CHAPTER 1

The Idea of Glory and Its Downfall

At the beginning of the principal section of his famousessay, Max Weber asked: "Now, how could anactivity, which was at best ethically tolerated, turn intoa calling in the sense of Benjamin Franklin?" Inother words: How did commercial, banking, and similarmoney-making pursuits become honorable at some pointin the modern age after having stood condemned ordespised as greed, love of lucre, and avarice for centuriespast?

The enormous critical literature on The ProtestantEthic has found fault even with this point of departureof Weber's inquiry. The "spirit of capitalism," it hasbeen alleged, was extant among merchants as far backas the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and a positiveattitude toward certain categories of business pursuitscould be discovered in the writings of the Scholastics.

Weber's question is nevertheless justified if it isasked in a comparative vein. No matter how muchapproval was bestowed on commerce and other formsof money-making, they certainly stood lower in thescale of medieval values than a number of other activities,in particular the striving for glory. It is indeedthrough a brief sketch of the idea of glory in the MiddleAges and the Renaissance that I shall now attempt torenew the sense of wonder about the genesis of the"spirit of capitalism."

At the beginning of the Christian era St. Augustine!lad supplied basic guidelines to medieval thinking bydenouncing lust for money and possessions as one of thethree principal sins of fallen man, lust for power (libidodominandi) and sexual lust being the other two. Onthe whole Augustine is perfectly even-handed in hiscondemnation of these three human drives or passions.If he does admit of attenuating circumstances for anyof them, it is for libido dominandi when combined witha strong desire for praise and glory. Thus Augustinespeaks of the "civil virtue" characterizing the earlyRomans "who have shown a Babylonian love for theirearthly fatherland," and who were "suppressing the desireof wealth and many other vices for their one vice,namely, the love of praise."

For the later argument of this essay it is of considerableinterest that St. Augustine conceives here of thepossibility that one vice may check another. In anyevent, his limited endorsement of glory-seeking left anopening that was broadened far beyond his teachingsby the spokesmen for the chivalric, aristocratic idealwho made the striving for honor and glory into thetouchstone of a man's virtue and greatness. WhatAugustine had expressed most cautiously and reluctantlywas later triumphantly proclaimed: love of glory,in contrast with the purely private pursuit of riches,can have "redeeming social value." In fact, the idea ofan "Invisible Hand"—of a force that makes men pursuingtheir private passions conspire unknowingly to·ward the public good-was formulated in connectionwith the search for glory, rather than with the desire formoney, by Montesquieu. The pursuit of honor in amonarchy, so he says, "brings life to all the parts of thebody politic"; as a result, "it turns out that everyonecontributes to the general welfare while thinking thathe works for his own interests."

With or without such sophisticated justification, strivingfor honor and glory was exalted by the medievalchivalric ethos even though it stood at odds with thecentral teachings, not only of St. Augustine, but of along line of religious writers, from St. Thomas Aquinasto Dante, who attacked glory-seeking as both vain(inanis) and sinful. Then, during the Renaissance, thestriving for honor achieved the status of a dominantideology as the influence of the Church receded and theadvocates of the aristocratic ideal were able to draw onthe plentiful Greek and Roman texts celebrating thepursuit of glory. This powerful intellectual currentcarried over into the seventeenth century: perhaps thepurest conception of glory-seeking as the only justificationof life is to be found in the tragedies of Corneille.At the same time, Corneille's formulations were so extremethat they may have contributed to the spectaculardownfall of the aristocratic ideal that was to be stagedby some of his contemporaries.

Writers from a number of Western European countriescooperated in this "demolition of the hero," withthose from France—the country that had perhaps gonefarthest in the cult of the heroic ideal-playing themajor part. All the heroic virtues were shown to beforms of mere self-preservation by Hobbes, of self-loveby La Rochefoucauld, of vanity and of frantic escapefrom real self-knowledge by Pascal. The heroic passionswere portrayed as demeaning by Racine after havingbeen denounced as foolish, if not demented, by Cervantes.

This astounding transformation of the moral andideological...