RELIGION AND OTHER SPHERES OF LIFE

The fourth and last set of topics Weber addresses in the Sociology of Religion is the interaction of religion with certain other aspects of social life—namely, economics, politics, sexuality and the arts. In the sphere of economics, he finds that the common rule of kindness to neighbors appears almost universally as the doctrine of charity or alms—giving freely to help others in need. This principle explains, among other things, the deep-seated distrust of usury in some religious traditions. They have held that to loan money while expecting interest in return is a way of exploiting, not helping, the poor. In keeping with its new ethic, however, Calvinism boldly challenged this principle. It actually prohibited charitable giving to beggars because they often were not truly in need, as were the disabled, widows, and orphans. Charity was not for those who can answer God’s calling to work. Those who beg when they are able to earn clearly violate the law of love by accepting what is not rightly theirs. Conversely, usury may be seen simply as a payment from earnings generated by labor that could not have occurred without borrowed funds. Usury, then, does not exploit poverty; it creates opportunity.

As for politics, sexuality, and the arts, Weber observes that religion has most commonly found itself in a measure of tension, and then compromise, with each of these endeavors. Whenever prophetic religions have stated a universal doctrine of salvation or love, they cannot help coming into conflict with the state, which always puts first the interests of a political entity, whether that is a city, territory, nation, or empire. Religion can seek to subdue the state to

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In its final pages, the Sociology of Religion does not really come to a close; it simply breaks off midway through a new chapter (the rest of which survives in notes) that examines the great religions of the world. Those pages can perhaps best be understood less as a conclusion to Sociology of Religion than as the introduction to Weber’s last and most ambitious enterprise, also left unfinished at the time of his death. He projected it as a series of studies that would include The Protestant Ethic and continue through no less than eight volumes dealing comparatively in sequence with the world’s major religions. There is no space in our pages to give this project the full attention it deserves. We can at best offer a brief sketch of the parts that Weber did finish, along with some observations on the general theme it was designed to explore. We will pass entirely over two important and complex essays he included at the beginning and in the middle of the sequence. Since the time of their translation, they have been read widely by English-speaking sociologists of religion; here they can be left to more advanced inquiries.²¹

“The Economic Ethic” proposes to explore all of the “five religions, or religiously determined systems of life-regulation which have known how to gather multitudes of confessors around them.”²² Weber adds Judaism to this group because of its historical importance to two other religions: Christianity and Islam. Of the volumes he planned, three—on Chinese religions, Indian religions, and Judaism—were completed. The two on Asian systems were prepared during the years of World War I, and the essays that made up the volume on Judaism were completed between 1917 and 1919. Weber’s first aim in these works was to return in much greater depth to the economic question

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From time immemorial, China has been predominantly an agricultural society ruled at the top by the emperor, who controlled the river systems crucial to agriculture and transport, and managed at the bottom by local village elders. The emperor asserted his authority through an elite class of public administrators—the literate mandarins schooled in the great Confucian writings— who resided mainly in the cities. Privileged and cultivated, they pursued an ethic of refinement and comfortable “adjustment to the world” that shaped Chinese elite culture for two millennia, but without comparable impact on the attitudes of the masses. In both city and countryside, ordinary life was governed by ties of family and clan and by religious attachment to age-old magical rites and ancestral spirits, which the elite made little effort to challenge or to change. China’s cities never developed features of many cities in the West: self-government, charters of independence, legal rights, guilds and fraternal societies. They remained patrimonial institutions that deferred to the emperor and willingly accepted rule by the Confucian elite. The only protest against this traditionalism came from the Taoists, followers of the teacher Lao-tzu, who urged a life of self-denial and escape from the world. Lao-tzu called for retreat into the unspoiled forests, where the spirit could attune itself to the Tao, the great and mysterious flow in all existing things. Taoists sought a life of simplicity, but because they prized life so highly and took such keen interest in techniques they believed could extend it, their doctrines often blended naturally with popular magic, even reinforcing its grip on the masses. So although it formed a protest against the mandarins’ learning and elegant urban lifestyle, Taoism was no more disposed than Confucianism to promote a universal ethic among the masses; on the contrary, the stress on quiet, selfless drift in the stream of nature left Taoist teachers as much at ease as Confucians with a civilization shaped mainly by peasant traditionalism.

This dominant posture of traditionalism and passivity meant that neither the folk traditions nor the great philosophical systems of China furnished a religious incentive for people to seek profit in business or trade. Despite certain early advances in mathematics and technology, China’s cultural blend of traditionalism and patrimonialism discouraged the kind of rational impartiality (the refusal to “play favorites” to help friends or family) in business dealings

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In India, successive invasions and conquests had created divisions in the social order that appeared in the system of caste, which was dominated by two elite groups. The Brahmins were a caste of priests privileged alone to read the sacred texts of the Vedas; the Kashatryias, a warrior class, held military and political power. Beneath these two groups, which claimed their status as an inherited charisma (or family gift), lesser castes arranged themselves downward on a scale fixed by birth and vocation. At the bottom were the very lowest of the slaves, literally “out-castes.” Rules against marriage or even association at meals kept the lines of separation distinct, but the most powerful support of the system was religious. Brahmin intellectuals, who were the main bearers of the ideas that shaped Indian civilization, wrote caste divisions into the very script of the universe. They held that all of life is subject to the cosmic law of samsara, or rebirth, which governs both nature and society on the principle of karma, the cumulative weight of one’s spiritual (or unspiritual) deeds. Those in the Brahmin caste, placed high, deserved their fortune as a reward for spiritual achievement in an earlier existence; those placed low equally deserved theirs as a natural consequence of prior lives too entangled in material attachments and sensual pleasures. This system was intellectually persuasive, explaining with a kind of cold logic just why social differences that seem unfair are not so; they are simply built into the framework of the world. But it was also deeply disheartening. To the ordinary person, it promised one life after another lived on the great “wheel of rebirth.” Human existence was defined chiefly by a continuous struggle to slip free from the coils of rebirth and by mostly failed efforts to overcome the allurements of sexuality, luxury, and even family.

This great world system, gray at best and grim at worst, colored the entire development of both religion and society in India. Brahmin leaders, originally

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All of this resignation left a visible imprint on economic life. As in China, capitalist enterprise in India failed to take root, even though the prospects for it actually were quite favorable. There was a system of arithmetic using zero and positional numbering; there were thriving centers of handicraft and trade, as well as specialized laborers with guilds to support them; there were independent merchants; and the system of taxation was not oppressive. But in contrast to Europe, society and the economy remained overwhelmingly rural and traditional, so true capitalist enterprise did not develop. It did not help that free, self-governing cities, which served as nurseries of capitalism in the early modern West, also had failed to emerge. The main cause was caste, which prevented the unification of different guilds and classes into a single community of citizens, all possessing equal rights under an impartial legal and moral system that rejected any favoritism based on family or class ties. Further, the problem of caste was in the end the problem of the Indian religious system that served to anchor it. The classic teachings of Hinduism held, and still today hold, that there is in the end no enduring, positive value we can assign to human activity, the physical world, and the present life. The messages of the Brahmin elite and of prophets such as Buddha and Mahavira (the founder of Jainism) were essentially the same: Spiritual joy comes only through withdrawal from the world and release from its toils, cares, and even joys.

Such teachings differ sharply from those of the Jewish prophets, who offered a message received directly from God, a divine revelation that disenchanted

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As he turned from Asia to the West, Weber planned his next volumes, which were to center on the great Western religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Unfortunately, the first, on ancient Judaism, was the only one he lived long enough (almost) to complete. It is a dense, thoughtful work; we, again, cannot do it justice. But we can at least touch upon its central ideas.

As with China and India, Weber begins by offering a close review of the material circumstances in which Judaism arose: the geography, politics, and culture of the ancient Near East. Even before the age of kings, the Hebrew confederation of tribes had united around a shared faith in Yahweh, the personal Lord of the covenant and Creator of the world. Out of all humanity he had chosen the Jews as his children by contract. His favor was theirs for the taking; only their loyalty was expected in return. All subsequent Jewish history was to be interpreted, by priest and prophet alike, in terms of this sacred covenant, which was eventually to shape the theologies of both Christianity and Islam as well.

The contract was shattered in the age of monarchy. The kings brought wealth to Jerusalem, but along with their success came dynastic marriages to nonIsraelite princesses and the worship of foreign gods of fertility. Resentment flared among the rural and traditional poor, bringing civil war and eventually the destruction of the tribes in the North. In time the kingdom was reconstituted in the South, and under King Josiah, prophets and teaching priests made the books of the law—the Torah—rather than temple sacrifices the centerpiece of Jewish life. They called for a new individualized religious faith: obedience to the precepts of the Torah out of a sense of personal devotion to Yahweh, the covenant Lord, who was now conceived no longer only as Israel’s God but as the God of all nations. This obedience consisted of more than just isolated good deeds. It was to be a complete “ethic of commitment.” The prophets who proclaimed it—Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah—demanded both purity

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of faith in Yahweh and social justice for the poor. Differing from the exemplary prophets of the East, they made no personal claim for themselves of supreme wisdom or divinity. But in another sense they asserted something far greater: the message of ethical monotheism. They proclaimed the sovereign majesty of God and demanded total obedience to his will. More than almost anything else, that message is what separates Judaism and its successor religions of the West from the traditions of the East. Unlike the great Asian systems, Judaism and its disciple faiths insist that salvation is not won through contemplation that leads the soul out of the everyday physical world; it comes instead through faith and lifelong obedience that seek to achieve a divine purpose within that world.

As these paragraphs reveal, Weber keenly appreciated the historical significance of Judaism to both religion and civilization in the Western world. There is, however, a troubling element in his discussion. Although he treats Judaism no differently than he does Christianity or Buddhism and although he fiercely opposed the mistreatment of Jews he saw in German universities, some of his ideas on Judaism have been linked nonetheless to later German anti-Semitism. The issue arises from his description of later Jews as a “pariah people” of the ancient Near East. After the exile in Babylon, he claims, Jews gradually became a “community of outcasts,” partly of their own making. They adopted a form of self-isolation in Christian Europe (similar to that of the outcastes in India) by refusing either to intermarry or to associate with members of the wider Gentile community. Inevitably, then, they found themselves disprivileged—the victims of suspicion, hatred, and exploitation. Burdened further by an “ethic of resentment” against their oppressors, they embraced a kind of dual morality, applying a high moral standard in all

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dealings with fellow Jews and a lower one for commerce with Gentiles. Jewish enterprise thus became “pariah capitalism,” as illustrated in practices associated with usury. Because the Torah prohibited them, interest-bearing loans could not be made to other Jews, yet they could be offered to Gentiles. In part this divided ethic also helps explain why Protestantism, and not Judaism, is the real parent of Western capitalism. Protestants demanded wholly neutral and rational standards of conduct in commerce—a principle that was alien to the Jewish pariah ethic.

Weber’s writings are notoriously difficult to summarize because he weaves such an abundance of specific historical and sociological detail so seamlessly into his theoretical discussions. With him the forest truly is hard to see for the trees. Even so, we can get some help with the broader picture if we work comparatively, placing both his methods and his achievements over against those of neighboring theorists, especially his nearest intellectual rivals, Durkheim and Marx. With respect to Durkheim, we should notice that between him and Weber there is a clear similarity of interest combined with a sharp difference in method. As noted, Durkheim and Weber were not just pioneers in the field of social theory; they were also responsible for turning the focus of professional sociology in its earliest years specifically toward the sociology of religion. Durkheim’s Elementary Forms was pivotally important in placing religion at the center of social investigation and theory. In the same

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way, Weber, though primarily interested in the economic aspects of social life, found himself ever more drawn toward the central importance of religion to society. By the time of his death, comparative study of civilizations, anchored in research on world religions, was the main focus of his labors.

There is a further difference over the matter of cultural evolution. As we saw earlier, Durkheim, because of his central focus on religion in its earliest forms, was somewhat inclined to think in evolutionary terms. He could entertain the notion of religious institutions evolving over time along a line of progress from the ancient to the modern, the simple to the complex. This was clearly not the view of Weber. When he sets out to explain ideal-types, he is careful to notice how expressions of those types may appear in one epoch, fade in the next, and return again thereafter, depending on each new cultural or historical circumstance. He finds magic, for example, more common in earlier societies but concedes its enduring appeal among the masses—the peasants and poor—in any society. He notices too how it can revive in places where once it had faltered. Magic was probably more widespread in medieval Christian Europe than it was a thousand years earlier in ancient Judaism after the message of the prophets had taken effect. Accordingly, there is also for Weber no such thing as a natural intellectual evolution of the kind Frazer imagines when he puts magic, religion, and science into historically successive

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stages. Finally, and significantly, Weber departs from Durkheim’s functionalist reductionism. As we have already seen in several connections, he does not believe that religious beliefs and practices are mere reflections of a controlling and more fundamental social reality. Since Weber diverges from Marx on this issue even more acutely than he does from Durkheim, we can turn to that comparison in the paragraphs that follow.