The Gift (18 page)

The double law worked well for a long time. It became a problem, however, in the centuries after Jesus, for his injunction that all men are brothers seemed to cancel the permission to practice usury. What form should economic life take if the tribe has no boundary at all? This question starts the real debate over usury which has run from the early Church Fathers into the present century. If we say that the double law of Moses describes a circle, with gift circulation inside and market exchange at the edge, then we may say that the history of the usury debate is the history of our attempts to fix the radius of the circle. The Christians extended the radius infinitely under the call for a universal brotherhood. For fifteen centuries people tried to work within that assumption. The Reformation reversed it and began to shorten the radius again, bringing it, by the time of Calvin, into the heart of each private soul.

II• A Scarcity of Grace

The property consciousness of the New Testament is like that of Saint Gertrude, who said, “The commoner property is, the holier it is.” When someone asks, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus tells the story of the good Samaritan. Compassion, not blood, makes one a brother. This spirit changes the boundary of the tribe. The house of Israel has no wall (except faith) after Jesus travels to Tyre and Sidon and is himself moved by the faith of the Canaanite woman.

Jesus continually separates the marketplace from the Kingdom. We all know the stories. He teaches that a person should “lend expecting nothing in return”; his prayer asks the Lord to “forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.”He drove out all “who sold and bought in the temple and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons.” When Jesus is preparing himself for crucifixion and burial, a woman anoints his head with fine oil. This is the occasion upon which he says, “Ye have the poor always with you,” in reply to a suggestion by the disciples that they take the ceremonial oil and sell it to get some money to give to the poor. As usual, they have been a little slow to catch on. They are thinking of the price of oil as they sit before a man preparing to treat his body as a gift of atonement. We might take Jesus’s reply to mean that poverty (or scarcity) is alive and well inside their question, that rich and poor will be with them so long as they cannot feel the spirit when it is alive among them.

The Christians in the early Church lived in a kind of primitive communism, sharing their property. The problem of usury did not receive much attention until after the Church and the Empire had joined. Benjamin Nelson, in his book
The Idea of Usury
,
*
cites Saint Ambrose of Milan as one of the first of the Church Fathers to try to apply a Christian conscience to the Old Testament law. Ambrose addresses usury in his fourth-century
De Tobia;
he retains Moses’s double standard but he changes the terms. The “brother” is now anyone in the Church. “For every people which, first, is in the faith, then under Roman law, is your brother.” He is a brother who is “your sharer in nature and your co-heir in grace.”

Saint Ambrose also has a feeling for the effect of the original permission to charge usury to a foreigner, however, and he allows that Christians may collect usury from enemies of the Church:

The charging of interest is an aggressive act whenever it goes beyond marking the boundary between peoples, and though in Deuteronomy this may not have been the intent of the permission to practice usury, it can clearly be the effect. Curiously enough, it does not seem to have occurred to Saint Ambrose that the stranger could be someone who is not in the group and yet also not an enemy. (“Who then was the stranger,” he writes, “except Amalech, except the Amorite, except the enemy?”) As soon as all men
ought
to be brothers, all aliens become enemies. Such aggressive faith leaves a blind spot in the spirit of universal brotherhood. A covert boundary lies in the shadow that falls behind an unbounded compassion, and much that unfolds during the Middle Ages, from a recurrent anti-Semitism to the Church’s spiritual imperialism, seems to grow in that darkness.

If we make a list of the ways in which medieval churchmen sought to reconcile the Gospel with the old permission to usure, we will find that most resolve the apparent conflict by finding
fault with the Jew; nowhere does there appear the idea of a wandering tribe protecting itself. To paraphrase a few examples:

• Peter Comestor, twelfth century: The Lord knew the Jews were a tricky people who might do worse if they were not permitted to charge usury.
  

• Thomas Aquinas, thirteenth century: The Jews needed an outlet for their avarice or they would have stolen from one another.
  

• William of Auxerre, thirteenth century: As the Lord could not bring the Jews to perfection all at once, he permitted them to sin in moderation.
  

Another explanation given for the permission to usure, one that runs from Saint Ambrose to Martin Luther, is that the Lord allowed usury against non-Jews in the Holy Land in order to punish them. Usury is a tool of war, and the Lord, by allowing the Jews to practice usury, authorized a holy war against His enemies. When medieval savants take up this line of analysis, it becomes difficult to distinguish the spirit of universal brotherhood from the hegemony of the Church. In the fifteenth century, for example, Bernardino of Siena could defend Christian usury as a species of brotherly love:

The Crusades were organized under this shadow side of the spirit of brotherhood. And as Saint Ambrose’s interpretation
of the law would permit usury against the Muslim enemy in the Holy Land, the Church tolerated usury—clerical and secular, Christian and Jewish—for a time. But in fact the occasion to loan money to a declared enemy rarely arises; in financing the Crusades, the Church Fathers soon realized that Jewish moneylenders in Europe imposed more of a burden on the Church than Christian moneylenders could possibly impose on the Muslims. It is usury
at home
that breaks up the brotherhood and loses the war. The Church finally prohibited all usury in order to close its own ranks. A bull issued in 1145 by Pope Eugenius III clearly links a renewed prohibition on usury to the problem of funding the Crusades. As in Moses’s time, interior unity demanded such an economic policy.

Clearly, then, usury was not unknown in the Middle Ages. But it must nonetheless be emphasized that despite divergent conclusions the common and unquestioned assumption of all Christians during this period was that usury and brotherhood were wholly antithetical. By the twelfth or thirteenth century the word “brother” is always used as a universal, and when the question is raised, the double standard of Moses (or of Saint Ambrose) is always resolved on the side of brotherhood. Here, for example, is Raymond of Pennaforte in the thirteenth century: “From him demand usury, O you, whoever you may be, whom you rightly desire to harm: but you ought rightly to harm no one; therefore, you ought to demand usury from no one.” This is a typical medieval resolution. Here is another from Thomas Aquinas in the same century: “The Jews were forbidden to take usury from their brethren, i.e., from other Jews. By this we are given to understand that to take usury from any man is simply evil, because we ought to treat every man as our neighbor and brother, especially in the state of the Gospel, whereto all are called…” Even in justifying the Crusades, medieval Christians never let go of the basic assumption that usury and brotherhood could
not mix. That assumption is the pattern to which the different clothes were cut. Much may have happened in the shadow of universal brotherhood, but the universality itself was never questioned. It is always the ideal: one does not take usury from a brother and all men should be brothers.

The Reformation changed this.

The central figure was Martin Luther. It is difficult to sum up Luther’s views on usury, for he was constantly torn by the question. It is not difficult, however, to summarize the effect of his views. Luther and other leaders of the Reformation organized a division of moral and economic life. Faced with managing the break from Rome, the reformers turned to the alternative power with the most stability: the new merchant princes. There were some priests during the Reformation who called for a new Jerusalem and the abolition of private property, but they did not survive. Those who did survive supported the princes and even advised them on matters of monetary policy. To do this, they ceded power to the state by distinguishing between God’s law and civil law. They said in effect that while it might be hoped that a prince would rule in the spirit of the Gospels, the world was such an evil place that a strong temporal order based on the sword, not on compassion, was necessary. Therefore Protestant churchmen did not in the end oppose civil usury nor any of the other changes in property rights that marked the sixteenth century (such as the charging of rents for what were formerly common lands). The leaders of the Reformation still spoke of brotherhood, but they had become convinced that brotherhood could not be the basis of civil society.

Luther’s views on usury changed greatly during his lifetime. In the young Luther, one finds a traditional medieval condemnation of usury embellished with some attacks on
Rome as the usurer. But in 1525 Luther came to a turning point. The Peasants’ War broke out in Germany that year, an uprising whose story has been retold many times, for in it are all the elements of the struggle between spirit and property that marks the Reformation. Germany had seen over a hundred years of unrest among peasant farmers as feudalism faded and princes began to consolidate their power by territory. Roland Bainton, a historian of the Church, writes:

The Peasants’ War was the same war that the American Indians had to fight with the Europeans, a war against the marketing of formerly inalienable properties. Whereas before a man could fish in any stream and hunt in any forest, now he found there were individuals who claimed to be the owners of these commons. The basis of land tenure had shifted. The medieval serf had been almost the opposite of a property owner: the land had owned
him.
He could not move freely from place to place, and yet he had inalienable rights to the piece of land to which he was attached. Now men claimed to own the land and offered to rent it out at a fee. While a serf could not be removed from his land, a tenant could be evicted not only through failure to pay the rent but merely at the whim of the landlord.

Some of the radical priests identified with the Reformation supported the peasants’ opposition to these changes, and Luther was therefore pressed to clarify his position. In 1523–24, Luther preached on Deuteronomy (the sermons later being published as
Deuteronomy with Annotations).
In this book he refers to the Mosaic law that releases debtors from their debts every seventh year, calling it “a most beautiful and fair law.”

Law and faith are already separated here. A second example from the same years will flesh out the tone of this division. In 1523 James Strauss, one of the more radical priests, suggested not only that no one should charge interest, but that debtors should resist their creditors or themselves share in the sin of usury. The peasants were delighted, but the local clergy and landowners complained to the electoral government, which in turn asked Luther for his opinion. Luther opened his reply by saying that it would be “a noble, Christian accomplishment” if all usury was abolished. Then he gets practical.
Strauss, he says, does not “sufficiently deal with the risk” that a businessman takes when he loans capital. Further, “by using high-sounding words, he makes bold the common man … Perhaps he thinks the whole world is full of Christians …” The reply is typical of Luther’s approach: he opposes usury on moral grounds but distinguishes between civil authority and Christian ethics, and in the end cedes to the princes the right to decide economic questions.
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In these fights, Luther stands personally torn in the conflict that tore the Middle Ages apart, the fight between
sacerdotium
and
imperium
, between church and state. He resolves the opposition by authorizing it. For whatever reasons, by the sixteenth century power had come into the hands of the holders of private property. Those religious leaders who survived were the ecclesiastical statesmen willing to recognize the civil authority of princes, and even to serve them. Some in fact became the economists who helped the princes develop the details of a cash economy. The German theologian Philipp Melanchthon, for example, stepped into a dispute in Denmark in 1553 and helped King Christian III organize the structure of interest rates.