Notes on Usury

Last updated on: October 20, 2016 at 12:00 am by Peter Leithart

Notes on Usury 2016-10-20T00:00:00+06:00 Peter Leithart

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Violent malice can be directed against God, the self, and the neighbor, Virgil tells Dante (Inferno 11) as they huddle under the lid of one of the tombs in the sixth circle of hell. Virgil takes a moment to explain the moral theology that organizes hell. He explicates these three objects of violence in reverse order—first speaking of violence against neighbor, then against one’s self, and finally against God.

There are some surprises. Violence against a neighbor includes not only assault and murder but “arson, theft, and devastation” that damage a neighbor’s goods. Person and property aren’t entirely distinguishable, so an attack on the latter is violence against the former. The same principle holds in Virgil’s description of self-harm, which not only includes suicides (obviously) but also gamblers who spend “all their wealth away / and weep up there when they should have rejoiced” (Musa translation, 11.44-45). The biggest surprise comes in the last category, violence or malice against God. Unbelief and “despising Nature and God’s bounty” (line 48) are assaults on God. But in the same narrow circle where unbelievers and the ungrateful are found are souls from “Sodom and Cahors” (line 50).

Sodom we know, but Cahors is less familiar. In a footnote, Musa explains that it “was a city in the south of France that was widely known in the Middle Ages as a thriving seat of usury.” Usurers and sodomites, in Virgil/Dante’s view, display similar vices and commit similar sins.

Virgil leaves the analogy dangling, but comes back to explain the moral objection to usury at the end of Canto 11:

“Nature takes her course from the Divine

Intellect, from its artistic workmanship;
and if you have your Physics will in mind
you will find, not many pages from the start,

how your art too, as best it can, imitates
Nature, the way an apprentice does his master;
so your art may be said to be God’s grandchild.

From Art and Nature man was meant to take
his daily bread to live—if you recall
the book of Genesis near the beginning;

but the usurer, adopting other means,
scorns Nature in herself and in her pupil,
Art—he invests his hope in something else”
(Musa, 11.99-111).

He begins from theology. Nature is the product of divine intellect and art, and human art takes its cues from nature. There is a line of descent from God to Nature to human artists to the art that is “God’s grandchild.” As God formed nature by intellect and art, so human beings are to take their daily bread from the application of art in imitation of nature. A usurer does not follow this pattern. Instead, he hopes to get his daily bread from something else. The implication is that his usury is fruitless, unlike the combination of nature and art that makes human art. It is fruitless like sodomy.

As Rodney Payton (A Modern Reader’s Guide to Dantes’ Inferno, 86) puts it, “God works, Nature imitates God, man imitates Nature. In this view of things every individual activity takes on a sacred connotation and nothing is exempt from consideration in terms of the light of the divine. God’s ‘labor; in the act of creation (from which He rested on the seventh day) is the prototype of all human labor. The ultimate problem with usury is that it provides increase without labor and is therefore a perversion and a direct violation of God’s command in Genesis 3:19.” There is no “labor,” and therefore no “child.”

Not all Christian writers shared Dante’s conclusions. Anselm thought it permissible to impose usury as a weapon against enemies of the people of God: “Who is your brother? He is your sharer in nature, co-heir in grace, every people, which, first, is in the faith, then under the Roman Law. Who, then, is the stranger? the foes of God’s people. From him, demand usury whom you rightly desire to harm, against whom weapons are lawfully carried. Upon him usury is legally imposed. Where there is the right of war, there also is the right of usury” (quoted by Auden in an essay on Merchant of Venice, reprinted in Harold Bloom’s collection.)

Bernard of Siena advocated using usury to weaken the enemies of God, but in a way that would ultimately have an evangelistic effect: “Temporal goods are given to men for the worship of the true God and the Lord of the Universe. When, therefore, the worship of God does not exist, as in the case of God’s enemies, usury is lawfully exacted, because this is not done for the sake of gain, but for the sake of the faith; and the motive is brotherly love, namely, that God’s enemies may be weakened and so return to Him; and further because the goods they have do not belong to them, since they are rebels against the true faith; they shall therefore devolve upon the Christians” (also quoted by Auden). By these same arguments, of course, usury could not be taken from a fellow Christian.

Even writers who agreed with Dante didn’t aways present the same arguments. Thomas, interestingly, presents a less theological/metaphysical, more economic argument against usury than Dante’s (ST II–II, 78). When something is consumed by use, you can’t charge both for the thing and the use. You can’t demand payment for wine, and at the same time demand payment for consumption of the same wine. That’s a demand for double payment, and unjust. With other goods—houses, for instance—it is possible to separate the thing from its use; an owner may give or sell his house to another and still retain the use, or the opposite, retain ownership yet charge for the use. This is just because the house isn’t consumed by use. Thomas rejects the notion that usury is a kind of rent. For Thomas, money is this sort of thing, consumed in its us, and therefore it is unjust for anyone to sell both money and its usus.

Dante

Usury

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