Christianity and the Logic of Capitalism (Part Three): The Theology of Money
But
isn’t capitalism a secular phenomenon? many will ask. And isn’t it therefore a scientific enterprise (thus treating it as a religion is either a
blatant category mistake or merely an inflammatory metaphor)? This is an excellent
question which in many senses gets right to the heart of this paper, and brings
into it a host of questions regarding just what “secularization,” is then, which goes quite beyond the
scope of this essay. For our purposes we
will rely on other scholarship and note that it is far too simple to record
secularization, as Milbank chides, “in merely negative terms as a
desacralization.”[1] Rather than the mere “falling off” of belief
in favor of “science,” or “rationality,” or “humanity come of age,” and the
like, it is more akin to what William Cavanaugh describes as "the migration of the holy," which is not the disappearance of the Holy, but varieties of conceptual and practical transfer to entities other than God. Charles Taylor prefers to talk of secularization in terms of changes in
the modes and conditions of belief,[2]
what Taylor calls the “social imaginary”:
What Im trying to get at with this
term [social imaginary] is something much broader and deeper than the
intellectual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality
in a disengaged mode. I am thinking
rather of the ways in which they imagine their social existence, how they fit
together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, and the
expectations which are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and
images which underlie these expectations.[3]
Thus
“Secularity in this sense is a matter of the whole context of understanding in
which our moral, spiritual, or religious experience and search takes place,” so
that religion and secularity are not “rival theories,”
but “different kinds of lived experience.”[4] Which is to say it is not a stark “belief vs.
unbelief” (or even faith vs. science) dichotomy in “religious vs. secular,” but
the fact that beliefs about belief
have changed. “Belief in God isn’t quite
the same thing in 1500 [as it is] in 2000,” because we are no longer
“immediate,” believers. Rather “belief,”
is now seen as a choice and this “breach of naiveté,” is itself constructed on
the basis of series of contingent cultural, philosophical, and theological
decisions.[5] Thus
“secularization,” is not a story of “subtraction,” of religious “mythology”
from concrete worldly practices (as in the narrative of the scientific
disenchantment of the world) but rather how alternate human “fullness,” became
imagined and believed in.[6] Indeed subtraction narratives are
bound up with the one-sided
negativity of the notion of desacralizing;
a metaphor of the removal of the superfluous and additional to leave a residue
of the human, the natural, and the self-sufficient. For this negative conception it is convenient
that there should always have been some perception
of the pure [secular] remainder…[the secular] achieved a
certain highly ambiguous autonomy with regard to theology. However autonomization was…only possible
because the new science of politics both assumed and constructed for itself a new autonomous object.[7]
So to speak, wading through Milbank’s thick prose, his point is the
secularization seen as “disenchantment,” is question-begging, since to
“disenchant,” something one must leave its “natural,” remainder—but to identify
the “natural,” remainder is already to assume a space that has not been touched
and constructed by its previous “enchantment.”
Secularism under this rubric of “the coming of age,” of man from
mythological blindness is but the assumption
of the truth of naturalism and the re-narration
of history to demonstrate its inevitable emergence.[8]
One must immediately note however that historically the “turn to nature,”
was not a step outside or against the theological but within it, and what subtraction narratives cannot account for is
that the “autonomization of nature” initially brought with it “its own kind of
devotion.”[9] The transition as it is described by these
thinkers accords to how the world is conceived in relation to God. In earlier Christian tradition the world was
seen in various ways as an analogical expression of God’s own being; thus
things were “good,” or “beautiful,” or “true,” insofar as they were expressions
of God. Lewis Ayres in his magisterial
book Nicaea and Its Legacy notes for
example that pro-Nicene theologians (including the Cappadocian Fathers and
Augustine) saw themselves “embedded within a cosmos that is also a semiotic
system that reveals the omnipresent creating consubstantial Word.” The world could not of course be “read,” by
just anyone, but rather “in our state of ignorance one of the tasks of
Christian life is the relearning of the language of the creation in the Word:
this part of the relearning is itself part of the reimagining of ourselves in
Christ.”[10]
During the early Medieval period however William of Ockham, an
influential Franciscan theologian, “drawing on the work of earlier
proto-nominalist thinkers such as Roscelin and Abelard, and the work of Henry
of Ghent and [Duns] Scotus…laid out in great detail the foundations for a new
metaphysics and theology that were radically at odds with Scholasticism.”[11] If the earlier tradition (if one can lump it
together thus) would say God makes things good because they are expressions of
the Supreme Good, which is God Himself, Ockham and the Voluntarist tradition
believed that God is limited by nothing, not even God’s own essence. Things are thus good simply because God
willed them, He does not will them in submission to a previously established
good. Thus “God must always remain free
to determine what is good” (Voluntarism) and now as “the super-agent who is God
relates to things as freely to be disposed of according to his autonomous
purposes.”[12] Things are thus no longer related to God
except as arbitrary instances of His will—everything can now only be spoken of
as fields of “pure power,” and the world no longer expresses goodness or truth
or beauty, rather “we, the dependent, created agents, have also to relate to
these things not in terms of the normative [i.e. meaningful] patterns they
reveal…the purposes of things are [now] extrinsic to them. The stance is fundamentally one of
instrumental reason.”[13]
Moreover names and things named are no longer related to God’s essential unity
as expressions of God; thus there is no essence “tree,” or “man,” or “dog,”
etc…but only individuals, and the categorical names we use to link them (again:
man, dog, tree, etc…) are not “real,” but “nominal,” (hence “Nominalism”) i.e.
merely convenient subjectively created categories meant to aggregate in concept
what are in reality ontologically unrelated.
This
is what Catherine Pickstock calls the worlds “spatialization,”[14]
or what Conor Cunningham calls the “lateralization of space,”[15]
by which they mean that places, objects, and bodies are no long related to
“vertical,” transcendent purpose, but the “purely spatial” and immanent
“horizontal,” field of space is merely an aggregate of individual things
definable now only by geometrical-mathematical description (i.e. chemical,
biological, physical, etc…). Existence
was no longer a semeiotic field of values related to God and uncovered through
spiritual growth (bread is, for example, not more itself when given to feed the hungry). Rather since all things are individual, and
expressions of arbitrary power, the world begins to appear as the site of vast
uncertainty and conflicting powers (and God could, with his potentia absoluta or absolute power,
re-create the world or fundamentally alter any given part of it at any
moment). Every existent at any given
moment merely represents not an essence, but a logical possibility, which could
at any moment be otherwise than it is currently, and replaced by another
logical possibility by God’s will. And
humanity, as Imago Dei of this
Voluntarist God now begin to be described by a trajectory of anthropology
“which begins with human persons as individuals and yet defines their
individuality essentially as ‘will’ or ‘capacity,’ or ‘impulse to
self-preservation.’”[16]
And this “willing individual,” is such precisely over and against a
fundamentally inert world ripe to be molded by acts of power. Thus political and economic thought start
having to deal with the question of society and economic relations of a field
of fundamentally unrelated individuals who are defined as essentially desirous,
willing beings (one thinks, for example, of a Hobbes or a Locke or a Rousseau.)
To
put it boldly then, what is actually a history of thought saturated with
theological concepts, is by naturalism and what Taylor calls “exclusive
humanism,” which abandon the grounds of their own inner conceptual justification,
erased, and the theological history
in which they arose as possibilities from within
theological trajectories forgotten through their presentation as “natural
man.” Thus for our purposes the history of the present economic order which
presupposes free humans as “individuals and yet defines their individuality
essentialistically as ‘will’ or ‘capacity’ or ‘impulse to self preservation,’”[17]
is not a “secular science,” in the sense of being neutral or empirical, rather
it was justified within the ambit of a theology increasingly pushed into the
background to later be displaced altogether, where “the real moment of
mystification occurs, because here the ‘mythical’ character of sovereignty is
forgotten.”[18]
The Unnaturalness of Freedom
And
yet once the theological does drop out, this also involves a large-scale
re-envisioning of the “good life.”[19] So to speak, “the human as an individual
sovereign will,” constructed theologically is unmoored from its traditional
counterpoint to “humanity is a servant of God.”
This is of course a complex process with a panoply of causes and
associated factors. In this sense
Milbank’s narrative must be complemented by Taylor’s expanded analysis. The upshot however is that economic
theorizing takes on the air of understanding the problem of “heterogenesis,”
namely how fundamentally selfish, autonomous individuals nonetheless are being
ordered together into a harmonious whole.
Adam Smith for example merely appeals to a secularized vision of
Providence in the “Invisible Hand,” to account for this. “What is striking about the Smithean
invisible hand, from the standpoint of the old science, is that it is a
spontaneous order arising among corrupt,
that is, purely self-regarding actors.”[20]
One
could begin to see the whole of society through quasi-economic metaphor, and
eventually “economy” became more than a metaphor, “it came to be seen more and
more as the dominant end of society,” says Taylor.[21] Indeed as we already noted, Daniel Bell
indicates “rights” discourse emerged parallel to the economic-imaginary shifts
here described.[22] Thus it begins a “drift in the social
imaginary,” towards an “impersonal order,” where economy is no longer merely
the management of needed resources, but “a way in which we are linked together,
a sphere of co-existence which could in principle suffice for itself.”[23] Though
the whole system is set up under the pretense of universal rationality, it is
really more or less the result of attempting to fit together the remnant
vestigial theology into an emerging post-confessional religious societal ideal.
This
is an important point because part of the invisibility of many of Capitalism’s
negative aspects are because, as Zizek,[24]
Milbank,[25] and
others point out, proponents of capitalism often present it as the inevitable
(and natural) culmination of human nature qua
human nature (e.g. rights are “natural human rights”). Writes Taylor: “All [these theories of modern
secularization] make a crucial move which they present as a ‘discovery,’
something we ‘come to see’ when certain conditions are met…The elements of
‘discovery’ seem unchallengeable because the underlying construction is pushed
out of sight and forgotten,” or in other words “all these accounts [of the
emergence of modern humanity] ‘naturalize’ these features of modern liberal
identity. They cannot see it as one,
historically constructed understanding of human agency, among others.”[26]
And this is part of the mythical lattice which
allows it to present itself as science, since it is the systematic analysis and
outworking of the “naturally,” latent energies of man (that is, man envisioned
as essentially individual desiring centers of consumption). Yet we must here
take MacIntyre’s caution under advisement that this is not science but another
story, “man without culture is a myth,” he says, “our biological nature
certainly places constraints on all cultural possibility; but man who has
nothing but a biological nature is a creature of whom we know nothing.”[27] Thus what has actually occurred is the
perpetuation of a certain caricature of the traditional Christian Imago Dei concept within the ambit of
the Nominalist and Voluntarist shift (that all of humanity is equal via atomic
individualism), unbounded from its more concrete moral implications and changed
into: all of humanity should equally have the chance to be consumers. David Loy
humorously comments that as such “economics is less a science than it is the
theology of that religion [of the market].”[28] Which is not to say that economics is
irrational, or that somehow its mathematics merely conjure figures from the
air. It is however, to suggest that its
rationality is based upon the contingent organization of a theorized domain
whose conceptual antecedents (and indeed, justifications) are theological. Unlike physics, whose descriptions and
mathematical formula do not often alter the objects being described, the same
is not true for social theorization.
Capitalism is as much a description of markets as it is their creation;
so much the analysis of agents as it is the habituation of proper habits of
consumption and sale. Again, this is not
a call to abolish the free market. It is
to ask: when is a market free? And for we who are Christians it is a clarion
call to realize that economics is permeated with theologically relevant
dimensions—that “each time money is used, an epistemology, a metaphysics, a
politics, an ethics, and even a theology is invoked,”[29]—all
of which are elements we all to often miss in our knee-jerk alliance with
partisan politics or liberal economics.
Thus
as Christians we must not give in to the privatization of our beliefs, as if
the economy represented a series of decisions and events that lay fundamentally
outside the realm of theological practice or theorizing. This dichotomy of two realms, one
theological, one scientific, occurs only in a fundamental theological
forgetfulness. This is not to say we
must have a nostalgic longing for some “pure,” age now lost to us or that
Christianity take on an air of superiority in an age of secular
commodification; on the contrary Christian engagement is a form of prophecy and
repentance which both calls to
awareness the theological origins of (post)modernity and attempts to overcome
many deficiencies which have stemmed from Christian theological history that
now often invisibly beset us. What it is to say is that we must (and I say we literally, I stand cut by my own
blade) overcome the solution of “inward piety,” in which we expect our beliefs
coupled with a few dashes of self control and a sprinkling of sympathy for the
homeless woman on the offramp to allow us to keep a sort of “ironic,” distance from
the tumult of consumption. By making it
purely a problem of individual piety it ignores the structural forces which
shape us and which we are caught within (and indeed that these forces are
themselves phantoms of religion).
Metzger notes this is a particular problem for evangelicals since we
have a tendency to have an “antistructural bias,”[30]
where sin and conversion are seen primarily along individual lines. As our brief analysis above shows, however,
the individualistic strain in retrospect plays right into the new ethos
undergirding the market, and thus in some sense the individualistic evangelical
strain plays into the market in a way parallel to human rights discourse. Indeed this is the famous thesis of Max
Weber’s “Protestant work ethic.” And
while individual decision and piety are important values in themselves, “It’s
tough to hold on,” remarks Klein, “to that subtle state [of ironic detachment]
when the eight-hundred-pound culture industry gorilla wants to sit next to us
on the couch and tag along on our ironic trips to the mall.”[31] It is thus not a question of “does capitalism
work,” or “is it efficient,” but “how are
we, as moral, theological agents, implicated in its total operations as ethical, moral, theological agents?”
[1] Milbank, Theology and Social Theory p.9.
[2] Taylor, A Secular Age p.3
[7] Milbank, Theology and Social Theory p.10.
[8] Michael Allan Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2008) p.272.
[9] Taylor, A
Secular Age p.92.
[10] Lewis Ayres, Nicaea
and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004) p.325.
For some helpful surveys see: T.F. Torrance, The
Ground and Grammar of Theology (Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 1980); Idem, Divine and
Contingent Order p.1-25. And for the
rise of the concept of person in theological discourse John Zizioulas in Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the
Church (New York, NY: St.
Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985) and Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church (New York, NY: T&T Clark International, 2007) and
Wolfhart Pannenberg, Anthropology in
Theological Perspective trans. Matthew J. O’Connel (Philadelphia:
Westminster Press, 1985).
[11] Gillespie, Theological
Origins of Modernity p.22.
[12] Taylor, A
Secular Age p.97.
[14] Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical
Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1997) pp.47-101.
[16] Milbank, Theology
and Social Theory p.14-15.
[17] Milbank, Theology
and Social Theory p.15.
[18] Ibid p.27. Milbank
is, of course, not alone. C.f. the
studies of Brad S. Gregory, The
Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society
(Harvard: Belknap Press, 2012); Louis Duprê, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Nature of Hermeneutics and
Culture (Yale: Yale University Press, 1993); Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical
Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1997); Philip
Goodchild, Theology of Money (Duke:
Duke University Press, 2009); Gillespie, The
Theological Origins of Modernity; Taylor, A Secular Age.
[22] Bell, Liberation
Theology
[23] Taylor, A
Secular Age p.181.
[24] Zizek First as
Tragedy pp.26-27.
[25] Milbank, Theology
and Social Theory p.41.
[27] MacIntyre, After
Virtue p.161.
[28] David R. Loy, “The Religion of the Market,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion
65 (Spring, 1996): 275.
[29] Goodchild, Theology
of Money, 20.
[30] Metzger, Consuming
Jesus p.58ff.
[31] Klein, No Logo
p.83.
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