Revision as of 13:58, 29 December 2022

Abstract

This work consists of two chapters and focuses on the formation of a new bourgeois ethics within the framework of the medieval mentality. This process is considered on the material of German folk preachers of the first half of the 14th century. The personalities of the preachers (16 names in total) are studied in Chapter 1; Chapter 2 contains an analysis of their doctrine, taken in its integral form. This teaching is based on Neoplatonist emanationism, according to which God is present in man as his image, a “spark”, a “synteresis”. God reveals himself in man's actions and in all his outward manifestations, so that man is basically an instrument through which God's actions are carried out. This is the “auto-determination” of man, where he is not grounded in church rituals and affiliation to particular social institutions, but in the objective dynamics unfolding in him. The paper concludes with an attempt at a new reading of Max Weber's study “Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism”

Full document