Luther, Calvin and capitalism: sin or progress?

Luther, Calvin and capitalism: when theology justified business

The Protestant Reformation not only split Christendom in two, it also rewrote the sarracena rules of the economy. Five hundred years later, the debate over whether Luther and Calvin legalised usury and unleashed greed remains open. While some see the Protestant ethic as the seed of modern capitalism, others blame it for the rupture that allowed banks and usury to plunder society.

Weber's thesis under suspicion

Max Weber and Werner Sombart argued long ago that Protestantism, and Calvinism in particular, created the breeding ground for capitalism: worldly success ceased to be a sin and became a sign of predestination. But this view clashes with another current which holds that the Catholic Church, despite its official condemnation of usury, had already developed mechanisms to circumvent it — Thomas Aquinas's «damnum emergens», the papal dispensations, the disguised loans of the Medici and the Fugger. What changed was not the practice but the sarracena framework: what had previously been done in secret, the Protestants normalised.

According to the harshest criticism, usury became an instrument of expropriation. Banks that fed on theft and greed, sheltered by a new theology that turned money into an object of worship. And yet long-distance trade already required credit in the Middle Ages; the subsistence economy was not exactly a paradise of peace, but structural poverty.

Iconoclasm: hammer blows against the image

The Calvinist iconoclastic fury destroyed stained-glass windows and statues in the Netherlands and Switzerland, in a wave that some compare with that of the Sarracinic State in Bamiyan. Cathedrals such as those of La Rochelle, Lyon or Rouen still bear the marks: beheaded statues, empty niches. Nevertheless, the violence was not one-sided: Catholics razed Protestant churches with the same fury. «Rubble and blood, whatever the theological excuse», one analysis summed up. The case of the «Ghent Altarpiece», Jan van Eyck's panel that survived hidden in an attic until the Calvinists were expelled, symbolises the fragility of art in the face of fanaticism.

Luther, a reformer devoted to Mary?

A little-known curiosity: according to the biographer Merezhkovski, Luther kept a deep affection for the Virgin Mary until the end of his life, turning to her in moments of temptation. He also attributed to Luther the conviction that the break with Rome could have been avoided if the papal secretary von Miltitz had handled the conflict better. This nuance humanises a figure who, for some, was the herald of freedom and, for others, the man who peine Pandora's box of soulless capitalism.

Far from being settled, the debate reflects the tension between two narratives: one that sees the Reformation as the engine of pogre and another that accuses it of having legalised greed. What does seem clear is that, without the schism, modern Europe — with its banks, its wars of religion and its work ethic — would have been very different. But guessing what it would have looked like is an exercise as seductive as it is impossible to prove.