f Money nd Morals
usury, and rulers routinely capped interest rates from Ancient Mesopotamia to Ancient Greece. In Politics , Aristotle described usury as “the birth of money from money,” and claimed it was unnatural because money was sterile and should not “breed.” Judeo-Christian religions cemented the usury taboo. The Old Testament reads: “Do not charge a fellow Israelite interest,” and the Book of Luke advises: “[L]ove ye your enemies: do good, and lend, hoping for nothing thereby.” In the 4th century CE, Christian councils denounced the practice, and by 800, the emperor Charlemagne made the prohibition into law. Accounts of merchants and bankers in the Middle Ages frequently include expressions of anguish over their profits. In his Divine Comedy of the 14th century, the Italian poet Dante Alighieri put the usurers in the seventh circle of Hell; in
norm. Hundreds of years ago, when modern finance arose in Europe, moneylenders moderated their behavior in response to debates among the clergy about how to apply the Bible’s teachings to an increasingly complex economy. Lending money has long been regarded as a moral matter. So just when and how did most bankers stop seeing their work in moral terms? In the early 1200s, the French cardinal Jacques de Vitry wrote a collection of exempla, morality tales that priests used in their sermons. In one story, a dying moneylender makes his wife and children swear to hang a third of their inheritance around his neck, and to bury him with it. His
the case of Reginaldo Scrovegni, one Paduan banker singled out by Dante, his son ended up commissioning a chapel painted with frescoes by Giotto to expiate the family’s sin. Over the ensuing centuries, the philanthropy and patronage of other Italian Renaissance families such as the Medicis was partly inspired by guilt about how they’d profited from charging interest.
family does as instructed. However, later they decide to open the man’s grave to recover the money – only to flee “in terror at seeing demons filling the dead man’s mouth with red hot coins,” de Vitry wrote. In de Vitry’s world, the moneylender deserved to be defiled by demons, because he’d committed the sin of usury – charging interest on a loan. De Vitry didn’t care whether the rate was high or low, because the Church’s position was that extracting a single cent of interest was evil. The roots of this revulsion run deep, and across cultures. Vedic law in Ancient India condemned
Today, a banker
listening to a theologian seems like a curiosity, a category error. But for most of history, this kind of dialogue was the norm.
64 | November 2017
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