persky 1990) But in an age of non-slavery in political and economic ideology, and the resulting gigantic positive sum in the economy, it is not obvious from Christian theology that a masterful state should be enforcing the virtues. It should not at least if a liberated will—a choice between virtues and vices—is to be meaningful, which God so evidently wishes.

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Bourgeois Dignity: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World by Deirdre McCloskey Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 71 One can be a slave in a metaphorical sense to lust, say, or to other disordered passions (among which natural-law theologians have often placed homosexuality). But, among the numerous sub-definitions and quotations in the three pages of the Oxford Latin Dictionary concerning liber and its derivatives, none so much as hints at such an ethical as against political/social notion. The word is about literal slavery to another human, as one might expect from pagan Romans with many slaves. Yet the OED does give as the earliest use of the French- origin ‘liberty’ in Middle English the theological definition, namely, “Freedom from the bondage ... of sin,” quoting Wycliffe’s bible of c1384, 2 Corinthians 3:17 (verse 18 in Wycliffe’s numbering): “Forsoth where is the spirit of God, there is liberte.” The OED’s last quotation on this score, as recently as 2007 from the theologian Glenn Tinder, speaks plainly that “an inner liberty—from sin ...—renders outer liberty a secondary, or even unimportant, consideration.” Well, not for an 18th-century liberal. By 1776 among advanced intellectuals in north-western Europe (fluent, needless to say, in classical Latin, and often hostile to and ignorant of Medieval Latin or of the substance of medieval theology), such a liberalism had become fashionable, as for example in the novel and highly non- classical opposition to literal, chattel slavery. Consider, as the most well-known example, the declaration by the conflicted Virginia slave-owner and deist, based on John Locke’s formulation in the 1690s, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Liberalism came with a new ethic That year 1776 saw also the publication of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Smith was a permission-egalitarian, opposed to slavery and to ‘protection’ in commerce, which are respectively the private and the public subjugation of one human to another, backed by the state’s coercion. To call Smith, and his liberalism, ‘egalitarian’ is mildly controversial, but not mistaken. True, Smith’s two books—the other, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1976a [1759]), is the one he loved the most—are rich and subtle enough, and very occasionally (it must be conceded) confused enough, that his words can be marshalled for the political left as much as for liberalism (though never for the political right). They have been so marshalled recently, for example, by the brilliant Smith scholar, the philosopher Samuel Fleischacker (2014). But other brilliant Smith scholars, in particular Sandra Peart and David Levy (2008, for example 84-5), attribute to him a modest “analytical egalitarianism” so characteristic of 18th-century social thought in Scotland. The analyst and the human subject are to be seen as equal, contrary to masterful French schemes of top-down. “It is the highest impertinence and presumption ... in kings and ministers,” Smith wrote, “to pretend to watch over the economy of private people” (1976b [1776], II.iii.36, 346). And the private people are to be equal in permissions. Smith advocated in all his writings “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty” (1976b, IV.ix.51, 687). In Smith, the word ‘natural’ and his much less frequent locution (three times only in all his surviving wirings) “the invisible hand” are stand-ins for “the Christian doctrine of divine providential care for humanity,” as the economist and theologian Paul Oslington (2012) has argued. In line with British natural theology of the Newtonian sort, a theology in which Smith was immersed (whatever his personal faith, about which we have to speculate), God’s “other book,” of nature, reveals the truths of the heavens, and of humanity, too. Like his children, the other so-called “classical” economists down to Marx and Mill, Smith had no real

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Bourgeois Dignity: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World by Deirdre McCloskey Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 72 conception of what an obvious and simple system of natural liberty would in fact yield in the two centuries after his death. But he did sketch a reason it would yield a continual approach to equality of genuine comfort, as Oslington also argues. If God-given, in view of the Christian equality of souls, Smith was recommending a society which was, at any rate by the standard of his age, radically egalitarian—in permission, I repeat, not in initial or end-state material capabilities expressed in money. Smith was particularly indignant about restrictions on a worker’s right to use his labor as he saw fit. The English (not Scottish) Settlement and Removal Acts, which attempted to prevent poor people from overwhelming local systems of poor relief, would force the poor back to the parishes of their birth—literally removing and resettling them, a cleansing by social class. There is doubt whether it actually happened on a large scale. But never mind: Smith’s indignation at the trespass on a poor man’s liberty was aroused. To remove a man who has committed no misdemeanor from the parish where he chooses to reside is an evident violation of natural liberty and justice. ... There is scarce a poor man in England of forty years of age, I will venture to say, who has not in some part of his life felt himself most cruelly oppressed by this ill-contrived law (1976b, IV.v.55). He is not requiring that the laborer be paid the same as the landlord, merely that an executive committee of the landed classes does not deny him permission to live and work where he wishes, “at liberty.” It is Smith’s “liberal plan of [social] equality, [economic] liberty, and [legal] justice” (1976b, IV.9, 664 and 687). In the line of Smith’s predecessors Locke and Voltaire, he at length acquired political allies for such novel opinions, though it took some decades after 1790 to bring liberal policies to ascendancy in Europe. Liberalism’s hour, that is, came recently. It is not anciently implied by the European character, Yet the timing of liberalism’s coming is not an entire mystery. From 1517 to 1789, the north and especially the northwest of Europe and its offshoots witnessed, Dei gratia, successful reformations and revolts and revolutions, which could easily have gone in an unsuccessful and illiberal direction. Two among many such happy turning points for a nascent liberalism a-borning were the Spanish army’s failure at the Siege of Alkmaar in 1573, and then in 1588 the failure of another portion of the best army in Europe to land in England. At length, around the North Sea a liberalism against hierarchy was (always partially) victorious (McCloskey 2016). Until liberalism came to Europe the equal immortal souls of Christianity were to take up in this life, uncomplainingly, their highly unequal crosses, and not to whine about hierarchies of permissions enforced by guild or Graf or government. The pre-liberal theory was, as the Swedish- American radical Joe Hill (1911) expressed with anti-clerical sarcasm, “Work and pray, live on hay. / You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.” Liberalism is sometimes construed by its enemies, and sometimes even by its less-wise friends, as an amoral Prudence Only, Greed is Good, a social Darwinism of egoism in the style of Ayn Rand. It need not be so. Think of John Stuart Mill or Ramon Aron. Ethical constraints are surely needed against Greed is Good. I myself wrote a book in 2006 on the constraints on sheer selfish will, if such a will is seen as “maximize profit regardless” or some other economistic fantasy encouraging sin. Prudence is a virtue, but it is decidedly not the only virtue relevant to a liberal society—again contrary to the less-wise opinions of my economist colleagues. Greed is a great

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Bourgeois Dignity: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World by Deirdre McCloskey Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 73 sin, and is to be resisted, I affirmed in 2006, by the constraints of other virtues in attendance on buying and selling, and non-slavery: temperance, justice, courage, faith, hope and love. One may ask who fashions such constraints on greed. Most of them are ethical habits learned at one’s mother’s knee, if one pays attention—and then they are molded by churches, communities, friends, novels, movies. The notion expressed by communitarians of the left such as Michael Sandel or of the right such as Patrick Deneen that liberalism must leave community to one side is mistaken.8 And even in the agora (which is a commune, too, argued the Dutch economist Arjo Klamer, 2017) the ethical schooling is not derisory, being what the liberals among the French in the 18th century called doux commerce. Contrary to an illiberal rhetoric elevating the state with its coercions as an ethical model, a life in private business is nothing like automatically corrupting. In a collection of mini-essays asking, “Does the free market corrode moral character?” the political philosopher Michael Walzer replied, “Of course it does.” But then he wisely added that any social system can corrode one or another virtue. That the Bourgeois Era has tempted people into thinking that greed is good, wrote Walzer (2008), “isn’t itself an argument against the free market. Think about the ways democratic politics also corrodes moral character. Competition for political power puts people under great pressure ... to shout lies at public meeting, to make promises they can’t keep.” Fallen humans are to be expected to be like that. Or think about the ways even a mild socialism puts people under great pressure to commit the sins of state-enforced envy or class hatred—or in the non-mild case the environmental crimes such as draining the Aral Sea. Or think about the ways, before the progressive historian Charles C. Sellers’ alleged ‘commercial revolution’ in the early United States (which he claimed damaged an alleged “affective and altruistic relations of social reproduction in traditional societies”) put people under great pressure to obey their husbands in all things and to hang troublesome Quakers and Anabaptists (Sellers 1996). That is to say, any social system, if it is not to dissolve into a Hobbesian war of all against all, needs ethics adopted by its participants. It must have some device—taboos, preaching, coyote tales, songs, movies, the press, child raising, or in a pinch the state (as in a Prohibition of alcohol advocated by the New Liberals)—to slow down the corrosion of moral character, to maintain what standard the society adopts, good or bad. The Bourgeois Era has in many ways set a higher ethical standard than others—abolishing slavery and giving votes to women and the poor; taking profit from its astounding innovations, yes, but a profit soon competed away by others rushing forward, and yielding therefore gigantic progress for the wretched of the earth. One can put a number on it, as the Nobel economist William Nordhaus (2004) did. He calculated that since World War II only 2 percent of the social gain in the U.S. from innovations such as bar codes (this Walmart and Amazon) or the computer (Gates and Jobs) or containerization (Malcom McLean) has stayed with the innovators. The 2 percent made them, to be sure, immensely rich, but it left the 98 percent of gain from cheaper retail or better computers or more goods shipped from China to the rest of us. For further progress, Walzer, who is another communitarian, puts his trust in an old conservative trope of ethical education arising from well-intentioned laws enforced by the police. One might doubt that a state strong enough to enforce such laws would remain uncorrupted for long. Power tends to corrupt. Look at the results of Prohibition and the War on 8For the case against them, McCloskey (2012 ad 2018).

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Bourgeois Dignity: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World by Deirdre McCloskey Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 74 Drugs. The state is regularly a poor instructor in ethics. People speak of the state’s courts as the ‘ultimate’ or ‘foundational’ protection, but such metaphors slip in a factual supposition that is false. Most protections against force and fraud, such as locks on doors and prudence in the agora and cooperatively enforced practices in businesses—and religious exclusion, if it’s a diamond merchant in Brooklyn who cheats his orthodox Jewish colleagues—are not in fact provided by the state. They do not appeal to a gentile court. It is consistent with Christianity, and socialism often is not Such a liberal economy, I claim, is consistent with a Christian life, employing a liberated will constrained by ethical treatment of others and oneself and God. True, the Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart (2017) notes in the postscript to his recent translation of the New Testament that the Christian testament has numerous passages in which God’s word interpreted by humans demands, literally or in effect, that the rich give away their goods and follow Jesus. The Christian gospels and many a Christian theologian early and late attack accumulated wealth, surprisingly harshly by the standards of the rest of the world’s religious canon. In A Passage to England (1959), the Indian professor of English Nirad C. Chaudhuri noted the contrast between the Lord’s Prayer requesting one’s daily bread and the Hindu prayer to Durga, the Mother Goddess, “Give me wealth, long life, sons, and all things desirable” (Chaudhuri 1959, 178; cf. ch. V ‘Money and the Englishman’). One prays as a Hindu to the elephant-headed god Ganesh for overcoming obstacles at the outset of a project, to obtain longevity, desired powers and prosperity. The Vedic hymns are filled with passages like this one in a hymn to Agni the god of fire: “I pray to Agni ... who ... brings most treasure. ... Through Agni one may win wealth, and growth from day to day, glorious and most abounding in heroic sons” (Knott 1998, 15). It makes the Prosperity Gospel in its promises look stingy. Thus, too, in Zoroastrianism a prayer of blessing (Afrinagan Dahman) reads, “May these blessings of the Asha-sanctified come into this house, namely, rewards, compensation, and hospitality; and may there now come to this community Asha, possessions, prosperity, good fortune,andeasefullife.”9 LikeallthefaithsoftheAxialAge,Zoroastrianismrecommendscharity to the poor. But it does not condemn fortunes honestly made and devoutly spent (which may have something to do with the unusual recent prosperity under ‘capitalism’ of the tiny group of Zoroastrian Parsis in Pakistan, northwest India, and England). Likewise, Jewish herders and traders viewed herding and trading as ethically acceptable. The Israeli economist Meir Tamari argues that there are few anti-commercial traditions in Judaism. In the 13th century Rabbenu Bachya, like Aquinas and certain other Christian theorists at the time, as town life revived, declared that “active participation of man in the creation of his own wealth is a sign of spiritual greatness. In this respect we are, as it were, imitators of God” (quoted in Sacks 2002, 87). Imago Dei. Nor is it surprising that the religion sprung from a merchant of Mecca “protects and endorses the personal right to own what one may freely gain, through legitimate means, such as gifts and the fruits of one’s hand or intellect. It is a sacred right.”10 What is surprising is that a Christendom so unusually hostile to commerce, profit, trade, wealth and gain would in the 19th century commence admiring the bourgeois versions of the seven principle virtues and encouraging, out of liberalism, a universally enriching ‘innovism’ (a word for the modern system much to be preferred, I repeat, to the deeply misleading word 9 Afrinagan Dahman, at http://www.avesta.org/avesta.html (accessed December 10, 2020). 10 Both of these are mottoes to Chapter 2 in Novak (1996, 41).

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Bourgeois Dignity: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World by Deirdre McCloskey Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 75 ‘capitalism’). Yet what is not surprising in view of the ancient hostility of Christianity to the accumulation of wealth is that also, and immediately, a bourgeois but still seriously Christian Europe in the 19th century invented the ideal of socialism, at first in an explicitly Christian form. True, Marx and Engels (1988 [1848], 77) sneered at it: “Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property? Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.” Yet most non-Marxists of the left down to the present retain an economic faith tinctured by Christian socialism. Socialism, too, contains its program in its very word, from Latin socius, ‘ally,’ and as an adjective, ‘sharing.’ The closest allies in a traditional society are of course members of one’s family. We are to have a family (of 330 million souls, say) making decisions socially, not individually, at any rate in matters of Mammon. Erasmus in the 1508 and later editions of his collection of Latin tags (Erasmus 2001) always placed as the first item amicorum communia omnia: among friends all [is held] in common. What made such a lovely (if approximate) truth in a family or in a small group of friends into a social theory was its rigorous application increasingly after 1848 to societies of 330 million strangers, or even of 6 million, such as Sweden in 1927. A famous speech then to the Swedish parliament introduced the term folkhemmet, the people’s home. It was inspired by an alliance characteristic of the era, of conservative corporatists and progressive socialists (thus the New Deal in the United States), consecrated by the holy waters of Christian socialism or the social gospel or Catholic social teaching. It emphasized not Marx’s class struggle but, in a liberal echo, a sweet society of (often formerly) Christian friends, such as advocated by the American theologian Walter Rauschenbusch’s grandson, the philosopher Richard Rorty. In the United States, the co-founder with Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement, the French peasant and priest Peter Maurin, used to wander the streets declaring, “The world would be better off/ if people tried to become better./ And people would become better/ if they stopped trying to be better off” (Ellsberg 1983, xxv). Do good by doing poorly. I am giving the word ‘socialism,’ note, a baggy definition, ranging from housing regulations up to communism-with-gulags. A housing regulation, even if mild and reasonable, is of course necessarily backed by physical coercion, however seldom in ordinary circumstances the coercion is applied. Otherwise the intended regulation by society is a dead letter. Public coercion, not private agreement, is the method. If you violate the building code, you will be fined. If you don’t pay the fine, you will be jailed. If you try to escape, you will be shot. The intent in the baggy definition is not to tar social democrats with Stalinism, or with the new Maoism of Xi Jinping. It is to persuade the social democrats to stop supposing that there exists an easily attained third position between coercion and persuasion, between state action and non-coerced inter-action. There is a bright line, as English Puritans c. 1642 could affirm, between being physically coerced to attend Anglican services by state action, on the one hand, and being amiably persuaded to do so, on the other. Let us stipulate for the sake of argument that social democracy is stable, and does not devolve into East-German tyranny and a rule by the Stasi. That is, we stipulate that mere housing regulations, say, do not lead inevitably to a larger and larger state, on the road to serfdom (thus against Hayek 1944). (On the other hand, it is only prudent to worry about such a devolution, as some social democrats do not worry enough, supposing the state to be a sweet bunch of wise folk.) Yet the true liberals since Voltaire and Smith and Wollstonecraft have recommended a restrained state, and the wide practice of persuasion in voluntary exchange. Thus in 1776 Paine,

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Bourgeois Dignity: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World by Deirdre McCloskey Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 76 who was a free trader, declared that “government even in its best state is but a necessary evil, in its worst state an intolerable one” (Paine 1776, 6). In 1849, the American naturalist and essayist Henry David Thoreau (1849, 1), who in aid of innovism had improved the machinery in his father’s pencil manufactory, agreed: “I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least’; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.” Modern social democrats and United States “High Liberals” attack such notions, and yearn for folkhemmet. Hostility to an imagined ‘capitalism,’ and enthusiasm for some version of socialism, became in the early 20th century a commonplace among intellectual Christians. “By the late 19th century,” notes the historian Jürgen Kocka, “capitalism was no longer thought to be a carrier of progress.”11Thecaseagainst‘capitalism’wassummarizedin1910bytheReverendH.H.Williams of Oxford, writing on “Ethics” in the 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica: “The failure of ‘laissez-faire’ individualism in politics to produce that common prosperity and happiness which its advocates hoped for caused men to question the egoistic basis upon which its ethical counterpart was constructed” (Williams 1910). Even in 1910 the Reverend Williams was mistaken factually, and as the 20th century proceeded the facts became less and less supportive of the anti-innovism view. As early even as 1910 a commercially tested betterment and the creativity of steam and steel had yielded unprecedentedly common prosperity and happiness, at any rate by historical standards. The prosperity of British working people had doubled since 1848, and at least had not fallen in the face of rapid British population growth in the half century before 1848. Then in the century after 1910 it redoubled and redoubled again and yet again redoubled, for a factor since 1848 of sixteen at least, even in a United Kingdom that in 1800 vied with the Netherlands as the richest country per person in the world. Yet in 1800 even the average person in the United Kingdom was miserable by today’s standard, dragging along on $6 a day in present-day prices. Then liberalism and its encouragements to innovism—the permission to, as the British say, “have a go”—brought a Great Enrichment, to $100 a day by now, a factor of about 17. If the higher quality of goods (food, housing, education) is taken into account, the Great Enrichment is more like a factor of 30 or 40. That is, it was in total not the 100 percent or 200 percent since the year 1800 that people will reply if you ask them. It was a startling 3,000 or 4,000 percentage enrichment of the poor, coming from the commercially tested betterments of kerosene and electricity, cardboard and container ships, subways and autos, movies and universities, airplanes and the internet. Startling though such thousands of percentages are, no competent student of economics, economic history or public health would disagree (Rosling et al. 2018; McCloskey 2010; 2016 for details and evidence). The poor are not always with us, not since political liberalism and economic innovism out of liberalism took hold. Liberal ‘innovism’ is not zero sum, but socialism is Yet the intellectuals had in Reverend Williams’ time, as George Bernard Shaw noted in 1912, long since turned against economic innovism arising from political liberalism. The priests and artists and journalists and professors looked back in conservative-socialist fashion to the lovely Christian commonwealth of the Middle Ages: “The first half [of the nineteenth century] 11Personal communication, November 2014.

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Bourgeois Dignity: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World by Deirdre McCloskey Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 77 despised and pitied the Middle Ages,” wrote Shaw (1990 [1912]). “The second half saw no hope for mankind except in the recovery of the faith, the art, the humanity of the Middle Ages. ... For that was how men felt, and how some of them spoke, in the early days of the Great Conversion, which produced, first, such books as the Latter Day Pamphlets of Carlyle, Dickens’ Hard Times, ... and later on the Socialist movement.” By 1919, Tillich and Wegener were claiming, recall, that innovism is a matter of non- cooperation. They were mistaken. An economy is a massive device for cooperation. The competition so offensive to them is merely the permission to enter a trade badly served by the present powers, an entry that then radically improves the lot of the poor. Yet. as the professional economist and amateur theologian Robert Nelson (2001, 331) commented on such sentiments, “If the private pursuit of self-interest was long seen in Christianity as a sign of the continuing presence of sin in the world—a reminder of the fallen condition of humanity since the transgression of Adam and Eve in the garden—a blessing for a market economy has appeared to many people as the religious equivalent of approving of sin.” The economy in this view is a zero-sum game, a species of football. One might claim correctly, acknowledging a sad and sober fact, that before 1800 or so the economy was zero sum, one person’s advantage conditioned by the sinful ruin of the other (see Wright 2019). The fact justifies the claim implicit in some passages in the Hebrew Bible (though contradicted in others) and explicit in the New Testament that a rich man cannot with ease, or enjoying his ease, enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Such a view, though commonplace in the 20th century among Christian people, is factually mistaken. Since 1800 or so, the zero-sum claim has been spectacularly belied. Income per head of the poorest has increased in Brazil and Japan and Finland and now China and soon India by that 3,000 percent, dwarfing any gain to the poor to be had by redistribution in a zero-sum economy. It is as though the old football game yielding typical scores of 28 to 7 in favor of the rich came after a while to yield in the new game scores of 840 to 210. The rich still ‘won,’ if sports-talk or a socialism of envy is how one wishes to think. But the formerly poor now enjoyed fully human lives, denied in the days of their old score of 7. And conceptually speaking, innovism is the opposite of the sinful “deliberate egoism” that the young pastors of Germany claimed. It achieves the solidarity of all people through voluntary exchanges among the 6 or 300 or for that matter 7,800 million souls rather than through the coerced allocation as though in folkhemmet. The people’s home is run by lordly parents, or by lordly economists, or by lordly commissars with, it may be, their own motives distinct from those of the citizen-children inside. Liberalism by contrast is the adult system of thoroughgoing cooperation with strangers. The Good Samaritan’s one-on-one gift was glorious. Yet all the more is the one-on-many, or many-on-one, of modern innovism evoked by profit and craft and property. After all, no profit is achieved, and any craft is pointless, and any property fruitless, unless the seller’s product made out of them is advantageous to the others, in the opinion of the others—who then willingly give over some of the profit from their own selling of labor or craft or property. It is liberal innovism, mutual gain, a positive sum. The Christian clerisy since the Great Conversion has not much listened to such liberal reflections. Yet physical coercion by one human over another is an evil in Christian theology, too, being an offense against the liberated will granted by a loving God. Socialism (technicalities and intentionalities aside) is the making of economic decisions by the general will, Rousseau’s volonté générale, enforced (note the word) by physical coercion. Rousseau (2001 [1762], IV.4) believed that the phrase volonté générale resolved the obvious tension

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Bourgeois Dignity: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World by Deirdre McCloskey Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 78 between individual action and state coercion. If you voluntarily join in the general will, he asked, what’s the problem? And, happily, you will so join, as the nature of man under socialism evolves away from a wickedly bourgeois nature, “an economy,” said the pastors, “in which each is the enemy of the other.” Rousseau’s oxymoronic notion of a voluntary coercion survives in political theory as the notion of a social contract. The only alternatives to such socialized decision-making are the decisions made by the God-given individual wills interacting with other humans without physical coercion, as in the evolution of language or music or science. The result need not be a harsh and unchristian social Darwinism, a country-club disdain for the poor. Liberalism gives to others in an ethical manner the dignity of respect, autonomy, self-rule, liberty of the will—but within serious ethics. Most human arrangements are of this character, and especially so outside of tyrannies: language is, for example; and art; science, love, sports and manners, as well. Admittedly, Rousseau’s notion is paralleled in theology to voluntarily acceding to God’s inevitable law. And admittedly the economy, the language, love, football, and art, science, and manners, make use of customary agreements to arrive at this or that action—what the liberal economist James Buchanan (1987) called “constitutional political economy,” and what linguists and linguistic philosophers call “conversational implicatures” (Grice 1989). Yet since Rousseau the implicit agreement with the general will has of course been used routinely to justify evil coercions. In the USSR, for example, someone who did not agree with the general will as discerned by the state was judged to be quite mad, and would be put under the coercing care of psychiatrists. The state, as Max Weber (1994 [1919], 310) put it, can with justice claim “the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical constraint/force/violence/coercion” (das Monopol legitimen physischen Zwanges). Good. Such a monopoly is greatly to be preferred to oligopolies of multiple gangs prowling around to physically coerce people. The liberal recommendation is to have a single guardian, and then watch over him. Quis custodiet ipsos custodies? Who guards the very guardians? Who watches the Chicago police? We’d better. But we must keep in mind, as the riot police gather, that the justified monopoly does necessarily involve physical coercion. After all, they have the guns. Markets by contrast do not involve physical coercion, and Apple and Facebook do not have guns to coerce you into buying their wares. At any rate, they do not coerce unless the word ‘coercion’ is so extended in meaning so that any influence, voluntary or physical, words or actions, advertising or billy clubs, is deemed ‘coercive.’ The dean of the College of the University of Chicago during the student disorders against the Vietnam War, the great rhetorician Wayne Booth, was trying to persuade a student to leave the Administration Building, which had been seized by the students. The student, irritated, said, “Now don’t try to reason with me!”12 Without reason, disagreement, rhetoric, freespeech, all is [defined to be] coercive, nothing is non-coercive, and we are doomed to an absence of will, by definition. Liberty of the will becomes a laughable fairy tale, not God’s grace. Intentionality does not imply socialism The ancient stoics, with many Christian quietists, went to the other extreme, claiming that external slavery allows nonetheless an internal freedom. As the philosophical stoic emperor of 12 Booth used it as the title of a collection in 1970 of his essays on that turbulent era.

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Bourgeois Dignity: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World by Deirdre McCloskey Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 79 Rome and stoic slave from Asia Minor both noted, even a slave has choices, within a more or less constrained position. An old New Yorker cartoon shows two prisoners chained hand and foot, hanging from a prison wall. One says to the other, “Here’s my plan.” Such extensions of meaning are rife in the philosophical discussion of liberty of the will (Kane 2002). I raise my arm voluntarily rather than not, or accept a poorly paid job in Vietnam making running shoes rather than starving. But, the determinist argues, in a world of causation the will to raise the arm or the will to accept the job has itself causes, back to the big bang and (the theist adds) God’s Beyond. One hears such an opinion expressed often on the left nowadays. It implies that being offered a job that is not heavenly, or being presented with an argument that is not pleasant, is an aggression, no better than state coercion in employment or in opinion, as in Stalin’s and now Putin’s Russia or Mao’s and now Xi’s China. Erasmus, in his debate during the 1520s with Luther over liberty of the will, turned the discussion towards the social and ethical consequences of a supposed lack of liberty of the will. Such a liberal trope of argument was characteristic of the Prince of the Humanists. By contrast, the arguments about liberty of the will have mostly taken place at the top level, so to speak, of God’s grant of liberty. Erasmus in the debate moves down to the level of human psychology, arguing for a middle position between the dual dangers of ‘indifference’/’hopelessness’ in predestination or an ‘arrogance’ in supposing that one can by works alone achieve salvation (Erasmus 2013 [1524], 85). Staying at such a level has the merit that we have actual information and experience about it, and can reflect with some chance of conclusion about ethics and law. Rising to the level of metaphysics yields only paradoxes, irresolvable it would seem short of the Second Coming. The theology about liberty of the will hangs on the word ‘intentional.’ Progressive Christians such as Pope Francis’ economist, Stefano Zamagni (2010), declare, contrary to the historical evidence and economic logic, that conscious, planned, intentional action at the group level, the volonté générale, is what is needed in order to improve the world. Francis himself, a child in Argentina of the Theology of the People, said to reporters on a flight from Poland to Rome, “as long as the world economy has at its center the god of money and not the person ... [it] is fundamental terrorism, against all humanity” (The Wall Street Journal, August 1, 2016). But no businessperson makes money without pleasing the person, saving her from starvation, educating her children, giving her a fuller life in which she can praise God. Contrary to such an obvious link between ‘money’ and the person, say Zamagni, and Francis, the society cannot rely on any of those ‘neo-liberal’ invisible hands or spontaneous orders of the sort that determine, say, the evolution of the Italian language or of Milanese fashion. Thus my own Episcopal priest in the United States declared in her sermon of July 4 that “independence is not a Christian value,” and that what is Christian is a dependence on God and community (God’s Will, but then also the General Will in central planning of innovation, say). A Christian liberal disagrees on the matter with Zamagni and with Pope Francis and with my beloved pastor, as with many other good-hearted folk. The initial independence of the person in a liberal economy results in the great and good interdependence of modern life. You don’t grow your own wheat or make your own accordion. You trade for them with people many thousands of miles away. Liberalism celebrates a non-coercive and ethical interdependence. Catholic social teaching of the sort Zamagni advocates doesn’t face up to the point. One- to-one cooperation is splendid, and certainly subject to ‘intentionality.’ You can choose in a liberal society the life of a desert hermit if you feel so inclined, and then eschew the profit of social

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Bourgeois Dignity: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World by Deirdre McCloskey Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 80 relations in an economy. But most people are not so inclined. If so, they should reject “national self-sufficiency” as vigorously as they would reject a law preventing them from buying a baguette at Bouton’s boulangerie rather than Bateau’s. The primitive calls for national self-sufficiency in response to the covid-19 pandemic deny the massive gain from one-on-many trade. If applied consistently, the protectionists would call for cutting off trade with your neighbor down the street. Grow your own wheat; make your own accordion. To the contrary, listen again to Smith (1976b, I.i.11, 22-3): “The woolen-coat, for example... is the produce of the joint labor of a great multitude of workmen” [and workwomen, please, dear Adam]. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser, with many others, must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production.” The American theologian and writer Frederick Buechner (2009, 119) set down as an axiom that “We have freedom to the degree that the master whom we obey grants it to us in return for our obedience. We do well to choose a master in terms of how much freedom we get for how much obedience.”13 His economistic talk of a tradeoff is commendable, and the theological point is, too—that one can for instance be enslaved to corrupting desires, and that a loving Lord is a better choice of master than Satan. But the concession to non-liberty has illiberal dangers. St. Paul drove the axiom of universal lordship, typical of the slave society in which he lived, to its secular conclusion: “Let every one be subordinate to higher authorities. For there is no authority except under God” (Romans 13:1). “Render unto Caesar” was perhaps a necessary rhetorical tactic at the time for a Judean with suspect politics. But the British King James I or the French King Louis XIV could not have put better the case for a merger of religious and secular tyranny. In short, a secular, human lordship, an absence of liberty, is not inevitable, as we moderns have believed since 1776. And human lordship is not at all—pace St. Paul—an entailment of God’s Lordship. Even theology shows, that is, how very illiberal St. Paul’s, St. Augustine’s, Calvin’s, and James I’s metaphysics is, how much against the discovery in the 18th- century of the merits of human wills constrained by ethics but liberated from human coercion. Charity is not socialism We are God’s creatures. God therefore owns us, by an analogy with Lockean mixing of labor with unappropriated land, or by an analogy with the ownership of children by parents. But God chooses to liberate us, not leave us as slaves. A parent, and God, wants us to be liberated adults, not perpetual children. We Jews and Christians say at Passover/Easter that God brought us out of slavery in Egypt, and then (we Christians add) by Christ’s sacrifice out of death. We Jews or Moslems say that a child undergoes a bar/bat mitzvah or instruction in the Holy Koran to become an adult, a mukallaf—in modern English, a ‘responsible’ person (see Haskell 1999 on the extraordinarily recent history of ‘responsibility’). As the theologian and Biblical scholar Shawna Atteberry (2019) puts it, the people-as-pets theory of our relation to God and His universe inspires “one of the greatest modern heresies of the church: the Prosperity Gospel ... [which] says that if we are truly in God’s will we’ll get everything we want: wealth, health, and all the toys that money can buy.” To the contrary, she observes, God and the universe sometimes say “No.” It is a position natural to the world of the economist, though God’s grace be free. If we lived in Eden, it would not be so. But, as liberated 13 I’m grateful to Amity Carrubba for the reference.

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Bourgeois Dignity: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World by Deirdre McCloskey Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 81 adults in a real world governed by natural and social laws, we choose, as Eve chose—and as in the tale as Adam too chose, exercising the sadly persuadable will of a liberated man. The über-liberal ‘Austrian’ economics speaks of liberty of the will as ‘human action.’ Orthodox, non-liberal public theology, by contrast, wants the state and God to treat us like obedient pets or children or slaves, not liberated wills. And orthodox, non-Austrian economics nowadays views people as reactive, maximizing utility under a constraint, like grass seeking the light and the water optimally. No, replies the liberal Christian. God made us in the imago Dei/Deae. Liberated. The point is that there is a third way between a coercive state and an atomistic individual: namely, the cooperation yielded by entry and exit in markets. When Jesus’s fishermen sold their catch—the abundant one arranged for them that day by Jesus himself—they intended only to help their own families. But by the miracle of interdependence in the market for fish, thousands ate. The unintended consequence of specialization and trade is a social miracle analogous to the divine miracle of loaves and fishes. The great economist Frank Knight (1885–1972), in an anti-clerical fury, mistook the Christian morality of charity as a call to common ownership in a big society and not merely in a literal home. He attacked it as unworkable. (It is said that the only time the University of Chicago has actually refunded tuition money to a student was to a Jesuit who took Knight’s course on ‘the history of economic thought’ and discovered that it was in fact a sustained and not especially well-informed assault on the Catholic Church.) Knight wrote a book in 1945 with T. W. Merriam called The Economic Order and Religion, which mysteriously asserts that Christian love destroys “the material and social basis of life,” and is “fantastically impossible,” and is “incompatible with the requirements of everyday life,” and entails an “ideal ... [which is] not merely opposed to civilization and progress but is an impossible one.” Under Christian love “continuing social life is patently impossible” and “a high civilization could hardly be maintained long, ... to say nothing of progress.” (Knight and Merriam 1945, 29, 30, 31, 46). It happens that Knight and Merriam are arguing that social life in a large group with thoroughgoing ownership in common is impossible. That is what they believe Christian love entails (see, for example, Knight and Merriam 1945, 48). Compare Tillich and Wegener. The source for Knight and Merriam is always the Gospels, never the elaborate compromises with economic reality of the Church of Power, or of other Christian writings, such as the 38th article of the Anglicans: “The riches and goods of Christians are not common, as touching the right, title, and possession of the same, as certain Anabaptists do falsely boast.” But, yes: social life without private property is impossible, at any rate in large groups. So said Pope Leo XIII in 1891 in Rerum Novarum, re-echoed by Pius XI in 1931, John XXIII in 1961 and 1963, by Paul VI in 1967 and 1971, and by John Paul II in 1981 and 1991.14 These men were not 19th-century liberals—especially, as the Catholic but liberal public intellectual Michael Novak (1989) explained, not ‘liberals’ in the harshest Continental sense. The popes 14 These are Pius: Quadragesimo Anno; John: Mater et Magistra and Pacem in Terris; Paul: Populorum Progressio and Octogesima adveniens; and John Paul: Laborem Exercens and Centesimus Annus. Michael Novak (1989 [1984), h. 6-8) is my guide here.

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Bourgeois Dignity: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World by Deirdre McCloskey Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 82 admitted private property—when used with regard to soul and community. They were nothing like the Sermon- on-the-Mount socialists that Knight and Merriam attacked. Thus Leo: “private possessions are clearly in accord with nature” (15), following his hero, Aquinas.15 “The law of nature, ... by the practice of all ages, has consecrated private possession as something best adapted to man’s nature and to peaceful and tranquil living together” (17). “The fundamental principle of Socialism which would make all possessions public property is to be utterly rejected because it injures the very ones whom it seeks to help” (23). “The right of private property must be regarded as sacred” (65). “If incentives to ingenuity and skill in individual persons were to be abolished, the very fountains of wealth would necessarily dry up; and the equality conjured up by the Socialist imagination would, in reality, be nothing but uniform wretchedness and meanness for one and all, without distinction” (22). “The love-gospel,” write Knight and Merriam (1945, 50), “condemning all self-assertion as sin ... would destroy all values.” Knight and Merriam are correct if they mean, as they appear to, that Love without other and balancing virtues is a sin. Knight’s understanding of Christianity appears to have derived from his childhood experience in a primitive Protestant sect, the Campbellites (evolved now into the less primitive Church of Christ and Disciples of Christ), and theirs is what he took to be the core teaching of Christianity: “No creed but the Bible. No ethic but love.” But Love without Prudence, Justice, Temperance and their combinations is not Christian orthodoxy—for example, the orthodoxy of Aquinas or of Leo XIII. And, yes, such a single-virtue ethic would not be ethical in a fallen world. Economists would call the actual orthodoxy a ‘second- best’ argument, as against the first best of “to him who washes to bring judgment against you, so he may take away your tunic, give him your cloak as well” (Matthew 5:40). Given that people are imperfect, the Christian, or indeed any economist, would say: we need to make allowances, and hire lawyers, and call the police. Otherwise everyone will live by stealing each other’s tunics and cloaks, with a resulting failure to produce tunics and cloaks in the first place—and the life of humans will be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. St. Paul himself said so, admittedly in a letter that not all scholars regard as authentic: “And we [that is, Paul, recalling his visit to the Thessalonian Christians] ate bread not as a gift from anyone, but rather by labor and struggle, working night and day so as not to place a burden on any of you ... If anyone should not wish to work, neither let him eat. For we hear of some who walk in idleness (2 Thessalonians 3:8, 10-11; startlingly, Lenin adopted it as a motto). Or to put it more positively, as Michael Novak (1984, xvi) did, “one must think clearly about what actually does work—in a sinful world—to achieve the liberation of peoples and persons.” “In the right of property,” wrote even John XXIII in 1961, “the exercise of liberty finds both a safeguard and a stimulus.”16 Frank Knight couldn’t have put it better. Charity is not socialism. Generosity is not a system at all. It is of a person, then two, then a few. God arranges such encounters, a Christian might say. But humans value them, too, the gift- economy of grace above material concerns (given an exceptionally eloquent expression in Klemm 2004). Yet to make them into a coerced-contributory social system is to undermine their virtue. We are mostly not friends, but strangers, and even in the Society of Friends the property was not held in common. Knight and Merriam were not really facing Christian 15 Leo XIII (1891), paragraph numbers given. See Aquinas Summa Theologiae (c. 1270), IIa IIae, q. 66, quoted and discussed in Fleischacker (2004, 35 and n40). 16 From the encyclical Mater et Magistra, 1961, quoted in Novak (1984, xxii).

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Bourgeois Dignity: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World by Deirdre McCloskey Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 83 orthodoxy and Christian ethics. They were misunderstanding them. One owes love to a family first. Property, with the virtue of justice, protects the beloved family, an analogy of God’s love for us. If any would not work, neither should he eat. Work, depending on temperance and prudence, is desirable to create and to acquire the property. So is prudent stewardship in managing it, though the lilies of the field toil not. For big groups of humans, being neither lilies nor little families, the right prescription is admiring the bourgeois virtues. A Bourgeois Revaluation giving permission to people to ‘have a go’ has since 1800 occurred in Holland, England, Scotland, France, Germany, the U.S., Sweden, Japan, Hong Kong, Ireland, China, India, and has ended, or is ending, famine and other miseries. So much, then, for a sketch of the political economy of liberty possible in Christian theology. It suggests a new and truly liberal public theology. For it is liberalism, a fulfillment of the Abrahamic equality of souls, that brings human flourishing and human virtue, as God wishes. References Aquinas, Thomas. 1267–1273. Summa Theologica. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Atteberry, Shawna. 2019. “When God Says No.” Sermon at Grace Church, Chicago, May 26. Accessed December 10, 2020. http://www.shawnaatteberry.com/2018/05/26/sermon- when-god-says-no/. Booth, Wayne C. 1970. Now Don’t Try to Reason with Me: Essays and Ironies for a Credulous Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brewer, A. 2009. “On the Other (Invisible) Hand.” History of Political Economy 41: 519–43. Buchanan, James M. 1987. “The Constitution of Economic Policy.” American Economic Review 77: 243–50. Buechner, Frederick. 2009. Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith, San Francisco: Harper Collins. Carlyle, Thomas. 1849. “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question.” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 40: 670–9. Carrubba, Amity. 2019. “July 4 Sermon.” Grace Place Episcopal Church, Chicago. Accessed December 10, 2020. http://gracechicago.org/resources/. Chaudhuri, Nirad C. 1959. A Passage to England. London: Macmillan. Clark, John Bates. 1901. “The Society of the Future.” The Independent 53, no. 2746: 1649–51. Constant, Benjamin. 1988 [1819]. De l’esprit de conquête et de ‘l’usupation. Translated by Biancamaria Fontana. In Political Writings, 45–167. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Deneen, Patrick J. 2018. Why Liberalism Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Bourgeois Dignity: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World by Deirdre McCloskey Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 84 Ellsberg, Robert. 1983. “Introduction.” In Dorothy Day, Selected Writings, edited by Robert Elssberg, xv–xli. New York: Orbis. Embree, Ainslee, ed. 1988. Sources of Indian Tradition. Vol. 1. From the Beginning to 1800. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press. Erasmus, Desiderius. 2001 [1500–1533]. The Adages of Erasmus. Selected by William Barker. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Erasmus, Desiderius. 2013 [1524]. “The Free Will.” In Discourse on Free Will: Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther, translated and edited by Ernst F. Winter, 11–105 London: Bloomsbury Academic. Fleischacker, Samuel. 2004. A Short History of Distributive Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fleischacker, Samuel. 2014. “Adam Smith and the Left.” In Adam Smith: A Princeton Guide, edited by Ryan Hanley, 478–93. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press. Glare, P.G.W., ed., 2012. Oxford Latin Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grice, H.P. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hart, David Bentley. 2017. The New Testament: A Translation. New Haven: Yale University Press. Haskell, Thomas L. 1999. “Responsibility, Convention, and the Role of Ideas in History.” In Ideas, Ideologies, and Social Movements: The United States Experience since 1800, edited by P.A. Coclanis, and S. Bruchey, 1–27. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Hayek, Friedrich. 1944. The Road to Serfdom. Oxford/Chicago: Routledge Press/University of Chicago Press. Hill, Joe [Joel Emmanuel Hägglund]. 1911. “The Preacher and the Slave.” In Little Red Songbook. Chicago: Industrial Workers of the World. Kane, Robert Hilary, ed. 2002. The Oxford Handbook of Free Will. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Klamer, Arjo. 2017. Doing the Right Thing: A Value Based Economy. London: Ubiquity. Klemm, David. 2004. “Material Grace: The Paradox of Property and Possession.” In Having: Property and Possession in Religious and Social Life, edited by William Schweiker, and Charles Mathewes, 222–45. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Knight, Frank, and T.W. Merriam. 1945. The Economic Order and Religion. New York: Harper and Bros.

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Bourgeois Dignity: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World by Deirdre McCloskey Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 85 Knott, Kim. 1998. Hinduism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Leo XIII. 1891. Rerum Novarum. Accessed December 10, 2020. http://vatican.va/content/leo- xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1988 [1848]. The Communist Manifesto. Translated by F.L. Bender. New York: Norton. McCloskey, Deirdre Nansen. 2006. The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McCloskey, Deirdre Nansen. 2010. Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McCloskey, Deirdre Nansen. 2012. “What Michael Sandel Can’t Buy: Review of Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy,” Claremont Review of Books 12: 57–9. McCloskey, Deirdre Nansen. 2016. Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McCloskey, Deirdre Nansen. 2018. “Why the Enemies of Liberalism Fail.” [A review essay on Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed] Modern Age (Summer): 15–23. McCloskey, Deirdre Nansen. 2019. “Fukuyama Was Correct: Liberalism is the Telos of History.” Journal of Contextual Economics – Schmollers Jahrbuch 139, no. 2–4: 285–304. McCloskey, Deirdre Nansen. 2020. “Christianity Did Not Cause Liberalism: A Comment on Klein Out of Siedentop.” Svensk Tidskrift, September. Accessed December 10, 2020. http://www.svensktidskrift.se/christianity-did-not-cause-liberalism-a-comment-on-klein-out-of-siedentop/. Nelson, Robert H. 2001. Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Nordhaus, William D. 2004. “Schumpeterian Profits in the American Economy: Theory and Measurement.” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper W10433. Novak, Michael. 1989 [1984]. Catholic Social Thought and Liberal Institutions: Freedom with Justice. 2nd ed. New Brunswick: Transaction Novak, Michael. 1996. Business as a Calling: Work and the Examined Life. New York: Free Press. Orwell, George. 1945. Animal Farm. London: Secker and Warburg. Oslington, Paul. 2012. “God and the Market: Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand.” Journal of Business Ethics 108: 429–38. Oxford English Dictionary on Historial Principles. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.

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Bourgeois Dignity: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World by Deirdre McCloskey Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 86 Paine, Thomas. 1776. Common Sense. Accessed December 10, 2020. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/147/147-h/147-h.htm. Peart, Sandra J., and David M. Levy. 2005. The “Vanity of the Philosopher”: From Equality to Hierarchy in Postclassical Economics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Peart, Sandra J., and David M. Levy, eds. 2008. The Street Porter and the Philosopher: Conversations in Analytical Egalitarianism. Ann Arbor, MI.: University of Michigan Press. Persky, Joseph. 1990. “A Dismal Romantic.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 4, no. 4: 165–72. Persky, Joseph. 2016. The Political Economy of Progress: John Stuart Mill and Modern Radicalism Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Roosevelt, Franklin D. 1941. “Four Freedoms.” State of the Union Address, Jan 6. Rosling, Hans, Anna Rosling Roennlund, and Ola Rosling. 2018. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. New York: Flatiron Books. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 2001 [1762]. Du Contrat social. Paris: Flammarion. Rumbold, Richard. 1961 [1685]. “Speech from the Scaffold.” In Henry Noel Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution. Stanford: Stanford University Press Sacks, Jonathan. 2002. The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations. London/New York: Continuum. Sala-i-Martin, Xavier, and Maxim Pinkovskiy. 2010. “Parametric Estimations of the World Distribution of Income.” VOX, 22 January 2010. Accessed December 10, 2020. http://www.voxeu.org/article/parametric-estimations-world-distribution-income. Sala-i-Martin, Xavier. 2006. “The World’s Distribution of Income: Falling Poverty and Convergence,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 121, no. 2: 351–97. Sellers, Charles G. 1996. “Capitalism and Democracy in American Historical Mythology.” In The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political, and Religious Expressions, 1800–1880, edited by Melvyn Stokes, and Stephen Conway, 311–29. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Sen, Amartya. 1999. Development as Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shaw, George Bernard. 1990 [1912]. “Introduction to Hard Times.” In Charles Dickens, Hard Times, edited by George Ford, and Sylvère Monod, 333–40. New York: Norton. Smith, Adam. 1976a [1759]. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Edited by D.D. Raphael, and A.L. Macfie. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics.

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Bourgeois Dignity: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World by Deirdre McCloskey Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 87 Smith, Adam. 1976b [1776]. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Edited by R.H. Campbell, A.S. Skinner, and W.B. Todd. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics. Thoreau, Henry David. 1849. On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (or Resistance to Civil Government). Accessed December 10, 2020. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/71/71-h/71-h.htm. Tillich, Paul, and Carl Richard Wegener. 1971 [1919]. “Answer to an Inquiry of the Protestant Consistory of Brandenburg.” Metanoia 3, no. 3: 10–2. Todorov, Tzvetan. 2003 [2000]. Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Translated by David Bellos. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Walzer, Michael. 2008. “Of Course It Does.” In A Templeton Conversation: Does the Free Market Corrode Moral Character?” John Templeton Foundation Big Questions. Accessed December 10, 2020. http://www.templeton.org/market/. Weber, Max. 1930 [1904–1905]. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by T. Parsons. New York: Scribner’s. Weber, Max. 1919 (1994). “The Profession and Vocation of Politics.” In Weber: Political Writings, edited by P. Lassman, and R. Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weber, Max. 1981 [1923]. General Economic History. Translated by Frank Knight. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. Williams, H.H. 1910. “Ethics.” In Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed. London: Horace Everett Hooper. Wright, Walker. “Ye Cannot Serve God and Mammon: An Institutional Interpretation of the Gospels.” Faith and Economics 74: 5–18. Zamagni, Stefano. 2010. “Catholic Social Thought, Civil Economy, and the Spirit of Capitalism.” In The True Wealth of Nations: Catholic Social Thought and Economic Life, edited by Daniel K. Finn, 63–93. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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The Marquise in Limbo: Madame de Pompadour and the historians by John Rogister Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 89 he traditional view and popular image of Madame de Pompadour, the celebrated mistress of Louis XV, is that of a powerful woman in a man’s world determining the policies of France thanks to her influence over a weak monarch. For those interested in eighteenth-century French art, she is seen as an innovative patroness, the high priestess of the rococo whose influence radiated from the grand setting of the Palace of Versailles or from her residence at Bellevue, overlooking the Seine. Yet, in the light of recent historical research, both these perceptions, current in the nineteenth century, are now held to be false. Should these judgements be themselves open to question? In her lifetime, Madame de Pompadour was already the victim of libellous attacks from the clandestine press, stigmatizing, at times in salacious terms, her alleged control of State and church, and her ready access to the royal finances. The demolition of her reputation proceeded apace when the French Revolution gained momentum and freedom of the press established. In her heyday the king’s mistress employed the police to pursue authors and distributors of hostile works directed against her. Men were imprisoned in the Bastille or at Vincennes for years, and she sent emissaries abroad, especially to the Dutch Republic, to hunt down such works. With the Revolution this control was removed. The Marquise de Pompadour came to be seen as the epitome of the corruption and political incompetence of the ancien régime. Various memoirs pretending to be hers had appeared after her death in 1764, as did now parts of her private correspondence, often raising questions about their authenticity to this day. Authentic letters of hers to the Marshal-Duke de Richelieu on political matters were published anonymously (probably by Faur and Sénac de Meilhan) in 1791 with the complicity of Richelieu’s son, as part of quarrel between the latter and the abbé Jean-Louis Giraud Soulavie, who was publishing a life of the marshal at the same time. Soulavie was one of the most prolific historians during the Revolution and the Empire. He was a sensationalist, who gave a growing public avid for revelations about the fallen monarchy plenty to satisfy their curiosity. He undoubtedly saw and collected a huge amount of original material some of which has survived. It is interesting that some of his major works were also translated and published in England, though not a study he wrote on Madame de Pompadour. By the middle of the nineteenth century, history-writing became a serious occupation for journalists and politicians. Among these, the now forgotten J.B.H.R. Capefigue was one of the first to take a favourable view of Madame de Pompadour in two of the seventy-seven books he wrote in one hundred and forty-five volumes. Inevitably critics noted that there were inaccuracies in his erudition but praised his ideas. More accurate editions of memoirs and correspondences began to appear. In the 1850s the journals and memoirs of a leading minister of Louis XV’s reign, the marquis d’Argenson, came out in two competing editions and they covered the period up to 1757. D’Argenson was not an impartial judge of the marquise but he cast shafts of light on her personality and role. A fly-by-night editor and T

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The Marquise in Limbo: Madame de Pompadour and the historians by John Rogister Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 90 publisher, Poulet-Malassis, nick-named “Coco-Malperché” by Victor Hugo, and active in publishing Baudelaire, left a sound edition of Pompadour's letters held in various libraries which were published in 1878. These and other sources helped to form the basis of the first scholarly work on the marquise, that by the Goncourt brothers. Their Madame de Pompadour, first published in 1879, re-edited in quarto size ten years later with the inclusion of yet more material and lavish illustrations (some made possible by the new process of heliochrome) remains a considerable achievement on several levels. The Goncourts were the first to research original documents to test the accuracy and validity of contemporary memoirs. They sought out and reproduced works of art related to the marquise, some of which they purchased themselves. They consulted sale catalogues and listed portraits of her. Decoration for a Masked Ball, 1764 reprinted c.1860, Charles Nicolas Cochin I It is fair to say that the main thrust of the Goncourts’s impressive work was to demonstrate that Madame de Pompadour influenced the pattern of art patronage and that she was the “mistress of the rococo.” They did cover certain aspects of her political role, as they had been able to consult the unpublished memoirs of the marquise’s close confidant, the abbé de Bernis, and to reveal her role in the secret negotiations leading to the signing of the treaty of alliance between Louis XV and Maria Theresia in 1756. But these themes were secondary to their aim of emphasizing her cultural resonance. The political aspects of her role emerged more clearly with the publication of those memoirs of Bernis in 1878 by the young Frédéric Masson, the future historian of Napoleon

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The Marquise in Limbo: Madame de Pompadour and the historians by John Rogister Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 91 and of the Empire. Masson had obtained permission from the Bernis family to use the original text dictated by the abbé to his niece. He completed his edition with the confidential correspondence between Bernis during his period as foreign minister with Louis XV, Stainville (later to become the Duc de Choiseul), ambassador to Vienna, and Madame de Pompadour, using the originals belonging to the Duc de Mouchy - a fellow Bonapartist, one might add. Further details about the marquise’s close involvement in political matters appeared a few years later in two works about a leading member of her circle at court, the Duc de Nivernais. A cleric, Mgr Emile-Antoine Blampignon (1839-1908) published Un grand seigneur au xviiie siècle. Le Duc de Nivernais d’apres sa correspondance inedite avec les principaux personnages de son temps (1888). His was a fairly straightforward publication of fragments of correspondence between the duke, Stainville and the marquise. Nivernais had been ambassador to Rome, later to Berlin, and finally to London, where he was involved in the final stages of the Treaty of Paris in 1762-1763. A more substantial work on him than Blampignon’s was published in 1890-1891 in two volumes by Lucien Perey, the nom de plume of Luce Herpin (1825-1914), a Swiss lady historian living in Paris. Like Blampignon, she had gained access to the archives of Nivernais’s heirs and descendants, the Marquis de Mortemart, the Marquis d’Havrincourt, and the Comte de Guébriant. This was the Indian summer of a Proustian French aristocracy. They still had their hôtels particuliers in Paris and substantial country houses. Lucien Perey fortunately made extensive use of these different papers, because these family collections have subsequently been dispersed in the wake of two world wars, rigid laws of succession with papers being shared out amongst heirs, and the change of use of the chateaux in which they were housed: Saint-Vrain, Entrains, Havrincourt, and Meillant. The final dispersal took the form of sales in Paris in the 1970s and 1980s. Few of these documents were rescued by national depositories and archives.

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The Marquise in Limbo: Madame de Pompadour and the historians by John Rogister Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 92 Duc de Choiseul at his desk, oil on canvas, 1786, Adelaide Labille-Guiard For a comprehensive picture of the Marquise de Pompadour, these papers also needed to be matched with those of Choiseul, as the Goncourts had already observed. Their existence was already attested in 1829, when Choiseul’s nephew published some letters from them in the Revue de Paris. Then, at the turn of the century, Etienne Charavay, a respected dealer in manuscripts, came across the original autograph memoirs of Choiseul. Probably a first shot at a longer text, they were published in 1904 by Charavay’s nephew, Fernand Calmettes. The main part of this unique document relates to a court intrigue in which Choiseul was able to be of assistance to Madame de Pompadour, an event which led to his brisk political advancement. The manuscript disappeared again, only to reappear in 1966, and, after a curious Anglo-French incident, it ended up in a French library. Calmettes had clumsily completed the text by including material by Choiseul from two bound volumes in the hand of an amanuensis which had also come on the market (and have again gone into private hands). These documents showed how wrong French historians have been, and still are, in doubting the authenticity of the published Mémoires du duc de Choiseul, ancien ministre, écrits par lui-même (1790). With all this documentation, one might have expected that a study of the Marquise de Pompadour’s significant role in the political history of the period between 1750 and 1764 might have been written. She herself left no archive, though her brother, the Marquis de

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The Marquise in Limbo: Madame de Pompadour and the historians by John Rogister Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 93 Marigny, was present in her rooms at Versailles shortly after her death when Choiseul, then a minister, appeared and removed a large portfolio from her cabinet under his cloak. Marigny felt the need to go to a lawyer and leave a record of what he had witnessed. One caught a further glimpse of the marquise in the two-volume biography of Choiseul by Gaston Maugras (1910), but the author did not gain access to the Choiseul archives at Ray-sur-Saône, which seemed to be the key to success. Then, in 1917, a retired general entered the scene. General Léonce Philpin de Piépape (1840-1925) belonged to the circle of King Louis Philippe’s erudite son, the Duc d’Aumale, at Chantilly. He had written estimable books on the Princes of Condé and the Duchesse du Maine. Possibly because he had Burgundian links, the Duc de Marmier, owner of Ray-sur-Saône, showed him Madame de Pompadour’s letters to Choiseul. Piépape’s publication of them in the Revue de l’Histoire de Versailles in 1917 was an unmitigated disaster. He could not date the letters, he quoted them in dribs and drabs, elided some letters into others, and was woefully ignorant of their context. Another chance of producing a decent book on Madame de Pompadour was missed in 1928, when Pierre de Nolhac (1859-1936), the distinguished curator of Versailles, and the author of several books on Louis XV and the court generally, published his Madame de Pompadour et la politique, d’après des documents nouveaux. He was aware of Piépape’s unsatisfactory publication, but had previously managed to obtain copies made by the Marquis de Marmier, son of the duke, of these numerous letters of Madame de Pompadour. He did not publish them all, but quoted from them extensively. One suspects he returned the copy after use. However, the problem with de Nolhac was that he had convinced himself that Madame de Pompadour had only a limited political influence. He made little or no attempt to discern the meaning of her highly allusive letters to Choiseul. An opportunity had been lost to exploit a crucial source, which remained closed again until the letters were sold in 1994. Fortunately, before their dispersal, we were able to examine them in detail. Once again, the French National archives made only a minimal attempt to retain them. Still, a large quantity of Choiseul papers remained at Ray-sur-Saône when, by the will of the last owner, they were given to the Departmental Archives in 2017. However, they are currently the subject of litigation which prevents their being made available to researchers, and even then, they will have to be catalogued first.

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The Marquise in Limbo: Madame de Pompadour and the historians by John Rogister Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 94 Portrait of Louis XV of France, pastel on grey-blue paper, 1748, Maurice Quentin de La Tour Since 1923 then, no progress has really been made to return seriously to the subject of the political role of the marquise. The reasons for this situation go beyond the question of the availability of relevant archives, a problem which has, to some extent, been overcome over the years. Firstly, the “Life-and-Times” kind of history went out of fashion in the twentieth century in France as it did elsewhere. Secondly, the prevalence of social and economic history captured the serious market, especially once the “Annales” school of history became prevalent, with its hostility to “histoire événementielle” and to the medium of biography. Narrative and biography became the preserve of historians working on nineteenth-or twentieth-century politics, although it is amazing how many historians of the Annales school have been willing to turn their hand to writing biographies for an eager “general public.” The political history of the ancien régime has become largely the study of the development and interplay of the institutions of the monarchy. Thirdly, there was the undeniable impact of the Action Française school of history. Founded by Charles Maurras (1868-1952), the Action Française was an anti-democratic and royalist political, philosophical, and cultural movement. It tackled the re-writing of the history of France, especially that of the monarchical period, which it claimed, not without some justification, had been deliberately slanted towards a Republican and secular vision. Its leading historians were Jacques Bainville (1879-1936) and Pierre Gaxotte (1895-1982). Both were fine writers, members of the French Academy, and their works are still in print, while their

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The Marquise in Limbo: Madame de Pompadour and the historians by John Rogister Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 95 reputations outlived the decline of the Action Française in the wake of that movement’s adherence to Vichy France. In his Siècle de Louis XV (1933) Pierre Gaxotte rehabilitated Louis XV as a serious monarch, and he belittled the role of mistresses as they detracted from the image of kingship, and such mistresses could be relegated at best to cultural and artistic adornments of the court, or indeed as pastimes in the daily lives of most well-heeled princes, noblemen or financiers. The influence of Gaxotte spread to the academic world. Michel Antoine (1925-2015), a product of the prestigious Ecole des Chartes and the leading historian of Louis XV adopted Gaxotte’s vision. Antoine was primarily an institutional and administrative historian, charting the development of the machinery of government during the king’s reign in two substantial works, Le Conseil du Roi sous le regne de Louis XV (1970) and the biography Louis XV(1989). The reader is reminded that Madame de Pompadour was not a member of the royal council (a fact, by the way, she recognized herself in a reply to a royal commander in Toulouse who was pressing her to act on his behalf). For Antoine, like Gaxotte before him, the king and the marquise and various ministers might talk about political matters in the intimacy of sumptuous private apartments at Versailles, Trianon, or Bellevue, but the marquise was not an official part of the established political process. This rigid and simplistic view has led to the marquise being regarded as a political light-weight. Subsequent biographers, who were mainly women, took this line and, while emphasizing her patronage of the arts, played down her political influence. Nancy Mitford, in a highly readable and sympathetic account of 1955 turned her into a jolly member of the Mitford clan, the view of A.J.P. Taylor. Danielle Gallet, in a book with the promising title of Madame de Pompadour, ou le pouvoir féminin (1985) claims that Louis XV allowed her to believe that she played a political role, not exactly a powerful woman in a man’s world. Evelyne Lever, in her Madame de Pompadour (2000), was unencumbered by these concerns, and saw the marquise as l”amie nécessaire” of Louis XV acting as wife, minister, “thérapeute” as well, and making and unmaking ministers. Hers is not a sufficiently critical approach, though she was aware of the archival constraints, and the book is padded out by the transcription of the marquise’s letters to Richelieu which had already been largely published over a century earlier. With Elise Goodman, The Portraits of Madame de Pompadour. Celebrating the femme savante (2000) an art historian reflects the emphasis increasingly placed on the marquise’s portraits. The books and props that appear in certain portraits, in particular the celebrated pastel by La Tour show her wide range of attributes: Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des loix, a volume of the recently published Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert, a portfolio of prints to which she had contributed a drawing. All these items display her cultural interests. According to the author their presence established the marquise as a woman of the

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The Marquise in Limbo: Madame de Pompadour and the historians by John Rogister Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 97 the neo-classical style. The thrust of the exhibition was blunted by the failure to arrange beautiful furniture and artefacts as parts of decorative ensembles, bringing rooms to life. The approach was also larded in the catalogue with modish new concepts. There was a strong attempt to convince the visitor that Madame de Pompadour was constantly “presenting an image of herself”, “inventing” or “re-inventing herself”. There was little documentary evidence advanced to support this anachronistic and unconvincing type of interpretation, which was also carried forward in part, but only in part, in Colin Jones’s book of the exhibition, Madame de Pompadour. Images of a Mistress (2002). In this and in a later collective work (2012) Jones usefully revealed the hitherto unpublished disrespectful and obscene caricatures which one of her own favoured artists, C.G. de Saint-Aubin, secretly produced of her and her pretensions. Portrait of Denis Diderot, oil on canvas, 1767, Louis-Michel van Loo Finally, more challenging in its approach is the work of a French social historian, Robert Munchenbled. In his Mystérieuse Madame de Pompadour (2014) he uncovers the financial underworld of the ancien régime, seeing her as linked from birth to a web of private financiers and army suppliers who had made their fortunes thanks to the continuous and costly wars at the end of Louis XIV’s reign. François Poisson, her supposed father, worked as an efficient driver of horses and supplier to the armies under the direction of the Pâris brothers, already powerful financiers. Like them, he was a great survivor in a cut throat world where embezzlement and bankruptcy were ever present threats. He managed to buy

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The Marquise in Limbo: Madame de Pompadour and the historians by John Rogister Erasmus Forum Bulletin / Volume V Winter 2021-22 98 ennobling office, move to Paris and married the beautiful daughter of the meat supplier to the Invalides, where the French military establishment was based. It was a milieu in which conjugal fidelity was a bar to further social and financial advancement. Madame Poisson deployed her charms generously, and it is possible that her daughter was the child of a farmer general of taxes called Le Normand de Tournehem. The young Jeanne-Antoinette was duly married to Le Normand’s nephew and heir, Le Normand d’Etioles. Munchenbled dwells upon her looks, her graceful bearing and the unusually comprehensive education she received under Tournehem’s guidance. She became a brilliant hostess at Etioles, their place in the royal forest of Sénart, where the Pâris brothers also had their residences. In years to come, she became an active player in a private financial network that had some hold on the State. This is clearly an important discovery, although it still remains for other historians to discover the precise nature of her influence on internal politics and on the conduct of diplomacy and war once she moved to Versailles. In conclusion, with her political role increasingly discounted, and her patronage of the arts downgraded, the marquise now seems to be in limbo, finding dubious favour only with art historians who think the portraits and sculptures she commissioned for her private houses and gardens reflected merely her “concern” to present an “image” of herself. How can the marquise be rescued from this fate? She remains an attractive figure. She was the most remarkable example of social mobility within the stratified society of the ancien régime. She is also a tragic figure; for a woman with a weak heart, the pace and stresses of court life and intrigue eventually proved fatal and she had no time to enjoy her wealth and status. The rescue of the marquise must begin by emphasizing that she remained part of a ruthless financial network and was influenced by its refined taste. Her unique and sophisticated upbringing made it relatively easy for her to penetrate the great salons of Parisian high life and culture. She also penetrated the court and when she became the king’s mistress, she already had close financial contacts in his immediate household. If we explore further the intricate workings of the governmental system, we can piece together the ways by which she did play a role in it, chiefly by striving to bring a degree of coherence into that system. She succeeded in placing her protégés in government, in the army, and in embassies, and, on a lower level, secured army commissions for relatives and friends, or jobs anywhere in France for friendly writers, or even membership of a French academy for a Polish aristocrat. She had a long-standing relationships with powerful financiers on whom the State depended. Munchebled can help us to disentangle her opaque financial dealings. All these avenues, once explored, will give us keys to learning more about her and, I hope, rescuing her from limbo.