The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

42god’s dealSeest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings.—Proverbs 22:29A man may know the remedy,But if he has not money, what’s the use?He is like one sitting without a goadOn the head of a musk elephant.—Vidyākara, “Subhāşitaratnakoşa”The Christian gospels attack wealth, surprisingly harshly by the standards ofthe rest of the world’s religious canon. It is not surprising therefore that inthe nineteenth century a bourgeois but Christian Europe invented the ideaof socialism. Marx and Engels wrote fiercely about it in 1848: “Nothing iseasier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianitydeclaimed against private property . ..? Christian Socialism is but theholy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.”1 The cofounder of the Catholic Worker movement, the French peasantand priest Peter Maurin, used to wander the streets of America in theearly twentieth century declaring, “The world would be better off / If peopletried to become better. / And people would become better / If theystopped trying to be better off.” 2 Do good by doing poorly.In 1919 Paul Tillich, then a thirty-three-year-year-old Protestant pastor inGermany, wrote with his friend Carl Richard Wegener “Answer to anInquiry of the Protestant Consistory of Brandenburg” (1919): “The spirit ofChristian love accuses a social order which consciously and in principle isbuilt upon economic and political egoism, and it demands a new order in