by Lewis Hyde
The primitive connection between gift-increase and usury may also be seen in Roman law, where usura originally meant a charge for the loan of a fungible (i.e., any perishable and nonspecific good whose use consists of its consumption). The examples given of fungibles are almost always organic goods, such as grain, which, like gifts, increase through use: if a man borrows a bushel of seed grain, his use of the loan consumes the loan, but if he is prudent, his use will also increase it—the grain he harvests will be more than the grain he plants. And when he returns the bushel he borrowed, he includes with it the usura, the fruit of its use. If both sides of the exchange are gifts, the usura is the expression of gratitude.
But I must stop here. This connection between usury and gifts is a fable I have invented to speak of ancient history. Perhaps I am right—the earliest senses of “usury” may well derive from the increase attendant upon gift exchange; but as we all know, the term does not in fact refer to that increase. When it first appears, “usury” is already distinct from gift-increase, for in pure gift exchange there is no need to speak of the increase in this intentional manner. The man who gives a gift drops the shells on the ground, saying, “Take this food I cannot eat,” and keeping silent as to the matter of any return. He certainly does not say, “The usura will be ten percent per annum.” To ask for interest on loaned wealth is to reckon, articulate, and charge its increase. The idea of usury therefore appears when spiritual, moral, and economic life begin to be separated from one another, probably at the time when foreign trade, exchange with strangers, begins.* As we saw in an earlier chapter, wherever property circulates as a gift, the increase that accompanies that circulation is simultaneously material, social, and spiritual; where wealth moves as a gift, any increase in material wealth is automatically accompanied by the increased conviviality of the group and the strengthening of the hau, the spirit of the gift. But when foreign trade begins, the tendency is to differentiate the material increase from the social and spiritual increase, and a commercial language appears to articulate the difference. When exchange no longer connects one person to another, when the spirit of the gift is absent, then increase does not appear between gift partners, usury appears between debtors and creditors.
Islamic laws concerning usury support the intuition that the idea of usury originally appeared in order to mark the distinction between gift giving and the market. I spoke earlier of increase as having a vector or direction: in a gift society, the increase follows the gift and is itself given away, while in a market society the increase (profit, rent, interest) returns to its “owner.” The material quantity of the increase could be the same in both cases, but the social and spiritual increase cannot, for the feeling-bond—and all that is attendant upon it—does not appear when the increase does not circulate as a gift. The Koran distinguishes in essentially these terms between lawful increase, which comes of gift giving (gifts to the poor, in particular) and unlawful increase, usury (riba). “God shall blot out usury, but almsgiving shall bring increase,” reads a verse in the second Sûra. “What ye put out at usury to increase it with the substance of others, shall have no increase from God,” says a later verse. The Koran permits a man who has given a gift to receive a return gift of greater worth. But they must both be gifts: to loan a thing under condition that it be returned with increase is usury. Increase borne of a gift (from a friend or from the Lord) is lawful and sacred; increase that comes of capital loaned “at usury” is profane.
Aristotle is always mentioned in discussions of usury for having made a similar distinction, though the best-known part of his argument strikes me as a bit of a red herring. By the time Aristotle wrote his Politics (about 322 B.C.) people were charging usury on money loans. Money had been classified as a fungible like grain, for it was considered to be “consumed” when it was exchanged for goods. Aristotle objected.
There are two sorts of wealth-getting …, one is a part of household management, the other is retail trade; the former necessary and honourable, while that which consists in exchange is justly censured; for it is unnatural, and a mode by which men gain from one another. The most hated sort, and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest [tokos, “offspring”], which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural.
Aristotle distinguishes here between a gift situation (the Greek household) and a commodity one (retail trade). To say that one is natural and the other not so is the red herring; the distinction between these forms of commerce holds up without recourse to organic analogies.* Natural or unnatural, in retail trade “men gain from one another” and not from their union. Usury and trade have their own sort of growth, but they bring neither the personal transformations nor the social and spiritual cohesion of gift exchange. As the industrialized nations have shown us, a people may grow richer and richer in commodities while becoming more and more isolated from one another. Cash exchange does not engender worth. If you care more about the unity and liveliness of the group than you do about material growth, therefore, usury becomes “the most hated” sort of gain.
The laws in the Old Testament which deal with usury have been a focal point for the usury debate over the centuries. The most important are two verses in the twenty-third chapter of Deuteronomy:
19: Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of victuals, usury of anything that is lent upon usury:
20: Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury: but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury, that the Lord thy God may bless thee in all that thou settest thine hand to in the land whither thou goest to possess it.
This double law, both a prohibition and a permission, seeks to organize the double situation of being a brotherhood wandering among strangers. The Hebrews had gift exchange among themselves, but they also had contact with peoples who were not part of the gift cycle.*
In a gift cycle the gift is given without contract or agreement about return. And yet it does return; a circulation is set up and can be counted upon. Within this circle, things must be kept moving, and that is the intent of the first law: no one may ask usury on a loan to a brother, for this converts generosity into a market exchange. The prohibition means not that there should be no increase or usance, but that it must come to the tribe as a whole, not to individuals.
Thus also the law against usury requires that the self be submerged in the tribe. This is the “poverty” of the gift, in which each man, by his generosity, becomes “poor” so that the group may be wealthy. A needy person is not seen as having a separate and personal problem. His neediness is felt throughout the group, and its wealth flows toward the need and fills it without reflection or debate, just as water flows immediately to fill the lowest place. The law asks that no member of the tribe be either more or less in touch with the necessities of life.
Put another way, the law says there shall be no business in the tribe. Property circulates, but not through buying and selling. Among the Hebrews the contracting of debts and the alienation of movable goods was very difficult. Business, as the saying goes, was done with foreigners (Thomas Jefferson had a phrase: “The merchant has no homeland”). The law makes it almost a matter of definition: trade is what you do with strangers. When this law is observed, when wealth is not turned into private capital inside the tribe, then they say, “The Lord thy God may bless thee in all that thou settest thine hand to …”
To speak of brotherhood as the first law does is to affirm a trust in the circulation of the gift. The second law deals with situations of doubt. Suppose a strange Egyptian comes by and asks for a few bushels of grain. You can’t tell if you’ll ever see the man again or if he understands how one bushel in the spring is several in the fall. He has a different god; he hasn’t
read the local Book. Grain, even what can be spared, is a wealth of the tribe; if it does not come back, the group will lose some of its vitality. Within the body of the tribe there is faith that the gift will return as blood comes back to the heart, but beyond the body there is risk. So, when the Egyptian comes by, you try to articulate what does not need to be said to a brother. Not only do you remind him that the gifts of nature grow with use and that he should return the usance, but you tell him you’d like it all on paper and could he leave his goats as collateral.
The God who permits usury is one who allows gift exchange to have a boundary. Though the weight of my attention in this book falls elsewhere, there is no need to pretend that such a boundary has nothing in its favor. It protects the interior of the circle and assures that the fluid property within will not be lost or spread too thin. The two Mosaic laws describe a community that is like a single-celled being. It was recently understood that some organic cells have a special kind of molecule forming their outer wall. These molecules repel water on one end and attract it on the other, a sort of double law for molecules. When such molecules are put into water, they will eventually group themselves in a circle with the water-repellent ends pointing away from the water, and toward the body of the cell. The cell becomes an organized and living structure by having molecules with two sets of laws, one for the outer edge and the other for the center.
Another image for a group of people governed by such laws is a walled city with a gate at the wall and an altar in the center. Then we may say, as the ancients did, that there is a law of the altar and a law of the gate. A person is treated differently depending on where he or she is. At the edge the law is harsher; at the altar there is more compassion.
To take a metaphor from the last chapter, we could say that the two laws in Deuteronomy are male and female with two kinds of judging for the two kinds of property. The first law says that female property must predominate within the group, while the second allows male exchange at the edge. The breakdown of these laws and the incautious mixing of the forms of property lead to the dissolution of the group. If there is no wall, then wealth flows out, like a manic person who discharges his energy with no means of getting it back. Conversely, if male property gets into the middle, then the group begins to fragment, as does any community whose gifts are placed in the market.
To summarize the Mosaic laws, one ensures the circulation of gift while the other rationalizes the structure of gift exchange in order to deal with strangers. The permission to charge usury allows some trade across the boundary, but while such trade may set up a flow between admitted aliens, it also carefully maintains them in their alien status. Foreign trade and the charging of rent on loans do not bring people together except materially. There is no felt bond, no group is formed. The rationalization of the gift abandons the spirit of the gift.
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:
Upon him whom you rightly desire to harm, against whom weapons are lawfully carried, upon him usury is legally imposed. On him whom you cannot easily conquer in war, you can quickly take vengeance with the hundredth. From him exact usury whom it would not be a crime to kill. He fights without a weapon who demands usury; without a sword he revenges himself upon an enemy, who is an interest collector from his foe. Therefore where there is the right of war, there is also the right of usury.
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:
Temporal goods are given to men for the worship of the true God and the Lord of the Universe. Where, 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 the 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 …
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.
