The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [92]
The Church frowned on intermarriage within families as far back as the fourth century. The policy stemmed, in part, from concerns over interbreeding within families, which posed risks of having children with genetic malformations. But it had other objectives: nobles favored marriage between relatives because it worked to maintain property within the family. The Church feared this would lead to powerful dynasties that could rival its power. Moreover, a ban on intermarriage allowed it to charge rich families for “dispensations” from the rule.
The bans got progressively tighter. In the fourth century the Church banned marriage between first cousins. In the sixth century it extended the prohibition to fifth cousins and in the ninth century to sixth cousins. The bans were lucrative. In the eleventh century, the Duke of Normandy, who would come to be known as William the Conqueror, had to build two churches in Caen—the Abbaye aux Hommes and the Abbaye aux Dames—so Pope Leo IX would undo his excommunication after William married a distant cousin, Mathilda of Flanders, against the will of the Church.
THE CHURCH’S MANAGEMENT of the behavioral price list might have sowed the seeds of its demise. There are several competing explanations of the Protestant Reformation that swept Europe in the sixteenth century. Martin Luther, the priest who led the attack, accused the Church of becoming corrupt and morally weak. Historians have argued that the Church allied itself with the losing side in the many wars that raged in Northern Europe. But to me the most compelling hypothesis is that believers were no longer getting value for money. The prices charged by the Church—which by the logic of faith are designed to tighten the bonds among the faithful—had lost their purpose.
The Church stopped working to inspire the faithful and focused instead on collecting rents. By adding sophisticated new ways to raise money from its followers, the Church became too expensive for believers and provided too little of its core services in return. This encouraged the entry of a rival into the market: Protestant Christianity, which came to offer believers direct access to God at a better price. It eliminated the rents and recovered the traditional link between costly sacrifice and religious rewards that had characterized faith since its earliest times.
This approach proved particularly fitting for the emergent capitalist economies that were beginning to develop in Northern European cities, where wealth was inherently less stable than among the landed feudal aristocracy. The Church never established the same alliances with entrepreneurs that it had developed with European nobility. Rather, entrepreneurs resisted its rent seeking and opposed its meddling in economic enterprise. So they chose the competing product.
SIN VS. THE SECULAR WORLD
Belief in a divine origin of the world has suffered a battering over the past few centuries. In the West, science has gradually replaced God in the schema of the physical world since Nicolaus Copernicus proved the earth was not at the center of everything in the sixteenth century, raising the question of why an omnipresent, omniscient God of everything would care so much about events on a little planet in some corner of the universe.
Since then the Big Bang proposed an alternative to God for the origin of the