While deciding which books to make accessible for easy reading while traveling back to the U.S. this past week, I came across one I’ve used for posts in the past and decided it might be interesting to revisit it. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism by R.H. Tawney, an economic lecturer in the 1920s, deals with religion’s impact up through the 1700s on the development of that creature that now rules the world, capitalism.

Rightly or wrongly, with wisdom or with its opposite…not only in one denomination but among Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and Nonconformists, an attempt is being made to restate the practical implications of the social implications of the social ethics of the Christian faith, in a form sufficiently comprehensive to provide a standard by which to judge the collective actions and institutions of mankind, in the sphere of international politics and of social organization. It is being made today.

Sound familiar? That was Tawney in 1922, but recently, from the Axis of Evil to Barack’s former pastor, the content is as strangely and blaringly relevant as it was almost a century ago and even as far back, according to Tawney, as the sinking of capitalism’s medieval roots.

“Modern economic history begins with a series of revolutionary changes in the direction and organization of commerce, in finance, in prices, and in agriculture,” and he writes too that these forces were completely bewildering to people at the time. The only guidance that communities and individuals had as far as social theory and financial practices were concerned was that of the streamlined medieval social body that “strains every interest and activity, by however arbitrary a compression, into the service of a single idea…purpose is universal…all activities fall within a single system.”

Models of the universe of the time, which were usually an illustrated set of concentric circles with a chain linking every element (or circular level) of life to god and the heavens, represented “that the world of social organization, originating in physical necessities, passes by insensible gradations into that of the spirit.” Money and the ever-shifting body of commercial activity too got forced into this universal model. “The contrast between …human appetites and interests and religion, is not absolute, but relative. It is a contrast of matter and the spirit informing it.”

Tawney calls this the first legacy of the period of the Middle Ages up through the sixteenth century, the idea that religion or the spiritual life, ruled all aspects of life, including the economic. There are still traces and incarnations of this along many different strands of contemporary thought, finding their roots not only in this first legacy but also in the period’s second and third as well, “the functional view of class organization, and the doctrine of economic ethics.”

Society had to work, so theory of the Middle Ages determined that this society must be much like the workings of the human body itself. Some parts were less important, were basically there to serve more important organs, and the feudal and hierarchical class systems developed. In order for a class to perform its function, inequality was essential. “Peasants must not encroach on those above them. Lords must not despoil peasants. Craftsmen and merchants must receive what will maintain them in their calling, and no more.” This doctrine acted to “spiritualize the material by incorporating it in a divine universe, which should absorb and transform it.” The weak spots here, like trying to squeeze the natural appetite involved with trading and money-making into such a model, are obvious, and ultimately turned on the model and themselves transformed the social doctrine. The important and resilient heredity that we still employ from the Middle Ages, however, is that “Baptized by the Church, privilege and power became office and duty.” This part stuck and really hasn’t shifted that much.

Despite the purported inextricable intertwining of all elements of society, unity and peace were not predominant in medieval industry. “In the great commercial centers there was sometimes, it is true, a capitalism as inhuman as any which the world has seen, and from time to time ferocious class wars between artisans and merchants.” Although there were traces of the forefathers of the modern trade unions as well, they weren’t widespread. More God in finance did not necessarily equal more peace.

The enormous growth of trade and cities and towns meant more people thinking about how money fit into the Church and the feudal systems and salvation. Economic theorizing was born. Economic conduct and trade became an element of eternal life. It spoke for one’s morals and one’s ability to help his neighbor. Today, culture as a whole views finance and economics as a creature informed by many facets, but as an independent creature too, one with blogs, books, and sections of daily newspapers dedicated to it. For some it may still be an element of salvation; for others it is the god of the day or even the moment, more material than eternal. Either way or wherever in between, the psychological imprint of medieval trading continues to be one of those informing facets present from the pulpit to the gas pump.