A Declaration of War

After invoking the gospel as a guideline to good deeds [1], Luther comes straight to the point by identifying the evils of his time. These may be captured under the catchall term avarice [1, 2 and passim]. As avarice (or greed, Latin avaritia) is one of the capital vices or cardinal sins, it is – in Luther's view – the main danger posed to contemporary society [1, 2]. Avarice can be generally defined as the desire to have more, but after that the story becomes tricky. What does more mean? It could mean, for instance ‘more than due’, as justified in terms of the just profit or reward to one's labour and effort spent on procuring a specific bundle of goods or making a just and honest living. Even though Luther disliked the medieval scholastic theologians, he is, at least implicitly, using the schoolmen's distributional concept of justice here; figuratively speaking the geometrical (as opposed to an arithmetical) mean as a benchmark for distributing capabilities, rewards and resources. Everyone should be rewarded a fair wage, profit and income, commensurate with one's occupation and status within society. Fair in this model does not mean equal as in the later communitarian and proto-communist utopias of the age, for instance, Thomas Muntzer's movement in Muhlhausen or the Anabaptists’ design of egalitarian communities in some other regions of contemporary Germany in the wake of the Reformation. It means, rather, ‘according to one's contribution and rank within society’. But more, in the theological notion of avaritia entertained by Luther, could also mean ‘more and more’, that is transforming the desire for a just reward or profit, which even honest Christian merchants were entitled to, into the desire for ‘profit for profit's sake’.